Popular science

Science is like Freud and Marx: a ravaged source of literary bleating. Type the word Freudian, psychoanalytic, Jungian, archetype, Marxist or socialist into a standard essay, and you've got an A, my friend. A few years ago, Ian McEwan wrote Solar, which coerces climate change to shake hands with more bleating about culture and philosophy, while some very unamused scientists watch. Science has been made into a concept! At least Freud and Marx encouraged our adoration. Science was happily breaking things and putting them back together to see if it could when we took a photo and stole its reflection.

Karl Popper was a smart man, but doesn't draw the same kind of crowd as Freud and co. In fact, I know educated people who do not know who he is. (And here is where the problem at hand throws itself at us. Duck! I have to exclude all the other things Popper said to make my point and this may be the only thing about Popper you and I will ever know. Which may be fine, but which may also distort our understanding of the world. Because what I say Popper said may not be not be what he said, strictly speaking.)

Popper devised a scientific method, which was meant to scaffold how hypotheses were tested and/or proved, so that we don't ignore the next guy who says the world is round-ish. Basically, try to prove the opposite of what you want to prove. This way you save yourself time, by identifying gaps and exceptions, so that you can adapt your hypothesis and then try to prove the opposite, and you don't taint the whole thing - and science itself - with your desire to be right.

Please read something about Popper, even Wikipaedia. So that I do not hold myself responsible for your trust in me.

I don't put much faith in my senses, especially after watching The Matrix and reading the novels of Philip K. Dick, or just media in general, and passing first-year philosophy (which obviously makes me an authority). (I certainly don't put much faith in your senses.) (Do I need to go over the irreconcilability of the words 'subjective' and 'truth' again?) Neither do I put my faith in science. Wait! What I'm saying is that faith and science are also irreconcilable.

Science is a description of, well, everything, including the things I don't put much faith in. Hypotheses are the labels we stick to things. The things themselves don't care much whether we stick them on by gravity or tape, which is really my point: some hypotheses are no-brainers (unless you want to deny the flow of electricity or how paper is made) and others are informed guesses (how Allosaurus ate (like a falcon, ripping at the flesh) and that the universe is expanding).

You spotted it, huh? The contradiction? I don't have faith in my senses or yours, but I accept that science has a good strike rate? Ah, young Padawan, but science doesn't care. It also doesn't read Philip K. Dick.

Just a hop, skip and jump, and we've arrived at another point. (Another one? You struck it lucky, folks.) Science is not a religion, nor does it build altars nor gather followers. It just (altogether now) doesn't care. Oh, there are fanatics and fundamentalists and extremists, who think the choice is stiff-upper-lipped logic or bust. Every concept in the history of history has some of those. People who need a yoke, but preferably not the one everyone else is chained to, because clearly their brains have been wiped free of psychology and all that angst of growing up without a pool.

We're getting there...

I failed Science in Grade 9, which meant I couldn't take it in Grade 10. I was smart enough for Biology and Maths though. Then I grew up and began to decide for myself who I am and found, despite the attempts of the best textbooks, I really like science. Really, who doesn't? Trees, planes, dancing; the world is a set of things that can be hypothesised and described (although, granted, that doesn't make the hypothesese right). Okay, maybe I only like pseudo-science. Magazines and books about pseudo-science, and maybe the odd experiment.

Ok, ok, I like knowledge, but maybe that's the same thing. Except I fall on the sceptic side of the epistemological scale. I grew up without a pool, okay!

I was reading one of these magazines when it told me (blithely) that Schrodinger's Cat is a thought experiment to show that quantum physics and the laws of relativity abide by the same logic. Because the cat is alive and dead until you observe it. Only if it's the size of an atom... See, Schrodinger placed his cat in a box (black and white, fyi) with a poison bomb. Until you open the box, you can't know whether the cat is alive or dead. (Unless you kick the box and the cat kicks back.) Note the preposition here: and vs or.

