May Novel: Brave New World

This month it was time again for a pre-1970's selection, and the lot fell to Brave New World, the 1932 classic from author Aldous Huxley. It's a small novel, but one that is often referenced and is most likely on the same Time Magazine's Top 100 Novels of All Time list that the majority of these books are included on. Finally having a day free to read I delved in and hoped that I would like it as much as I was told that I would.

I knew that it would be about a utopia, judging by the French epigraph, which when translated spoke of the reality of utopian societies and the fact that modern society may instead be turning towards the imperfect. Chapter one threw me into the heart of the "new world" - the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where individuals were cloned, predetermined, actualized, and molded into who society need them to be.



In this new society, children are taught to want to do the job they've been created for, and to be glad that they are in their specific strata and therefore not envious of anyone else. "Everyone is happy nowadays" is a phrase characters often utter; and indeed they are -  stresses, tragedies, passions, every sort of extreme has been erased from their lives, leaving them to live in the moment and feel good about it. Religion has been replaced with industrialism, with Ford being used in place of God, obviously an homage to Henry Ford, his Model-T (all crosses have been repurposed as T's), and his ways of capitalism and assembly lines. Freud is thrown into this odd religion/patriotism (they believe Freud is Ford's psychological persona) and subsequently all happiness and entertainment is sexual in nature. Promiscuity among children is encouraged, all films are pornographic and/or violent and relationships have disappeared in favor of "everyone belongs to everyone else" mentality. With cloning as the main means of reproduction, nuclear families have also disappeared and asking someone about their mother is a dirty insult. Humans almost world-wide are psychologically trained to accomplish exactly what society needs them to, and they are more than content to follow along unquestionably. 

I am really fascinated that I happened to line up this novel directly after Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. It's interesting to see how two different authors, 50 years apart, present a utopian society and the people in it. Huxley's world looked forward to the future, while Atwood's world did the opposite and reverted to the past. Atwood's characters could remember the world before the utopia, while Huxley's characters knew nothing of the past. Atwood used surrogates to repopulate the human race, Huxley used artificial cloning. Yet somehow, they both taught the same message: Utopians are unnatural. They do not work, no matter how complicated or simplistic they are created to be.

I loved Huxley's jumping between characters and storylines, especially in Chapter Three with the juxtaposition of at least three stories told alternately one line at a time. Brilliant. I also enjoyed the inclusion of John, the savage, and his love of Shakespeare. Ironically, the one that is considered the most uncouth is instead the most intelligent and the most aware of what is actually going on in the world. He's the one who fights for religion, for modesty, for goodness, for education - and when he learns that nowhere in the world, not on the reservation or the outside, is any of this accomplishable, he kills himself rather than succumb to the modern ideal.

It's no wonder that this is considered a classic. It speaks of the human condition, what is important in life, and what is important enough to die for. It forewarns the dangers of putting too much stock in industrialization, of ignoring education and history, and of altering the natural way of life. And all in less than 200 pages.