2009 books
( SOME SPOILERS )
6) Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932 ( RE-READ )
When reading this at age eighteen, many of the subtleties that are present in Brave New World must have passed me by. I knew nothing about Huxley and probably only read it that first time (in 1978) because it seemed to be on everyone's shortlist of Science Fiction That Must Be Read. I know now that what I certainly did miss was the feeling that Huxley, while exploring his imagined future with a sometimes fearsome zeal, perhaps also viewed what he was creating with increasing degrees of concern as the story grew more fully formed between April and August of 1931, but to try to tell these moments apart means picking apart the morass of Huxley's complex personal politics, something I won't attempt to do here.
A more informed reading of Brave New World is by far the better experience, and the reader is also lucky to have an entire appendix to the book to explore, often bound as a separate work, in the shape of Brave New World Revisited. Neither of these works, however, have ever provided me with a sense of joy or hope for the future no matter how hard Huxley may have tried to do so in entertaining his reader. If the reader knows little or nothing about how Huxley came to write it, then what the reader gets is a straightforward yet darkly comical story about the genetic perfection of the human race, with caveats.
Brave New World is nothing less than an excursion into a human termitarium, with horror suspended. Whatever repulsion the reader may feel is not something that Huxley actually went out of his way to elicit, but his awareness of the more repellent side to this utopia meant that they also sat uncomfortably alongside his unabashed enthusiasm for some of the other ideas he was actively championing.
With the novel's introduction, the tour of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre sets an uneasy tone at the beginning, but after the positive aspects of this mostly happy consumerist society are brought out for view as well, that unease then gets dismissed - or at least diluted as if with a heavy dose of soma - to calm the hackles that arise from a closer inspection of the structure of this seemingly perfect society. Early in the novel my attention became divided: it's not particularly the minutiae of their daily existence in London that I remember, or Bernard Marx's difficulty in fitting in with his society's preconditioned obsession with casual sex, or his holiday in the New Mexico savage reservation and the Tarzan-like introduction of John to civilisation, nor even John's ultimate fate. It's the progress of Huxley's 'utopia/dystopia' tightrope walk that's the one memorable thing about the novel, because the ambivalent questions he asks about this particular utopia are ones he certainly had to ask of himself while in the act of creating it.
Brave New World is deliberately dismissive of some of H.G. Wells's utopian ideas of a perfectly functioning society, though it seems as if Huxley just replaces them with some pet utopian theories of his own. Eugenics, for one, plus his contempt for parliamentary democracy and his belief that society should be reorganised as a pyramid of mental abilities controlled by an elite caste of highly intelligent experts, able to coerce the rest of the sub-normal human race into doing whatever they deem necessary. A ruling class, in other words, but a ruling class in a world where the organisational perfection of the human race has largely been achieved, with the by-product that war has effectively been abolished. That in itself might appear a worthy utopian aim, but many of the means by which it's achieved are problematic and objectionable ideas to consider with much seriousness today (though inevitably they do still surface from time to time around the world). When Brave New World was written, the ideas and political extremes of both left and right also had a more vibrant currency than they have today. Huxley's fear, shared by many, was of a collapse of civilisation more complete than the destructiveness of the "war to end all wars" that had been fought a little over a decade earlier, and many felt some drastic measures were needed to prevent such a collapse (one that, even after a second World War, has still never really come about). The view shared by Huxley and others was that humanity at large simply wasn't able to govern itself properly, and it must be relieved of a burden it was clearly incapable of carrying. But who to appoint to lead? Well, who else but a biologically-created elite. Cue yet another hopeful, stillborn utopian ideal...
I was also not aware, before, how much the plot of Brave New World was influenced by Huxley's friendship with D.H. Lawrence, whose retreat to a more 'earthbound' life in New Mexico mirrors the pilgrimage made there by Bernard Marx with his on/off girlfriend Lenina. The two writers seemed well-placed, both geographically and philosophically poles apart in relation to each other, and I expect that while considering how Brave New World's two mutually incompatible ways of life rubbed up against each other, this forced Huxley to take a questioning second look at the ethics of the scientific ideas he was championing. By the end, despite the necessity of the final bravura justification of their utopian/dystopian way of life by the Controller Mustapha Mond, Huxley in the end seems to come down on Lawrence's side despite all that has gone before.