This writer may have been a fundamentalist and is definitely a solipsist, because if something could be bigger than an atom and in two states at once, I'd observe the food in my refrigerator never going off and my favourite characters in a series never getting their heads chopped off during the Red Wedding.

The cat gets maybe poisoned to show that the physical world is not governed by the laws of tiny solipsistical things. Not that that really needs proving but we humans need to understand our world and educate others including fundamentalists. Newton and Einstein can rest easy for the time being. So can gravity.

How did this error get into a well-known science magazine? (Having been in magazine publishing before, I can tell you, but that would be like showing you that there is only glitter in the middle of my crystal ball.) This is a whopper but most mistakes are more subtle. Honestly, if you are interested in science, it won't be long before you discover the world isn't magic and that the cat is dead because it isn't moving or making a noise and so you are the worst kind of human being. It is the danger of simplifying something you need to beware of.

Like, you are an artist and you're painting a tree (you're bored and there aren't any cats in boxes around). The leaf is green, you think, pulling out your pre-mixed paint. Er, it's also yellow. And blue. Maybe purple. Dark green, light green, even some red. You tell a five-year-old the leaf is green (and hopefully they will look at you askance because clearly a thing can be more than one thing at a time), but you tell a budding artist to look more closely (whereupon they may also look at you askance).

Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything is a good example. I enjoyed it, but I wouldn't recommend the geology section to a geologist, because he knows the leaf isn't just green. Or something. Karl Marx and Audrey Hepburn may have lived and died in the same century, but that doesn't tell me much about the 20th century except that Karl Marx mistrusted wealth and Breakfast at Tiffany's is about Holly Golightly ogling a diamonds in a jewellery store display.

Richard Dawkins also writes science books, but he does so with a cattle prod in his other hand and none of his books have geology sections. Phew. Imagine what he could do to geostrata.

Even having read that noxious editorial error and despite some misgivings, I purchased a copy of Michio Kaku's Physics of the Future. Oh, I haven't read it yet. It's just that, he has written more books than I can count on one hand, and the titles deteriorate with time from Introduction to Superstrings to The Future of the Mind. This particular book considers time travel and AI. Seriously considers it. Even when history teaches us that it goes its own way and science doesn't care.

Another of his books is Parallel Worlds. It explores the multiverse - you can take it from here - a series of bubble universes. Theoretically, there is another me who didn't fall for the nonsense about doing something you love and suffering for your art. She is being paid to travel around the world and consult with large firms about something very boring but very specialised. Or she is living her principles and doing charity work because either she doesn't mind sharing a room with three students or she has a rich husband.

This is all apparently part of a part of string theory, which is part of an attempt to explain why Schrodinger's Cat lets Schrodinger put him in a box in the first place. In other words, it wants to be The Grand Unifying Theory and explain why atoms can be in two places at once but my begonias are dead and not waiting for me to observe them being alive.

String theory is the frontrunner (although that doesn't mean you have to accept the multiverse - not that the universe cares), or so science writers tell me. But, the other day, a reliable (aren't they all...) science news site described a new theory based on the nature of copying in digital media. (In literature, we call that simulacra, but hey, I don't put faith in my senses anyway.) Now I'm perpetuating the sloppiness of pseudo-science, because that was one of the only things I understand. And another scientist from another elite university endorsed the paper, though I think he was sniggering at the end.

Popper can't help me here. What is the opposite of the Copier Theory? The Deletion Theory? Instead of a universe, a zeroverse, a finiteverse, a cat-in-the-boxverse? I'm going back to bleating because a Freudian or Marxist reading of the philosophy of science is far easier than disproving hypotheses of people who may or may not be oversimplifying things and convincing you that the universe depends on you noticing it.

