Huxley, Aldous
About the Author:
Aldous Huxley was born in Surrey, England on the 26th of July 1894. He lived in Italy in the 1920s but moved to Toulon, France in the 1930s. In 1937 Huxley moved to California, USA and worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood. He died on the 22nd November 1963.
AVERAGE REVIEW SCORE:
3 out of 5
(1 book)
Brave New World
Centuries in the future the world is kept peaceful and controlled by a combination of laboratory breeding programmes, hypnosis and state-sanctioned drug use. However, Bernard Marx chafes under the regime he lives in and undertakes to visit a reservation to see people who exist outside of society's controls. Looking to shock his peers, Bernard brings Linda, a woman forced to go native in the reservation years earlier, and her biological son John, back to civilisation with him.
Much smarter people than I (not to mention any number of students pretending to be cleverer than they are) have analysed this book in the past, so this will not be an attempt to do so again. These are just my thoughts on the text as read and not a researched or informed study. Okay?
This book was originally written as something of a rebuttal of H. G. Wells' 1922 novel 'Men Like Gods' (reviewed here), which initially intrigued me because, for all that it was engagingly written, Wells' novel horrified me by extolling the virtues of eugenics. Unfortunately, I was to discover that Huxley was also something of a proponent of the concept of eugenics (although he had the good grace to stop after the Second World War). I'd always heard this book spoken of in the same breath as George Orwell's '1984' as a vision of the future intended as a warning to the present, but Huxley never really made me feel that he entirely disapproved of the world he had created here.
That said, the author does a nice job of using John to challenge the concepts that this orderly and happy civilisation represent. It's masterfully done by having John be a 'savage' who has lived a deprived life on the reservation, but who also has had access to the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, exposing him to elements of human thought and experience that are completely beyond to the more 'civilised' people he meets. In this way Huxley explores the idea that to create a civilisation where people are productive, content and orderly, we would have to sacrifice the very passion, good and bad, that makes us human. I particularly enjoyed the scene where John asserts his right as a human being to be unhappy.
When my girlfriend asked whilst I was reading it if the book was good, I responded that "it's more 'interesting' than 'good'" and that's an assessment I'd hold to. In all honesty, I found it to be a little overrated, but it is nevertheless very thought-provoking (but '1984' is better).
3 out of 5
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