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This month features Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Vintage, £7.99, ISBN: 0099458160
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It is always worth finding out what one thinks about a book, even if it turns out that one thinks the same thing as everybody else.
Readers, despite being called that, are always looking for excuses not to read. And so I am wary of making the following statement: 'By the time you've finished Brave New World you will probably have come to the conclusion that Aldous Huxley wasn't at base a novelist and that Brave New World didn't really have to be a novel.' Because, believe me, it is worth reaching this conclusion for yourself, the journey towards it being exactly the one Huxley would have wanted you to take.
Brave New World is a novel of ideas, in which the ideas stand whilst the novel is disposable. The plot creaks like a space-galleon, the characters are 'alive enough with strength to die', the language at every attempt falls embarrassingly short of poetry. But the world continues to fascinate:
'Under the microscopes, their long tails furiously lashing, spermatozoa were burrowing head first into eggs; and, fertilized, the eggs were expanding, dividing, or, if bokanovskified, budding and breaking up into whole populations of separate embryos. From the Social Predestination Room the escalators went rumbling down into the basement, and there, in the crimson darkness, stewingly warm on their cushion of peritoneum and gorged with blood-surrogate and hormones, the foetuses grew or, poisoned, languished into stunted Epsilonhood. With a faint hum and rattle the moving racks crawled imperceptibly through the weeks and the recapitulated aeons to where, in the Decanting Room, the newly-unbottled babes uttered their first yell of horror and amazement.'
Far less of Brave New World has entered the language than of 1984 - to mention only 'Big Brother'. Huxley didn't have Orwell's talent as a creator of slogans: 'Everybody's happy nowadays,' has none of the brutal unforgettability of 'Freedom is Slavery'. And Orwell's society, probably because it was so closely modelled upon post-War England seen through Stalin's Soviet Union, convinces in a way that Huxley's never does.
Despite this, it is Brave New World (the earlier novel by over a decade) that we feel we may be heading towards, just as 1984 recedes, with its year, into safe history.
Brave New World feels very contemporary. 'Imagine the folly of allowing people to play elaborate games which do nothing whatever to increase consumption. It's madness.' Read that and try not to think of Naomi Klein, Michael Jordan, sneakermania and American football. Or 'Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today.' The moral of a million pop songs (and the chant of storecard hedonists everywhere).
Orwell foresaw panoptic media: we have panoptic media; Huxley foresaw a society that intervened directly, and pre-emptively, into the physical and psychical composition of its citizens, something we still have a possibility of avoiding.
The central subject of 1984 and Brave New World is the same: Happiness. At the end of 1984 Winston Smith, our hero, is happier than he has ever been in his life. He has been brought to love Big Brother by the tortures of O'Brien.
Huxley's O'Brien, Mustapha Mond, a less threatening figure, more like a Tin Tin villain than a Witchhunter General, is given the following rumination: 'It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes, make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge.' A commonplace, but very definitely endangered, conclusion.
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