First published in1932, reading from the 1946 edition, Harper and Row, NY, 175 pages
I really dislike British fiction [Tolkien & Peake excepted] of the period from 1920 through 1960. Thank God for Michael Moorcock. I wanted to be up front with my bias concerning ponderously plotted novels, with vapid soulless characters, page-long paragraphs, and intrusive narration. In my opinion, Brave New World, in terms of a novel, is a 2-star effort that begins in the fashion that a fantasy written by an 18-year-old gaming geek would begin, with a tour of the world and how it works. However, if you just begin reading at Chapter 16 on page 147, you will be in for a treat. That portion of the book, if reviewed as a short, would get 5 stars from me.
Overall Huxley’s Brave New World is a bold imagining of a fantastical future that was made to seem patently absurd at the outset, to stress more deeply the line his allegorical fantasy held alongside the ultra statist leaning of the modern word he knew, a world of propaganda and mind control; an England in which ‘White feather girls’ used to walk up to strange men who were not in the military and bestow upon them a feather of cowardice so that they would be shamed into entering the sausage factory on the Western Front in which British generals fed men into a grinder made of German machine guns.
For someone like me who regards the British Empire as being as evil as Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany, I do enjoy reading old Brit intellectuals like Orwell, Huxley and Lewis decrying their time and place. Then I recall that they were really predicting my time and place, and I stop grinning.
At its root Brave New World is about cultural conditioning; the matrix we all live in. Huxley started out with eugenics, the pseudo-science cause celeb of the period from 1850-1940 that gave birth to superhero comics, Planned Parenthood, and the slaughter of the Jews and Gypsies in Europe by the Nazis. But, whereas the science of eugenics gives genetics pride of place above God, psychology, education, environmental stress, war, poverty and privation, in determining the qualities and deficiencies of individual humans, Huxley, just uses it as a springboard into a more rational model of human development.
Huxley’s Brave New World is set ‘in this year of stability, A. F. 632’, with A.F. meaning After Ford, who, as industry has replaced God, is something of the Jesus Christ to a world of blissfully drugged technology-dependent retards. Huxley was a satirist, not a sci-fi writer, so he imagined his fantastical future among industrial lines, with the human race manufactured in huge state run hatcheries. He also imagined a more grossly, intrusive Soviet Style Daddy State, as opposed to what we actually have, which is a much more subversively invalidating Mommy Sate. Huxley correctly predicted that drugs and senseless entertainments would be required by a One World Government to maintain an apathetic population. Most interestingly he predicted the need for The State to encourage promiscuity to erode pair bonding between men and women, and insure that all men and women were essentially married to the government.
The characters: Lenina, Bernard, and Helmholtz are so devoid of character as to be unworthy of mention. They do however stumble upon John, 'Mister Savage', a feral civilized man who grew up on a New Mexico Indian reservation. Huxley does sketch a conversation well, and his debate between 'Mister Savage' and Mustapha Mond, the Controller of one of 10 world districts, in the next to last act of the book, is worth the entire price of Brave New World. It is John 'Savage', a man not accepted by the primitives, and not accepting of civilization—the man between two world—who breathes life into this dreadful novel just as it seems about to slowly ossify and die.
This is not to say that Huxley cannot write. He proves himself a master of the telling phrase with passages like this discussion of the state-piped music of the Solidarity Hymn, “Those reoccurring harmonies haunted, not the mind, but the yearning bowels of compassion.”
Huxley also juxtaposed the eugenics worldview of 1932 which would morph into political/corporate ideology by the time he updated the second edition, with something that was then currently being studied on the ground, Native American Existentialism. The title of the book comes from a statement by an Indian elder Miranda, “Oh brave new world that has such people in it. Let’s start at once.”
In Huxley’s world of hatcheries, 80-twin Bakonovsky batches of human Deltas, Gammas and Epsilons, Controllers, Directors, Predestinators; a world seemingly dreamed up by Henry Ford in an afternoon spent arguing with H.G. Wells, he holds out the possible answer to denatured society, reservations of organic people living according to traditional patterns. He does not however, hold out hope. In the end he hangs our womanly hopes for meaningful paradise from a high lonely place.
Huxley has written something supremely dystopian, and makes clear that one dark truth I believe is waiting for us on the horizon: state controlled human procreation. It will not be until that point, that state efforts at mind control—currently more successful than not, though far short of universal—will be able to realize the totality of their potential.
Read Chapters 16 and 17.