It's difficult to resist the romance that you can will things alive or dead, that you know everything about the world and that everything is connected at some abstract level. Even when you put little faith in your senses and less in those of someone else. Which is why I shall read the book and tell you that all these things are true because a guy who looks very much like Einstein wrote it down. I like science fiction. However, I may never finish Dawkins' The God Delusion, the Joyce and Ulysses of the scientific world.

World War Z again

Again? you grumble. Hey, be grateful. I am going to end the debate that has divided business relationships, families, communities (by being that insignificant thing that hides what you're all really pissed about). Well, no, but I'm going to give it a shot, and according to various motivational memes, trying is the same thing as success even if you fail, because even if you fail you succeeded at trying, which is further than everyone else got, even though judging by the prodigiousness of these memes a lot of people are trying.

Movie or book?

That's the debate. The English Patient, Cloudatlas, Jane Eyre - I happily take up position on my chosen side of the trenches and you know exactly where this is, methinks. Or you can anticipate my unpredictability and know I am going to take up, not the opposing position, but a whole new one!

A play and a script are unhappily married, because they are just like each other, but different. Every performance of a play by every theatre company is alike but different. The way I see it, fundamentally, the stage and print are different media with different conventions and so each exists outside of their relationship too. More marriages should recognise this.

Although, Cloudatlas the movie is Ike Turner to the book's Tina.

But this isn't why you grumbled. You grumbled because I have posted about World War Z book and movie before. Such a memory, dear reader, it makes me blush. Oh, you only remember because of the poster of Brad Pitt falling from some curved horizon? Oh, that's better, it is my clever puns you remember?

Based on the scanty evidence of the poster and Wikipaedia, I declared the movie a dud. I made that tragic error that has gotten many a rich partner killed off - I forgot that the two have separate identities. Last night, I craved the catharsis of watching special FX creatures being blown up (this description has been censored for sensitive viewers) and imagining they are alive and well people - creatures. Yes. If I try to think nice thoughts about people, but the above is all that comes to me, I have still succeeded. Because they are still alive.

Nope, it is still a dud. I suspect they don't even share the same last name, because they don't share the same characters, style, themes and ending. I hesitate to say 'plot' and 'setting', because the character in the movie visits three of the same places and both Jerusalems have a wall. This actually helps to view them as having separate identities. Still a dud.

I hope they didn't pay Max Brooks much, because they used so little of his IP.

Brad Pitt neither, because they used so little of his acting talent. Ok, I can't say that for definite - I was distracted by his hair cut. It is cut in this highlighted bob that keeps waving around his cheekbones but that he never has to push out of his face. I had time to notice because of the amount of time he spent staring at the hordes of zombies instead of running, literally, for his life. Luckily because if he hadn't, humankind would never have found... a way to hide from the zombies and think soppy thoughts about trying and succeeding.

I checked and this is definitely not how the book ends.

The book is a set of interviews conducted by the Pitt character after the zombies have been contained. He works for the UN, which as we know prefers to take notes than prevent genocide. Anyway, we learn very little about the narrator, so Pitt had a blank slate there. The interviews range from military to political to personal and even spiritual. The interviews combine to create a multifaceted report that only proves there are more facets. Yet each interview is gripping in its own right - strategies, characters, perspectives.

To capture this, the movie would have been a documentary. I can't imagine Brad Pitt in a documentary any more than I understand why his hair stays so still. Nor can I imagine him taking a backseat to the story. Unless he were producing it. Then again, I would not have predicted he would act in a zombie movie.

While Pitt stared at oncoming floods of the undead, groups of multiracial and -ethnic men and women milled around talking loudly enough for us to hear their accents. The South African was genuine, so I guess the rest were too. Kudos on acknowledging that the rest of the world would suffer in an apocalypse too, which the book does nicely albeit with more range.

