Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Since I always seem to find myself reading or watching stories about anti-utopias, I have decided to revisit an English class utopia unit from the 8th grade. At the time, we were given five books to choose from – 1984, Brave New World, The Handmaid’s Tale, Fahrenheit 451, and Flatland – all of which dealt with the idea of utopias. I choose 1984, and loved the first two thirds of it. But I sort of feel like I didn’t understand it, especially since the final third was heavy on philosophical explanations on why the alternate world was the way it was. Really, with little exposure to such dense and lengthy discussions, I got bored.
Today, I barely remember what happened in 1984 and I want to revisit it, along with all the other books I could have chosen. Plus, I have now read some of the foundations of Western philosophy. That’s not to say, though, that I enjoy reading dense, convoluted, and somewhat pointless ramblings.
I have started with Brave New World, saving 1984 for later, and I have to admit that I am disappointed. Not in the ideas, but rather in the execution. This is more of a writing style complaint. I just felt like the entire thing was horribly disjointed. There really was no main character focus, as early protagonists fade away towards the end, with late protagonists abruptly taking over the story.
Then there’s the incessant jumping around. The second chapter was perhaps one of the most difficult chapters I have ever read. For twenty pages, each single sentence paragraph jumped between three simultaneous stories. One sentence about Bernard, one about Lenina, one about the Director, then everything repeated. While this technique can build tension and point out ironies between all the stories, the second chapter just didn’t know when to stop.
Then, of course, the final part of the book features a dense philosophical discussion between the two opposing ideals. Here, the characters were lost and they just became mouth pieces for Huxley’s ideas. I hate it when this happens.
Still, Brave New World is a rather entertaining and somewhat enlightening read. It brings up some interesting points, even if it’s not all that effective. However, I just finished feeling underwhelmed.
That whole generation stopped short of discovery with it’s dependence upon drugs to induce altered states of reality.
Good observation. He took a lot of criticsm for lack of character development when it was first published. I just started reading the book myself, but read a little about it before starting. Four out of five of the the book choices given to your eighth-grade class have made the Top 100 Banned Books list. My eyes popped out at a comment in BNW’s first chapter about Black eggs in Africa ‘budding’ more quickly than European eggs. This was a nod to the old stereotype of blacks being more fertile than whites. I had to remind myself America was still in the grips of Jim Crow laws when this book was written but still felt it was overtly racist. Funny how times change. In Fahrenheit 451, all the characters smoked constantly and woman were ‘housewives’ In the 50s, Bradbury could never have imagined his ‘future’ world including no smoking laws and working women. I’m impressed Huxley conceived of the idea of cloning. Bradbury had people watching flat wall TV’s. Pretty amazing.