Brave New World

Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Vintage Classics
1932 original publishing date
2006 Vintage reprint

[I know it's been a long while since I did a proper review, so please forgive the slightly rambly nature of this piece...]

A little while back I reviewed 1984, the classic dystopian, science-fiction novel by George Orwell (maybe not that science-fictional since it could be argued that it was used as a sort of Totalitarian-State Users Manual in North Korea, but I digress...) The other book often mentioned in 1984's company is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. (Orwell actually sent a draft copy of 1984 to Huxley, who had been his French teacher at Eton. And Orwell also reviewed Brave New World, in 1940, saying that, "though brilliant ... it probably casts no light on the future." Lol.)

When it was published, it was heavily criticised. Huxley, on a trip to America, had been rather shocked by the sexual promiscuity and what he saw as the bawdy, hedonistic cheapness of the place - this was at a time when Europe was extremely fearful of Americanisation, after the First World War, and the old world was crumbling - and Brave New World partly arose from his experiences there, in particular his reading of a book by Henry Ford (called Our Ford in the novel, and seen as a Messiah figure; the dates are A.F 150, etc...) and from other issues at the forefront of contemporary minds -- there are characters with surnames, Marx, Freud, Engels, Mond, and so on.

Brave New World is the totalitarian system through ignorance - people are actually bred to varying degrees of intelligence - whereas in 1984 Orwell proposed that the language itself might be altered to change how people think, i.e. linguistic relativism or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (hey, I'm a linguist, let me name-drop; the theory does not really hold much water with modern research). Brave New World is the drug and hedonism and the evils of science, and 1984 is jackboots, bombs and tanks.

Like with 1984, I was surprised at how easy this one was to read. While some of the language has dated, and some of the predictions are a little bit giggle-worthy (all the Our Ford stuff), Huxley would probably feel vindicated by his account if he were alive today, in today's modern, liberal, sexually-aware, drug-and-alcohol-tolerant society. (And long may it live.)

I find Huxley's vision far scarier than Orwell's because it is hard to argue against - there are no wars, sex is not something to be ashamed of, everybody is conditioned to enjoy their work and be proud of what they do, death is not feared, people do not age (visibly, that is; perfectly healthy, 20-year-old-looking sexagenarians drop dead of internal ageing), and everybody is happy. Except some of our protagonists...

The story of Brave New World is really quite simple. It's told through multiple third-person points of view - Bernard Marx, a socially-useless man, quite high up in his job, who harbours secret (and not so secret) reservations about their society, and who gets in trouble as a result; Lenina, one of the Beta-plus caste created with a quite high amount of intelligence, who becomes fascinated by Bernard, even while she fears his "madness", and the fact that he is, shockhorror, monogamous; and Bernard's friend Hemholtz Watson, who is ostracised by people because, unlike Bernard, he is too clever and too handsome. In a bid to impress Lenina, Bernard takes her on holiday to see one of the very last Savage Colonies, where mankind lives in a sort-of primitive pre-Industry society - there they come across the Savage, who has strange ideas of love and has read some guy they've never heard of - Shakespeare - and is going to rock the boat quite a lot when he's brought back to London...

Brave New World is not really what you'd call a fast-paced novel, there's not much action, but it does read very easily, and is a masterful snapshot of a terrifying future. Enjoyable - and terrifying - to read.

For more information:

Amazon UK
Amazon US

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