Useful for all this consideration were the extras included in this Vintage edition: first is Huxley's foreword to the 1946 edition, in which he makes but one scant reference to eugenics yet glaringly fails to mention his enthusiasm for the idea at the time of writing, though this perhaps comes under the aegis of his opening sentence, "Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment." Secondly, David Bradshaw's introduction teases out rather well the assortment of threads that must have interwoven in Huxley's head at the time of writing, and this is summed up well with the words: "...it seems more likely that the composition of Brave New World proved so problematic for Huxley ... because he was unsure in his own mind whether he was writing a satire, a prophecy or a blueprint." Certainly, considering Huxley's pro- stance on some of the ideas he offers but not others, this sums up the novel's ambivalence rather well: sometimes you can never quite tell whether he's being serious or satirical, as these modes are quite effectively homogenised into the lightly comical style he adopted for this novel. But even with all the good stuff that it has going for it - the bravely uncertain nature of Huxley's direction while writing, the mountain of food for thought he presents, and the impressive world-building which alone justifies its enduring reputation - I still find this an awkward and hard book to like.
7) Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 1958
The two relevant events that separate the publications of Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited were the Second World War and the publication of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, a novel which Revisited is in part a response to. Huxley's admiration for Orwells' novel is unbounded: he describes it as "magnificent", and often he contrasts and compares the two as if to point out, unnecessarily, that his dystopia - and by 1958 the optimistic aspects of Brave New World had been mostly discredited - at least wasn't as evil as Orwell's dystopia. Huxley mostly takes a then-current look at many of the themes of Brave New World, and it often reads as if he wishes he were wiser in hindsight. Unfortunately this long coda to the novel doesn't really inform today's reader with much that isn't already at the forefront of current human concerns and can be better explored elsewhere: overpopulation, state propaganda, the over-organisation of society, dictatorships, chemical persuasion, education for freedom. And of course there's eugenics: he tries to dodge this bullet abysmally, since his enthusiasm for it had long been on record and, as he conveniently avoids pointing out, the Nazis had since done more than just think about it. He cops out with "We are on the horns of an ethical dilemma, and to find the middle way will require all our intelligence and all our good will." Quite. Revisited doesn't particularly endear to me Huxley any better than Brave New World does, though it shows he continued to think about and question the same concerns despite never really coming up with any useful answers.
6) Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932 ( RE-READ )
When reading this at age eighteen, many of the subtleties that are present in Brave New World must have passed me by. I knew nothing about Huxley and probably only read it that first time (in 1978) because it seemed to be on everyone's shortlist of Science Fiction That Must Be Read. I know now that what I certainly did miss was the feeling that Huxley, while exploring his imagined future with a sometimes fearsome zeal, perhaps also viewed what he was creating with increasing degrees of concern as the story grew more fully formed between April and August of 1931, but to try to tell these moments apart means picking apart the morass of Huxley's complex personal politics, something I won't attempt to do here.
A more informed reading of Brave New World is by far the better experience, and the reader is also lucky to have an entire appendix to the book to explore, often bound as a separate work, in the shape of Brave New World Revisited. Neither of these works, however, have ever provided me with a sense of joy or hope for the future no matter how hard Huxley may have tried to do so in entertaining his reader. If the reader knows little or nothing about how Huxley came to write it, then what the reader gets is a straightforward yet darkly comical story about the genetic perfection of the human race, with caveats.
Brave New World is nothing less than an excursion into a human termitarium, with horror suspended. Whatever repulsion the reader may feel is not something that Huxley actually went out of his way to elicit, but his awareness of the more repellent side to this utopia meant that they also sat uncomfortably alongside his unabashed enthusiasm for some of the other ideas he was actively championing.
With the novel's introduction, the tour of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre sets an uneasy tone at the beginning, but after the positive aspects of this mostly happy consumerist society are brought out for view as well, that unease then gets dismissed - or at least diluted as if with a heavy dose of soma - to calm the hackles that arise from a closer inspection of the structure of this seemingly perfect society. Early in the novel my attention became divided: it's not particularly the minutiae of their daily existence in London that I remember, or Bernard Marx's difficulty in fitting in with his society's preconditioned obsession with casual sex, or his holiday in the New Mexico savage reservation and the Tarzan-like introduction of John to civilisation, nor even John's ultimate fate. It's the progress of Huxley's 'utopia/dystopia' tightrope walk that's the one memorable thing about the novel, because the ambivalent questions he asks about this particular utopia are ones he certainly had to ask of himself while in the act of creating it.
