Anthem Review

As a whole I enjoyed the novel, Anthem. I generally find the dystopian books entertaining and this was no different. I especially like the use of "We" instead of I or me. It seemed to help set this anti-utopia apart from others. Also, it reminded me a lot of a book I read years ago, The City of Ember. Anthem was a simple novel, but it still got its point across of how this altered society can affect its inhabitants into revolting.

The use of "We" in this book, was interesting and a little tough to grasp at first. I had originally thought that it referred to a group of people as "we" does today. But upon learning that it meant just one person and this society had so far stripped each person of individual identity that they didn't even refer to themselves when speaking, but everyone as a whole; it was an odd but clever technique to show the loss of uniqueness and flood of equality and sameness.

All at the beginning I kept thinking of the City of Ember. In that book, the society is underground and slowly loosing its supplies to continue living there. Simply the fact that it was so primeval and happening so far in the future helped me draw comparisons between the two. The underground society takes place after we have run out of all resources and have created this place to live underground to avoid the conflicts of the surface. But the lack of knowledge of the surface and lack of supplies below brings the inhabitants to find a need for escape. In Anthem both Equality and the Golden One thirst for knowledge of a world without this sameness and therefore escape the restrictions.

The simplicity of Anthem was refreshing because even though it was short and sweet, the point was still made. In the mere 100 pages, characters and a setting were introduced, the plot to leave was in place, and the act of leaving the society was carried out. I liked that Rand was able to do this in such a short novel.