jankp's Full Review: Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
Another subtitle could be Stuck In Darwinian Antiquity. I wasn't able to choose which was better, but they infer the same thing because Huxley's intimidating message here is that in the far future we will still need domination by an elite few to be 'happy' and live. That premise seems unlikely because there is no reason to fear that man's social or biological evolution is anywhere near complete.
Should the believability of a fantasy enter into criticism, though? Since it is fiction we should perhaps just suspend our disbelief and accept the author's premise or world, as Vormancian observes. I expand on my answer to this in the comment section, but the nitty gritty is that I need some basis of reality if I'm to accept a fantasy. It is essential that the characters are authentic and well-developed, not caricatures poorly developed as happens here.
In Brave New World (BNW), a 1932 novel by Aldous Huxley, religion is not the opiate of the masses, but 'soma' is, which in all reality is a simple twentieth-century drug in BNW's civilized World State of the year 632 A.F. (after Ford, meaning Henry Ford, inventor of the automobile.) Huxley, by his own admission in the Foreword, simply lacked the vision of how wonderfully different the world could be in six centuries and instead propagated early twentieth-century paranoia of the evils of technology.
Soma is the drug given out liberally by the controlling World State (the World Controller is called His Fordship) to placate the cloned masses of the citizenry into acceptance of their dull, consumeristic lives. It is little more than a narcotic inducing many hours of dreamless sleep with no visible ill effects upon waking, but will suffocate one to death with an overdose and shorten one's life considerably. In fact this BNW can expect to never show aging, but will up and die around sixty years of age! This opiate is a strange religion that offers a numbed-out nirvana, then kills you off at what could be considered middle age in the not so distant future. Fortunately we know, or should, that the already burgeoning industry of genetic engineering or biotechnology has begun to offer feeling-enhancing drugs (emphatogens, entractogens like Ecstasy, entheogens, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) that are more likely to leave a person undeterred by authority in the future and not deaden your brain or kill you like soma.
The Story
After a foreword by Huxley in my Perennial Classics edition, I think written in 1946, where he regrets having such a limited approach to the ideology of BNW, the book opens with the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning giving a rare tour to new 'students,' although I fail to see what they are studying. Are they future workers there? They are shown how thousands of cloned humans are created by bokanvskization, predestined to become Alpha pluses or minuses, Betas, Epsilons, Deltas or Gammas (I think the Epsilons are the bottom and Semi-Morons). Out of the bottle they undergo progressively abusive conditioning and hypnopaedia all night while sleeping for years to produce contented citizens with a consumer-driven and sexually promiscuous-only society.
Almost sounds like some parts of the world, huh? Except are they as content as the BNW sheep with no use of history, literature, conversation, love, solitude, family, religion, creativity, culture, aging, fear of death, intelligence?
We meet a few of its citizens besides the Director as they go about their shallow lives, such as a female Lenina who has lupus, yet is 'particularly pneumatic,' which I have yet to look up in the dictionary. It is a word exclusively used to describe a sexually-attractive woman, which doesn't help me picture Lenina or other pneumatic women. And one male, Bernard, she and everyone else finds strange because he refuses soma mostly and dislikes the way they've been conditioned, blamed on alcohol getting into his blood as he was being fertilized or some such craziness. But when Bernard, an esteemed Alpha, receives permission to visit the 'Savage' territory in New Mexico, she accepts his invitation to accompany him.
Flying there in Bernard's rocket-plane Lenina is disgusted by the sight of an old, wrinkled, toothless, native man and a fat, middle-aged woman, not able to comprehend what aging means. When she happens on a mother suckling her child, Lenina desperately looks for her soma to help her withstand the emotional trauma. That middle-aged woman has a twenty-year old son who we come to know well as he describes his childhood to Bernard while Lenina is left suffering with his horrifying mother.
This boy, John, seems likely to be the product of a relationship the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning had with his mother, despite the birth control females are conditioned to use all the time. Bernard invites him back to civilization with him and Lenina, this boy who has learned to read and love Shakespeare from a discarded book of Shakespearean works found by his mother and who is overjoyed at the prospect, as is his mother Linda. He's also in love, but not lust, with lupus-plagued Lenina.
"Oh brave new world with such people in it!" he quotes the character Miranda from Shakespeare's play The Tempest, which was not explained and I had to look up. (I recommend the two hour-long review at Huxley.net if you have the time. It's fascinating!) But when they all go back to civilization, nothing works out like they had hoped. Yes, the Director resigned after being humiliated with evidence of his immoral past coming back to haunt him, for women were not supposed to get pregnant or anyone supposed to be in love. Still life goes quickly out of control for the 'Savage' John and Linda and Bernard and Lenina fail to help or understand them.
My Reaction
It is 268 pages of unrelenting, satirical science fiction that is never pleasant to read and sometimes quite confusing in structure with numerous shifts in focus as first one character then another is followed, so I wasn't able to care about them or the story, or even sometimes know who was speaking or being referred to. I took a couple of weeks to decide to finish BNW with its mostly unengaging and not well-developed characters. Bernard was the most realistic and complex character with his impassioned 'strangeness' that I could appreciate, but Huxley wanted us to follow the disturbing demise of the 'Savage' instead and Bernard was sent off to Savage territory in the Falklands.
Why this book has been studied in literature classes confounds me because we're past communism and there are better written sci-fi books. I guess the alienness of the society is intriguing in a historical sense, even a creative writer's sense, but such a dystopia isn't believable to me. It's not even that entertaining to read of drugged out people six centuries from now wasting their lives as clones in assembly lines, playing boring games like Centrifugal Bumble-puppy or going to feelies, which are movies you can watch of sex and feel it too. Our distant future will be thankfully nothing like this, in my opinion!
After over three years and 130 books reviewed here on Epinions.com, I have only read one other science fiction novel besides Aldous Huxley's novel and reviewed it. I refer to Ray Bradbury's 1953 work of art, Fahrenheit 451, which received a hearty five stars from me in spite of its similar dark vision of the future that ends with some hope for the very likeable hero and Earth, and if you haven't had the fortune to read it yet, please do so rather than pick up Brave New World.
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