Brave New World is deliberately dismissive of some of H.G. Wells's utopian ideas of a perfectly functioning society, though it seems as if Huxley just replaces them with some pet utopian theories of his own. Eugenics, for one, plus his contempt for parliamentary democracy and his belief that society should be reorganised as a pyramid of mental abilities controlled by an elite caste of highly intelligent experts, able to coerce the rest of the sub-normal human race into doing whatever they deem necessary. A ruling class, in other words, but a ruling class in a world where the organisational perfection of the human race has largely been achieved, with the by-product that war has effectively been abolished. That in itself might appear a worthy utopian aim, but many of the means by which it's achieved are problematic and objectionable ideas to consider with much seriousness today (though inevitably they do still surface from time to time around the world). When Brave New World was written, the ideas and political extremes of both left and right also had a more vibrant currency than they have today. Huxley's fear, shared by many, was of a collapse of civilisation more complete than the destructiveness of the "war to end all wars" that had been fought a little over a decade earlier, and many felt some drastic measures were needed to prevent such a collapse (one that, even after a second World War, has still never really come about). The view shared by Huxley and others was that humanity at large simply wasn't able to govern itself properly, and it must be relieved of a burden it was clearly incapable of carrying. But who to appoint to lead? Well, who else but a biologically-created elite. Cue yet another hopeful, stillborn utopian ideal...
I was also not aware, before, how much the plot of Brave New World was influenced by Huxley's friendship with D.H. Lawrence, whose retreat to a more 'earthbound' life in New Mexico mirrors the pilgrimage made there by Bernard Marx with his on/off girlfriend Lenina. The two writers seemed well-placed, both geographically and philosophically poles apart in relation to each other, and I expect that while considering how Brave New World's two mutually incompatible ways of life rubbed up against each other, this forced Huxley to take a questioning second look at the ethics of the scientific ideas he was championing. By the end, despite the necessity of the final bravura justification of their utopian/dystopian way of life by the Controller Mustapha Mond, Huxley in the end seems to come down on Lawrence's side despite all that has gone before.
Useful for all this consideration were the extras included in this Vintage edition: first is Huxley's foreword to the 1946 edition, in which he makes but one scant reference to eugenics yet glaringly fails to mention his enthusiasm for the idea at the time of writing, though this perhaps comes under the aegis of his opening sentence, "Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment." Secondly, David Bradshaw's introduction teases out rather well the assortment of threads that must have interwoven in Huxley's head at the time of writing, and this is summed up well with the words: "...it seems more likely that the composition of Brave New World proved so problematic for Huxley ... because he was unsure in his own mind whether he was writing a satire, a prophecy or a blueprint." Certainly, considering Huxley's pro- stance on some of the ideas he offers but not others, this sums up the novel's ambivalence rather well: sometimes you can never quite tell whether he's being serious or satirical, as these modes are quite effectively homogenised into the lightly comical style he adopted for this novel. But even with all the good stuff that it has going for it - the bravely uncertain nature of Huxley's direction while writing, the mountain of food for thought he presents, and the impressive world-building which alone justifies its enduring reputation - I still find this an awkward and hard book to like.
7) Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited, 1958
The two relevant events that separate the publications of Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited were the Second World War and the publication of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1949, a novel which Revisited is in part a response to. Huxley's admiration for Orwells' novel is unbounded: he describes it as "magnificent", and often he contrasts and compares the two as if to point out, unnecessarily, that his dystopia - and by 1958 the optimistic aspects of Brave New World had been mostly discredited - at least wasn't as evil as Orwell's dystopia. Huxley mostly takes a then-current look at many of the themes of Brave New World, and it often reads as if he wishes he were wiser in hindsight. Unfortunately this long coda to the novel doesn't really inform today's reader with much that isn't already at the forefront of current human concerns and can be better explored elsewhere: overpopulation, state propaganda, the over-organisation of society, dictatorships, chemical persuasion, education for freedom. And of course there's eugenics: he tries to dodge this bullet abysmally, since his enthusiasm for it had long been on record and, as he conveniently avoids pointing out, the Nazis had since done more than just think about it. He cops out with "We are on the horns of an ethical dilemma, and to find the middle way will require all our intelligence and all our good will." Quite. Revisited doesn't particularly endear to me Huxley any better than Brave New World does, though it shows he continued to think about and question the same concerns despite never really coming up with any useful answers.