One should read as many influential works in the original as possible, rather than study them from references and CliffsNotes. (Jehovah's Witnesses are always asking if I've read the Bible, and when I say Yes, you can see them wanting to say “Then why aren't you converted?”) Life's too short to read Das Kapital, but I did get around to Atlas Shrugged.

I've known for a long time that this was a major influence on the Illuminatus trilogy; an important secondary character, Atlanta Hope, clearly represents Rand, and there is a lengthy summary of the plot of her book Telemachus Sneezed (oh, dear.) It was interesting to find that on the one hand, the influence goes deeper than I knew – the trilogy's hero Hagbard Celine is a conflation of Rand's heroes Galt and Danneskjöld, with added pop spirituality – and on the other, “Hope” and her book bear absolutely no resemblance to the originals. (The book summary reads as if the authors had heard a few catch-phases from AS, and pasted them into a mash-up of right-wing cliches.)

What I didn't expect was that it's a fine Dom/sub romance. Dagny is my ideal of a femsub: a strong confident woman who'll fight to defend her individual freedom – and who wants to be a humble slave in love. Both her first two lovers treat her with the respect due an equal till their relationship becomes sexual, then order her around, call her names and take her with a violence that she enjoys. She recalls a moment when she and the boy who would be her first lover were teenagers together, and she said something so crass that he slapped her:
She knew that she would have killed any other person who struck her. She felt the violent fury which would have given her the strength for it – and as violent a pleasure that Francisco had done it. She felt pleasure from the dull, hot pain in her cheek and from the taste of blood in the corner of her mouth. She felt pleasure in what she suddenly grasped about him, about herself, and about his motives.
As a D/s author, I couldn't have expressed it better.

She wears a chain bracelet for her second lover, and so we don't miss the point, his wife has refused to wear it because it's an emblem of subjection. When she finally meets the hero Galt, and (of course) falls hopelessly in love, she manipulates things so that she is “forced” to work as his cook and housekeeper: and Galt makes clear that he knows this is a game she's choosing to play, then happily accepts her submission. The role-play gets heavier when a former lover turns up and asks her to move in with him, and she tells Galt that it's up to him. This is doubly spurious, since none of them are the sort of feudal capitalists who'd expect to command an employee's private life. But Galt once more makes sure everyone understands that as a free individual she is choosing to make him her Master – then orders her to stay with him.

Rand's general philosophy is one I can comfortably accept, and one that chimes with many of my heroes; for example, A.S. Neil, the founder of British progressive education, also used the term “anti-life” for those who suppress children's initiative and feelings. But when she moves to practical applications, I feel that, like people who deduce homophobia from the Bible or suicide bombing from the Koran, she has taken a flying leap from a philosophy to a political position and pretended that they were all the same thing. I know plenty of people with the same philosophical views who are dedicated socialists, believing that enlightened self-interest, and the promotion of individual enterprise, are best served by a robust welfare system and strictly regulated business.

(I'm not saying they are right and Rand is wrong, only that one can reach both positions from the same starting point: but it's worth pointing out that Scandinavia, which is famous for its comprehensive welfare system and a tax regime to match, owes its sustained prosperity to its industrial entrepreneurs. The home of Ikea, Lego, Nokia and Brio is scarcely hostile to enterprise.)

When I started to read the book, with its dominant theme of impending doom and the crumbling of the state, it rang a bell. I read a book in the '60s, written about the same time as AS, which also began with the feeling that something had gone horribly wrong with society since the War. (I wish I could recall its title, as it had a very similar theme of an industrialist saving the world, and it would be interesting to compare them in more depth. If anyone recognises it, the story was about the inventor of a superconducting plastic and his struggle against the vested interests of the copper industry, and how almost by accident he creates a new kind of industrial democracy which sweeps the country.) One would hardly guess that ten years after Rand's book was written, the US (and Europe, which Rand was still writing off as “the wastelands,”) would be launched on one of their greatest economic booms, powered by those industrialists and inventors she believed were doomed.

But the most confusing aspect of the book, and the one that makes its message so ambiguous, is that the viewpoint characters are clearly fooling themselves. They insist that they are in business solely to make money, and that if everyone did the same everything would be fine: but at the same time Rand belabours that their greatest weakness, the one that the world exploits, is that they love their work and would do it for nothing.

Here, I think, Rand touches on something important but doesn't fully understand it. The best work is always done by people (like Rand's heroes) for whom their craft or trade is an end in itself, not a means to any end; that gives them the dedication to do it the best they can. But it also makes them the worst people to decide policy about how their craft or trade should fit in to society as a whole. When Francisco gives his speech about the virtues of money, he is wrong in only one respect: he treats money as an end, not a means. Money and bureaucracy are both tools to organise production and distribution of goods and services in a complex society. Money works well for some jobs, badly for others, just as does bureaucracy. Declaring that only one tool is right for every job is exactly the kind of mistake made by someone for whom the tool is an end in itself.

The same self-deception appears when we get to Rand's Utopia of Galt's Gulch. This is a portrait of something any student of the communes movement will recognise at a glance, an intentional community running on mutual aid and a charismatic leader: but the inhabitants insist that it runs on selfishness and the profit motive, and proves how much better the world outside would be if they did the same, and to prove it they pay each other wages and charge each other rent as solemnly as children pouring cups of water at a dolls' tea party. This is as convincing as a hippie commune who tell you they are empowered by cosmic love, or a religious community who claim they are proving how everyone should live by the power of Jesus.

But Galt's Gulch is dishonest in another way. It's often said that the trouble with Utopia is that it doesn't work for average people. Rand gives us a Utopia entirely peopled by what she insists are the best minds of their world: and then claims that they are a model for how everyone should live. I have an uncomfortable feeling that if Galt's Gulch opened its gates to ordinary Joes, they would end as either bandits or peons.

And that made me notice another omission in the larger story. There are no old people or children anywhere in the vast length of Rand's book, except as occasional background figures in the landscape. There are no invalids (our heroes never get sick regardless of their punishing workloads,) no cripples; there aren't even any doctors, except once when the plot absolutely demands one, and he's gone in two paragraphs. Anyone who isn't doing productive work is unemployed through indolence or venality. Rand's “root, hog, or die” philosophy only works for the young and healthy, so she simply ignores the rest.

The book is very clearly a product of its time, and not only because of communism, which Rand never mentions by name but which is as implicit as the devil in medieval theology. When I read Danneskjöld's proud boast that he only robs aid ships, my eyebrows went up: then I thought of the date, and guessed that Rand was not thinking of Oxfam but of Marshal Aid, which the Right still considered a Communist plot to rob the US. Half a century on, its message that everything would be fine if private enterprise were given a free hand without government meddling sounds as dated as those of the surviving Trotskyites: like communism, it's been tried, and we're cleaning up the messes from both.