But by bringing the 'hero' from behind his pen, notepad and dictaphone, the movie places the burden of surviving every attack by the skin of his teeth and solving the global crisis on the poor man. What I really enjoyed about the book were the political ramifications and strategies - the ones that worked and those that didn't. This seems like an obvious hit, but I haven't seen much that forces such uncomfortable decisions on the reader without denying that they may be ethically unsound but that they worked. Luckily for this man, he has no such decisions to make, except the one that saves his skin.

The only thing the book and movie have in common is that the zombies are terrifying. In the book, they overwhelm every force that faces them, mostly by sheer mass. In the movie, the actors' actions are fast-forwarded, so that they seem even less human. They are similar to those in 28 Days Later, where the zombies are victims of their own rage rather than undead. Pitt comes face to face with one that alternately makes the sound of an eagle hunting and an alien in Alien, which is more scary than it sounds.

This feels like a light post - stop sighing with relief - because the movie is so superficial. It takes a good book and wraps it around Brad Pitt and his hair (which actually happens in the movie, now that I think of it). Then they pasted a layer of 'virus' horror/action movie in places where he still showed. As in the movie poster, the setting is contorted, while the book is realistic in so far as it is a historical record; the character is staring at the chaos, while... ok, so the protagonist of the book is also kind of staring, fixated, but through him we explore how people react to genocide. He doesn't pretend trying is succeeding.

The myth of the Selkie woman

Once every quarter as I was growing up, a glossy illustrated hardcover book would 'arrive'. My mother would look it over, hem and hah, show me a page or two, and then secure it at the top of the cupboard for me to read when I was older. Older being when she had decided I could decode the stories told by more realistic generations and artwork drawn by artists raised in Bluebeard's cavern. She forgot though that I could climb to the top of any tree, fence or wall with appropriate handholds and so a cupboard where my Christmas and birthday presents were also kept, meant only that I needed to get her out of the room.

The Rape of the Sabine Women

The books were a series of mailorder titles labelled 'Myths and legends'. My mother had begun ordering the series because I was fascinated by myth from around the world - and not the sanitised Disney forever-after myths. When my mother realised the titles were a bit, um, dark, she held onto them as an investment. They were hardcover with dark green and blue dust jackets with gold, embossed lettering. The pages were illustrated and full-colour with commissioned and licensed artwork: The Rape of the Sabine Women by Pietro da Cortino and Ophelia by John Millais.

Ophelia

Myths and legends are advice passed down from one generation to the next using symbolism. (Symbolism being far more effective than straight-out telling someone something. An authority figure says don't look in the cupboard? Like Bluebeard's wife I look in the cupboard. Now, if I had heard the Bluebeard tale first, I might have thought more carefully about what might be in there.) We all internalise social mores on an implicit basis, otherwise advertising that holds no relevance to a product would not work.

Illustration by Edward Dullac from an earlier version of the Little Mermaid. At the end she dissolves into foam.

I am all for scaring children a bit. I would rather my child didn't go into the forest or be nice to darkly handsome men, and deal with the emotional scars later. Generations upon generations of children listened to these stories (best told by a scraggly spinster with a talent for voices and sound effects around a crackling fire), were terrified to the point of wet pants and sheets, and lived to tell the stories in their old age.

Our real deficit I think is losing those old people to old-age homes. And our general disrespect for age and its knowledge, which we imagine is a return to juvenilism.

These stories taught that reality is brutal. Things happen for no discernable reason except that they happened, and a useful way to exorcise them is to turn them into moral tales or allegories. The stories change to adapt to changing dangers, unless they are written down and instead of adapting them we just read them verbatim. Because wolves soon cotton on that if they run across a girl in a red cape, they will wake up with a belly full of stones.

Disney spoke to a post-war and then consumerist society, where the ills were no longer hunger and shelter, but happiness, which remained elusive. Happy endings were maybe not so much a warning as a substitute, and a veil against the pyramid of class sinking into the mud. Our more post-modern Pixar nods at the brutality of life, although it ultimately convinces us of the benefits of living in society because life outside of society is wolves and most importantly loneliness. Wall-e is a beautiful movie, that like movies before it, ultimately confuses the desire for love with its necessity.

