‘I am Howard Roark in a world of Ellsworth Tooheys…’ I tweeted in a fit of depression the other day, though I rather wish I hadn’t. I’m not an architect — and if I were I definitely wouldn’t be a humourless monomaniac into concrete and influenced by Le Corbusier; I don’t have hair ‘the exact color of ripe orange rind’ (does anyone?); I’m not a rapist; and, to be honest, I’m not even sure I like the novel that much anyway.
It’s called The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand, and if you haven’t read it that’s quite understandable as the Russian-born novelist and philosopher Rand (née Alisa Zinovyevna Rosenbaum in 1905) is much bigger in the US than she is over here. Though she’s now better known for Atlas Shrugged (1957) — currently enjoying a massive revival in the US as part of the Obama backlash — it was The Fountainhead (1943) that made her name and has since sold around 6.5 million copies.
The thing that drew me to it was that it was Sir Michael Caine’s Desert Island Discs book and I’ve got a bit of a thing about Michael Caine. I love the fact that, during his National Service in the Korean war, his recce platoon was completely surrounded by Chinese and they thought they were going to die. As a last desperate measure, the platoon leader ordered them to charge through the Chinese lines and hope for the best. It worked. Caine has never feared anything since.
You do wonder, though, what kind of mindset you’d need to choose The Fountainhead as your all-time favourite book. For a start, there’s Rand’s prose style — poetic and quite Hemingway-like in small doses; prolix, monumental, portentous in larger ones.
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