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Sunday, 16 December 2007
How Ayn Rand Cracked My Ribs
She did. Actually, physically.
In the middle of editing DANNY Volume 2 I took a mad turn one night. Mr Scratchmann sends me the Penguin newsletter. I don't know why; I never read them.
On this one ill-fated night I decide to open said newsletter up and there I see "Do you want to blog one of our Penguin Classics?" Mind immediately thinks, "Hmm, exposure. Yes, I'd love to blog a Penguin Classic."
What the hell was I thinking?
Now, you all know that I 'believe' in karma, it's just one of those weird things about the universe – what goes around comes around. It may take fifty years but, believe me, whatever you do, it will revisit you in some way, some time, and usually in the way you least expect.
Now look at this for a story of coincidence, synchronicity and karma.
I had never heard of Ayn Rand. Ever. Not sure why. Suddenly (a while before all this Penguin blogging shit happened), I'm seeing her everywhere. I find her coupled with me on two lists as "favourite authors". I get a community of hers popping up on my MySpace search. I fall over an article about her on a newspaper web site. She comes up on my book recommendations on Amazon (that's the most baffling of the lot – you'll see why in a minute.)
From having never heard of her, I'm seeing her everywhere. So often, in fact, I actually look her books up on Amazon – and find no resemblance between us whatsoever. The only single point of recognition I can find is she was Russian and I grew up with all things Russian. She's female and she wrote. End of similarities.
Still, there she was, suddenly larger than life and in my face.
And now we move forward in time again, back to Chancery irrationally opening the Penguin newsletter (ask yourself why I did it, then, when I'd never done it before).
I go onto the 'blog our books', I fill it in. Two seconds later it comes back and says, "Congratulations, you've been chosen to blog a classic…." Etc, etc.
At first I felt chuffed. When I tell Max he says, "You bastard, how did you manage that? I've been filling them in for months with no luck."
I go back to my eyrie and then realisation sinks in. I'm in the middle of editing DANNY Volume 2 and struggling, why, and how, in God's name, am I going to find time to read a book?
And now we will take another aside to show you just how weird this synchronicity is.
I don't read books.
Ever.
I'm not talking non-fiction here. I read those all the time. I'm talking novels, short stories, anything resembling novels or short stories.
I stopped reading fiction somewhere between 1990 and 1993. It wasn't sudden or overnight, but it just tailed away and stopped. Really I had stopped before that, in my heart, that's how DANNY got written, but I actually realised I'd stopped around then. I did read one more book around 1999 – 2000, on Orkney.
I would say, unfortunately I can't remember what it was, but actually that's probably just as well since I burnt it. I sat up till three in the morning to finish it and was so infuriated by it that I decided it should not be inflicted on another human being. I went outside and got an old wheel rim and ripped the book up and burnt it, using that as a fireplace. I danced round the flames in the pitch-dark of an Orkney night, with a bemused cat and boyfriend looking on, as I continued to curse it and all its author's progeny for five generations.
Ah, I'm not a half-hearted person when it comes to storytelling.
So, that was the fate of the last novel I ever read, so you can imagine the odd (and panicky) feelings my bizarrely out-of-character behaviour had induced in me.
I had a book to review. It would (could be) free publicity to get my name on the Penguin book site. I had to do this. But I was not looking forward to it.
Time went by. I was deep in editing DANNY 2, the monster of sadness, and I forgot all about it. Then one day an ominous package arrived.
I opened it, thinking some irate reader had returned DANNY since it weighed half a ton. But no, there, inside, was nestling Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand – the very book I had seen people list alongside mine, the author I'd been seeing everywhere. I couldn't believe it. It seemed to take coincidence to whole new levels.
After the shock wore off I began to see just what I'd got myself into. Ayn's book was much bigger than mine. Not only was it actually physically longer (oh yes, it is – must be that Russian influence) but she wrote much denser prose. Heavy, expository, metaphorically-significant, politically-leaden prose. Lots of it.
I'm telling you, I wish I'd had that book as an example when I had someone complaining about the length of DANNY. You fly through DANNY. (Can I help it? You do.) There would be nothing on God's earth could fly through Ayn.