Don't get me wrong; animated films as contemporary myth are natural adaptations to the old myths (apparently there are only 10 plot lines but infinite manifestations). The adaptation is just a refusal to accept the brutality and sugarcoat it, sometimes literally, with proclamations about identity and love that, according to smart people, only sprung into being roundabout Shakespearian times. (Also the innocence of childhood, which maybe invalidates my entire argument here, but every argument is inherently flawed, else we wouldn't bother to debate.)

I think I have blogged about this before, but contemporary readers have short attention spans (you), which I am relying on.

This depressing monologue was sparked by the legend of the Selkie. Selkies were seals who concealed living breathing men and woman beneath their coats. Every so often a Selkie would 'unzip' her coat and do a few stretches, and if you caught her coat then you could keep her. So far the social more appears to be mysoginism. But this is a 'real' myth and the empathy you feel for this woman is about to be challenged and complicated.

She lives with her captor as his wife for years, because maybe he captured her from loneliness and is actually not so bad. They are kind to each other and breed some human children. One day he goes fishing and she steals back her coat. She swims out to her first, Selkie family. Husband number 2 is furious, so naturally he hunts down and kills her Selkie husband and children. In her rage, Mrs curses every man in and around the village to die in her ocean.

Yikes. Neither partner is exempt from judgement here, or from our empathy. Even society is implicated in the tragedy, by implicitly enabling this theft of a woman's rights. The consequences are vicious, but although there is a lesson, there are no dichotomies.

In another version, Mrs kills her landlubbing children and husband, and then lies weeping in a stream of his blood. This sounds like a Guy Ritchie film.

The Selkie story comes from varying cultures in northern Europe: Inuit, Celtic and Nordic, although the Celts lay claim to it. This is the type of myth depicted in those hardcover books so expertly hidden from me. Boiling, furious oceans, enraged and tragic characters, no hero or villain, or many heroes and villains, trails of blood and curses and life and death. I internalised these messages because they seemed more genuine. C'mon, even Barbie in an ivory tower must be able to see that Cinderella makes no sense, because someone's story never ends and it certainly doesn't continue for forever after.

Is a brutal mythology a sign of more brutal times? Is it an 'uneducated' peoples attempt to describe their reality? And is it paranoia to suspect that nothing has changed? That life and death are inexplicable, but that they are brutal and they do not always sit easy even when you reconcile yourself to these facts. That it is the trauma we need to be wary of: the curse of the Selkie woman. That we are both the hero and the villain, but that sometimes we are only the villain in someone else's story.That maybe children and adults could stand to be a bit more scared.

The Goldfinch

We're one for three, people. Or one for eight, and I'll explain why, once I've led you on for a bit. We played poker the other day - remember? You still owe me 100 bucks. One of my hands was a three-of-a-kind, all queens. The rest of the game is fuzzy. My queens were Donna Tartt, Marisha Pessl and Scarlett Thomas, and even though they were all of a kind, Pessl got all the attention, dressed in black and sauntering in with creepy-as-heck film producer Stanislav Cordova on her arm.

Tartt and Thomas got a caption each, I'm embarrassed to say. This writer was too excited about the black diamond to appreciate the other two on behalf of her readers. Rookie mistake.

To recap (this bit stands out of the fog): I read the first novels of all three at roughly the same time. Like any parent will tell you, I loved them all the same. (Even though really I saw Tartt as a professional and the other two as up-and-coming amateurs.) So I loved them all equally, just differently.

I was finishing up my postgrad and internship, and settling into my first full-time job, in magazine publishing. I was still living in Jo'burg. I had the puffed-up naivette of a varsity achiever and the hangdog wariness of an intern (dust-covered, paper-cut, permanent marker-stained and all). Some things just stayed the same, like a troupe of mimes: my friends, social life, family, hangdog wariness and general sense of myself. Some things changed immediately, like a troupe of avant garde performance artists (tautology but anyway).

