DEAR FUTURE ANGELA: THESE ARE ANTHEM NOTES

In case if I should ever need to find them quickly months for now, because I read Anthem by Ayn Rand for Marky Mark.

The book is another story about an oppressive future community, a la Handmaiden's Tale, 1984, Brave New World and that's all I can think of. It's quicker and comparing it to, say, 1984 is like comparing an Oreo to an ice-cream cake. Already I can tell the theme of this class... But, first off, like Brave New World, people all exist as--they don't consider themselves as individuals, for example, instead of "I have brown hair" it's "We have brown hair." "They spoke to me for the first time" as opposed to "She spoke to me for the first time" and so on. Though I do find it curious they have the word 'alone' and know its meaning... But! Knowing those other books, I'm sure you can figure out how the story starts--one rebel realizes the situation isn't quite right and blah blah blah.

"'We are one in all and all in one.'" Compare to Brave New World... You know, the mantra from that, "Everyone belongs to everyone else". OH HEY.

"We learned that the earth was flat and that the sun revolves around it.... we learned how to bleed men to cure them of all ailments." So, the level is basically Medieval. Later on 'Prometheus' talks about how candles were just invented... What scares me the most is the fact that unlike in all these other books telling of a horrifying fascist future (or whatever you want to call it) the higher power doesn't know this isn't the truth. The founders must have concealed the knowledge, but in this book it has so degraded that the knowledge is gone, to everyone but our hero, of course. Basically, it has all gone backwards into a medieval world. (A la Timeline?) It's kind of like that book City of Ember, which spawned a movie (which I didn't see) and a sequel called Sparks that was blah. That time, this town was in a dark barren world. They had electricity for lights that would only last for x amount of years. In that case, the higher power had the knowledge he was basically screwing everyone over, but the thing that reminded me the most was I guess when the talk about discovering candle ensues. In City of Ember, the young girl and her friend discover candles and matches for the first time and are practically besides themselves with excitement. And, I mean, they're candles. They didn't have candles? Or, in Anthem, glass windows.

"At forty, they are sent to... where the Old Ones live.... The Old Ones know that they are soon to die." Wasn't there a movie like this? Except when you got to age forty, they found you and killed you and one guy escapes somehow? I remember Emily's dad telling me about it... and they made fun of it on Family Guy once...

One thing that bothered me: Our hero says that no man can view his own face nor ask what he looks like. But, later, he finds a mirror and says "when we looked upon it we saw our own bodies and all the things behind us, as on the face of a lake." And yes, I know, he only recently discovered the beauty and vastness of lakes and nature and such, but this opened a whole other can of worms for me: Water. You think he'd have seen--or anyone else for that matter--his reflection in water at, say, a pond. A bucket of water. I know it wouldn't have picture-perfect clarity, but you'd still have a general idea, no?

Our hero names his mate 'Gaea', saying she was the mother of the earth. Wrong! Greek mythology puts her as the earth itself. So... So come on Ayn Rand. Bring your a-game or don't bring anything at all.

One thing which I appeared not to have marked but interested me greatly was the idea of set mating rituals (every spring). Not so much that, but everyone looks upon it and sex as a filthy, disgusting act which must never be talked about. But, so much to a point that when our hero first meets his mate, he can't even imagine how his love for her and something like sex could ever be interconnected. The fact that something so base and instinctive could be shut out completely so lust can't even exist is shocking and a little disturbing on a vast scale. The fact that a society could ban instinct? That it could make it impossible to be affected by it? That actually makes me wonder how the society could be sustained at all. Too much of that conditioning and it seems logical that the society will celibate itself to death. Well, maybe not logical, but possible. A little. Humor me, okay? But, yeah. Can you imagine the sort of conditioning to deem that undesirable? That goes against not only psychological factors (again, just play along) but biological and instinctual ones. Yikes. If you can go that far, you can pretty much do what you like, huh? People are toys at that point.

It was okay. Better than Brave New World, for sure. Like I said, not very meaty, very straightforward. It's even quicker a read than Stardust, too. I'd say take it from the library, though. Again, no sense in buying this, unless if you're absolutely in love with Ayn Rand. I like her, but I like her more when she hits me in the rib cage and then I keep her for free. (English teachers are dangerous beasts!) Oh, well, regardless of the fact that I'm cheap, I still wouldn't do it. It's about one hundred pages long and the bonus is Ayn Rand's notes on her original manuscript, which is longer than the book itself. And for eight dollars? I'd put it towards my own copy of Handmaiden's Tale instead. THERE ARE BETTER BOOKS ON THE SUBJECT AT HAND TO READ. But not Brave New World guhhh.

EDIT: Oh man, I feel really stupid for forgetting why I brought up City of Ember in the first first place. In both books, you see, they discover forests and wildlife for the first time and they're both amazed at all the beauty around them. In City of Ember it was the cool moonlit sky and a fox that made the girl gasp, and I think it was just just the foliage in general that awed our hero in Anthem. So... cool.