City News
Anthem by Ayn Rand
Review by Sean
The book Anthem is a great read for a teenage audience looking to squeeze in a short yet amazingly written book in their busy lives. Ayn Rand wrote this novella in 1937. Anthem has a few main characters: Equality 7-2521, The Golden One, The Transgressor of The Unspeakable Word (just called “The Transgressor” for short). The Transgressor is also known as the Saint of the Pyre. This book takes place in a society with no personal identity or privacy, where sharing thoughts with oneself, known as writing, is illegal, and people are bound extremely close together.
This world is under the dictatorship of an unnamed leader, who has stripped every living soul of their human rights, only labeling them with traits and a string of numbers. Equality 7-2521 finds a safe place, isolated, away from the general public. He calls it the Tunnel, where he commits the so-called sins of thinking about himself and writing. He is completely aware that what he is doing is illegal, but he does not have a clue on why things are so. Writing does zero harm to oneself or others, so why isn’t he allowed to write?
Writing is not the only thing that Equality 7-2521 does in his safe little tunnel. He also performs a wide variety of scientific experiments on his own, and he even invents a lightbulb. He has been stealing manuscripts from the Scholars, a group of people who were assigned by their dictator to spend their life learning and discovering. It was during this time span in which Equality 7-2521 was able to feel how it felt to be an individual, and grasped the idea of collectivism, where a society has no individual identity and are referred to as a whole.
When seeing the Transgressor being burned in public for possessing the Unspeakable Word “I,” the Transgressor locks eyes with Equality 7-2521, and that is exactly when Equality 7-2521 decided to pursue a future just like the Transgressor. Decisions like these show how book and movie characters can deviate astronomically from people in real life, since nobody in their right mind would make eye contact with a person being burned to death as a punishment and think “Wow that looks inspiring, I want to be exactly like him.”
This book is extremely short, which is great for busy people to read and enjoy. For any parents that may be concerned with their child’s reading material, this book is not for kids who are too young to be exposed to gruesome and suggestive topics. I recommend that this book be read for people 15 or older, just for the sake of the content inside of it. Particularly the setting seems both advanced as given off by the naming as well as rudimentary as with the punishments. Other than that, I think that this book is amazing for an appropriate audience to appreciate the importance of individual free will.