It was like trying to walk when the speed on the treadmill has been turned up. (Do you ever wonder what your ancestors would say as they watch you use a machine indoors to do something they did for survival and never paid for?) I was disconcerted... disillusioned... distraught... Ok, I'm all of these things on a good day, but add to this disconsolate, disorientated and distraught. (I was tempted to write 'deceased' and blame it on the dictionary, but this is probably not funny, though at the time I didn't think it was funny either.)

Let's get Ms Pessl down the red carpet first. As established, she wrote Special Topics in Calamity Physics and Night Film, and both have wormed their way into my heart (I should probably get a doctor to look at that) - Special Topics more so since I have seen how far Pessl could take improbable themes and twist them (and me) into infinity loops.

Look up a word for feeling isolated beginning with 'dis-' and that was me too. The book in my hand was a) a book club book, b) pink and flowery. But the character inside was neither. She might have been, under different circumstances, but the pink is scrubbed into a wish-washy grey and the flowers turn out to be those garden roses, that bloom quickly before the petals hang loosely for a while and leave behind rosehips. She has a mystery that isn't quite a mystery to solve, symbolism for solving scarier mysteries in your psyche.

 

Scarlett Thomas is next up. She wrote The End of Mr Y - that book that led to every publisher to incur the expense of dusting the block of the book (the ends of the actual pages) black, red and blue, maybe purple, in the hopes that readers would think they were original. Actually, we wondered how much that inflated the price by. Like Special Topics, Mr Y was a mystery solved by - or not solved by - quantum science, since for the last time, quantum physics and the laws of relativity exist on separate scales, unless you're saying you found the Unifying Theory?

I did not know any better either, and either way it is a good book. I read it in the dimmed lights of a house that has already gone to sleep until I was haunted again by the fate of the scribes in Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red: they go blind. (This describes every night, really, but Pamuk is quite convincing.)

Thomas has apparently written seven other novels, of which I have read two: PopCo and The Tragic Universe. If this were a card trick, the cards would all be of one suite. You don't read an author's works for the same magic display; you're looking for their signature style. Personally I don't care where or when we go, just give me more of what you gave me when we met. By which I mean not anything illegal. Both novels felt like the journal of an anthrophobe, even in a crowd of anthrophobes, which is some kind of impressive.

I am also disturbed that the profile photo of Ms Thomas is a selfie. Where is the publicity team (or person) and why does she look like someone I know but don't like?

I wanted to tell you earlier but I don't like to tell you how long it will take to get to My Point because sometimes you wander off. It's dim in here and I only have the one light, so stick close, because we're here. It's dim so you of course can't see anything.

The real star of this show is Donna Tartt (no selfies, thank goodness). Her first novel (and the first one I read) was The Secret History. It is set in a top, uptight university, that in some obscure way reminds me of that of Stephen Daedalus, with more sentences that have objects, verbs and subjects. The mystery here is chilling, maybe because you know it's skulking around and that it will get you the second you least expect it. There is also the circle of friends within which everything happens, this time like the discombobulated voices in The Waves.

Of the list so far, The Secret History and Night Film are neck-on-neck. Don't shout so loudly! You'll burst my microphone. Most people will probably disagree with me, and yes, that's half the joy, but Night Film is well-crafted and delicately paced. I dare you or Ms Tartt or Ms Thomas to find another novel that suspends your disbelief from the moon and tells you to go get it (unfortunately Google stopped investigating the elevator and I'm not setting foot on a rocket not built by NASA or the Russians) and convinces you that you can and that you should because this belief or disbelief has become critical to your existence.

I dare it to do that, while keeping you hooked on the plot and playing with the conventions of Nancy Drew and ilk, through 500-odd pages.