Still, I'd promised to read it and read it I would. No skimming.
And I didn't. I read every, single, solitary word, with one exception. Right at the very end, Ayn has a political speech that is something like ten or twelve pages long, no paragraphs, no breaks. When you consider that everything that is in this speech has already been covered over and over and over again, ad nauseam, it's no wonder I just couldn't face it. I cracked. I read about the first two pages and then skipped the rest.
But that was the only time. In fact, I reckon I'm one of the most dedicated readers Ayn ever had.
In the event, it took me forever to read because I only read in the bath. I had no other free time and it was so bloody long-winded. You wouldn't believe how tired you can get reading baby politics – baby because it's like some Goth kid thinking he has the world taped because people bully him at school, so he writes a polemic on it and calls it philosophy.
I seriously doubt if Ayn would get her badge of 'philosopher' if it wasn't for a following of right-wing Americans adopting her ideas wholesale to use as 'arguments' against everything from welfare to immigration. In fact, I'm sure if it wasn't for the Ku Klux Klan and the NRA she'd be all but forgotten by now.
Which is a terrible shame because this woman can seriously write. Underneath all that encrustation of reactionary resentment about shiftless freeloaders (much of which I actually agree with), she has some of the most vivid descriptive prose I've ever read. She takes insane risks sometimes with her descriptions, unintentionally creating grotesqueries and laugh-out-loud absurdities. But I admire her for it immensely, it's very brave. For every one she fucks up, she gets five well beyond right. She is seriously good.
But she is also interminably boring, relentlessly cudgelling you with naïve, out-of-date personal polemics, dressed up as politics and masquerading as great thinking, bogging down a plot line which is really nothing but a Mills & Boon written with far more flair, but still containing the essentials of a little woman romance.
Her heroine is the only heroine, all the other women are written out of existence. All the 'bad' men are seedy and depraved and lazy and drunken. All the good men (all industrialists) are tall and handsome and beautiful and tanned and golden – and they are all, every one, in love with Ayn. Oh, she's called something else (Christ, I've forgotten already… no, Dagny, that's it – and yes, Ayn's name is in there, folks), but they all love her. She's special, different – because she loves trains. I think.
Dear God, my friend Eileen was making a better job of this stuff at thirteen.
I don't know if it's sad or glorious, but Ayn would never get this book into print nowadays. Even if she had a reputation no publisher would touch it, certainly not without editing.
But none of this tells you how Ayn cracked my ribs.
Well, as previously stated, I only read in the bath. I got in one morning and forgot to put the book on the mat. I got up on my knees to reach it on the cabinet where I'd left it, turned round to sit back down, holding the book out the bath so I didn't wet it, and slipped. Because I was holding the book in one hand, and went down quickly, I had no time to protect myself. My body came down, full weight, on the side of the bath, right under my breast. The pain was so bad I blacked out for a second, 'came to' and then it really began to hurt.
I couldn't breathe, had to walk like an old woman, couldn't bend to do up my own shoes, couldn't do any form of lifting, cleaning or housework, couldn't get across roads without imminent death from cars that don't slow down because, of course, you are dawdling for the sake of it, couldn't sleep or even move in bed, couldn't yawn, couldn't sneeze, couldn't cough – the list was endless.
It lasted during the entire edit of Volume 2, adding to toothache (an over-high filling causing inflammation of the tooth socket) and general stress during that time. I have a personal theory that the suicidal misery I experienced during that edit probably helped to make the book bleaker and blacker. Which may well be a good thing. Maybe even what the universe intended.
See? Everything happens for a reason, even if you can't see it at the time – even pain, suffering, and being forced to read Ayn Rand.
Anyway, who's to say it wasn't Ayn getting her own back? Maybe she knows a great author when she sees one and can't stand the competition…
Sublimely ironic. And just delicious.
To read my review of Ayn on Penguin (ruined due to length restrictions, in my opinion) you can find it here Penguin Made Me Shorten My Review – the philistines
To read a longer version, but sadly not the full version, which I did not keep, read it here on Amazon. Ayn Rand – Even Longer Than Me…
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