The Little Friend came next and always reminds me of Caspar the Ghost, and actually there is something in the book that reinforced this. This time, the death is right up front. The mystery is the death of a girl's little brother but the ending feels like the beginning, just with three-digit page numbers. This novel is the middle child that will never be as talented or mature as the eldest, and for a long time is the youngest, until a younger child comes along that makes it feel even less talented. (I anticipate some bullying.)

Cue The Goldfinch. I finished this two nights ago. More deaths, upfront, and some more that float around. A mystery, but it only becomes a mystery at the end, although it could have become one earlier. Cryptic enough? The mystery has to do with a painting of the same name, but in French, I think. A boy is in a museum when a bomb goes off and pretty much everyone but him is hit by falling and flying things, including his mother. The remaining family members are nonplussed, so he is passed around a bit, gathering more, unlikely family members.

My favourite character is his best friend, Boris, as to be expected because he is the underdog. The type of dog that will always be under. The type of dog that chooses to be under, even when you pull his blanket out and put it somewhere warm.

My description is cryptic because this feels like three novels in one, except that the sentences are long and loose, and as an editor I find this irritating. As we are told in the narrative (another irritation), the story is compiled from journal entries, to justify the style but the style isn't immature enough to need explaining. Just annoying. Holes gape through the plot as they do when I attempt to knit.

My reviews always get meaner when I am disappointed. Or hungry. Or breathing in fishy cat breath especially when I don't feed said cats fish.

What I am really irritated by is the ending. (Don't worry, I won't spoil anything. Wouldn't know where to start.) The main character is fairly disillusioned with some deep emotional scars and minor nihilistic psychoses (but it seems like everyone in the book is at different stages bipolar). Suddenly he trips over a moral! Look, another one! Granted some of them are projections, because logically they can't exist in the real world. He's not exactly pulling out Hawaii shorts and tiny umbrellas, but he may be sporting a golf shirt.

Another dud. Which means it is probably a good book, but cannot possibly have been written by the same person who wrote The Secret History, unless it's the reader that maketh the book? Not buying it? Anyway, we have eight books from three authors with chocolate biscuits going to the three first-generations and one second-generation. While I stand by my reviews, readers' experiences make for capricious reviews. Who knows how I would feel about Night Film if I weren't binging on sci-fi and horror right now, and if I didn't get such joy from being contrary.

But as I pointed out, I am always varying proportions of various 'dis-'s, even words I'm just making up now (the ones in this post are real though, honest). Every story is a quest story (even yours, Mr Eggers) - which is an hour and a half or 400 pages of a human life. We roleplay a crisis, snatch up the resolution and discuss the thing to pieces. The crisis is half our own. So, I suppose, a great (according to me) novel is one I live. I can take that.

PS. You knew, didn't you? The book the conclusion alludes to? I'll give you a hint: it's set in Siberia, and features a cannibal and cult of castrates. Couldn't resist.

Anthem

Everyone has an opinion about Ayn Rand. Hordes of people have opinions about those opinions. The poles of these opinions are like the US and USSR during the Cold War, except that the Cold War was important. I even had an opinion before I read anything by her. (No, I’m not going to tell you yet. I want to keep you on this page for longer to make my analytics look good.) Chances are you're rooting for the US, right? Spoiler alert: So was Rand.

To make up for trying to reduce your loyal following of my blog to mere stats, I will tell you that Rand made me very angry when reading Anthem. This is a novella about a boy who lives in a future where education and progress is dictated by 'process'. Teenagers are allocated jobs that determine where they live and how they spend their time - for their whole lives.

And here I was ready to start ranting (say it with a soft and extended sound, like 'A' in 'Arthur'). Then I realised I was about to drop a spoiler. Which is not a bad thing, I contemplated, because then you won't have to read it and risk a blood pressure spike. But we live in a free society (well, I do and if you don't, chances are the entire internet is banned anyway).

Without revealing important plot points (blood pressure spike), Rand is very obviously pitting communism and socialism against democracy and capitalism. Because obviously those pairs are blood siblings. Like Sigourney Weaver and aliens. Wherever Ms Weaver is, an insect-like alien slobbering all over itself is preparing to rear in uncharacteristic silence behind her. In literary critique, you always avoid attributing something to the author, because how can you know that your and their opinions coincide?

In this case (and because this isn't critique, more like... commentary. Kinda like telling someone everything you see and think while riding on a mountain trail. Except that books are far more important and I have the muscles of an old lady) (what was I saying again?) we do know what she intends - no, wait, we do and we don't. If you are questioning my use of conjunctions, remember Ms Weaver. There are almost entire scenes without aliens in, so that no one believes her, but the aliens are still waiting, even if only in her memories.

Ayn Rand is unapologetically in favour of democracy and capitalism, the latter being the spike in my blood pressure. In fact, she dares you to prompt her to apologise so that she can take some time to break your spirit. (Wow, that was harsh, right? I am unapologetically not in favour of capitalism, except that I want to be able to make money from my career and buy things I don't need. Well, I need them, but only because I want them.)

The majority of Anthem is spent in the city, cataloguing the ways in which oversimplified communism denies the human spirit's inventiveness, ability to adapt, curiosity and other things prized by capitalism. Because, clearly, being part of a community and, literally, communal life means you cannot choose your path in life. You will not create art or invent things or investigate the world or be able to think rationally. A fortunate side product is that no one in this city is starving, homeless or without access to medical care.

Yes. Well. I am trying to repress a desire to smack something. Only because it is unladylike. Instead, I swear.

When I was growing up, my father would try to provoke me into debates, because I have always been an opinionated liberal with the world on my shoulders and I am very easy to provoke. He had a copy of Fountainhead and said I should read it because it isn't what people say it is. According to him, the strands of the novel are knotted around a more humanistic perspective than their tautness suggests. 

I understand this now. As oversimplified and unfair as the portrayal of socialism is, the boy's egoism is oversimplified in inverse proportions. His arrogance - at his own (re)discoveries of science, sexuality and freedom - is not a sustainable model for good citizens. Unlimited freedom is not possible if there is more than one person - at some point, you will constrain someone else's freedom. This is a principle of democracy and justice: you have rights, to the point where they restrict someone else's rights.

For me, this humanism is revealed in his relationship with a girl his own age. They fall in love (or lust and general repressed sexuality), they skip through meadows and she declares herself his servant - sorry, wait, what?! 50 Shades of Grey where democracy is white and communism is black? So you reactivated your brain and began to think independently again and now you're a god? (Does this have anything to do with the fact that she's female and you're male? (Really easily provoked.))

I imagine Ms Rand grinning as she typed (obviously, with a typewriter). Grinning at her own mischievousness rather than any consideration of the reader. I imagine this because I enjoy pranking people and the joy comes of the art of the prank and so I laugh out loud while creating and always feel people don't appreciate the humour enough. I mean, c'mon, how do you not stand for a few minutes and appreciate the Alt, Ctl and Del keys lifted with a butter knife from your keyboard and lined up on the desk?

I am crediting Ms Rand with this because the suggestion is not very subtle - you can tie thread around a key, but you can still see there's an object inside and it's probably a key. The author would back me up here, if she weren't in capitalist heaven where life is really unfair because some people get a head start and keep on going and some get a head start but don't know what to do when pushed out the nest and some don't get a head start or anywhere and... you get the picture.

My mind keeps coming back to my glib comment about how the city is free of the problems of our cities. Because negotiating between the two poles is difficult and has rarely worked in modern memory, we should throw ourselves into one or the other - better the devil you know. There must be a middle ground, where creativity and drive meets universal shelter, food and health care. Honestly, I'm just contrary like that. But I'd like to imagine her grinning behind her typewriter, knowing I appreciate the prank.