Haven’t written here in awhile, been busy with Richard the Lionheart over on my medieval blog, here: https://medieval.substack.com. But I just finished reading Brave New World, the first time since high school, and thought I’d post a few thoughts.
As a dystopia, BNW provided plenty of food for thought. Drugs and sex and infinite distraction as the defining characteristics of how people are controlled. The echoes of today’s modern society are hard to miss. The presence of science as a driving force in society is pretty overpowering. The invention or Huxley’s near-invention of soma, helicopters, sex-hormone drugs, and other science seem ahead of their time.
The erasure of mother, father, family seem to lead to a well-behaved, polite society. Which is, on reflection, a bit odd, as the last 50 years or so would suggest the breakdown of the family seems to trend to the reverse. I suppose with enough soma everyone becomes well-behaved.
I found the intensive Shakespeare quotations and allusions interesting for a time, although it seemed a bit much by the end.
There is an old saw about civilized vs. savage people, that a savage man has a much easier time acting civilized, than a civilized man has in being savage. That might be from Tarzan, or perhaps Rousseau, or somewhere else, I can’t remember? Anyway, spoiler, that proves not to be the case here. And while I found John’s ending to be tragic, as an ending to a novel I wasn’t completely convinced. I could certainly imagine him remorseful; suicidal seems a stretch.
Perhaps it is because of my own preoccupations with the negative influence of media on our lives, and the dual and troubling issues of media censorship (left and right both!) and surveillance capitalism, I find 1984 a far more compelling and frightening novel, as a novel, than BNW, and a more disturbing dystopia. I think I am in the minority compared to most public review/criticism, which seems to favor BNW as the better book. But to my mind, BNF suffers from having little narrative tension throughout most of the book (nothing bad happens to anyone for nearly 3/4 of the book), a weirdly-shifting view of who the protagonist is, and an over-focus on society itself, rather than the characters being impacted. 1984 was grim and ominous from the beginning and I turned almost every page waiting for something evil to happen, and was often not disappointed. In contrast BNW felt more like an amusement park ride, a bit light-hearted even, until the last few pages. Interestingly, while 1984 focused quite a bit on the control of information, BNW did not focus on equivalents of the media much at all, except to mention that books were forbidden and history not taught.
Not to mention Huxley’s apparent fixation with the word “pneumatic”, which occurs no less than 15 times. 🙂 And the threat of getting sent to Iceland – I would take that punishment in a heartbeat!
Still I am glad I re-acquainted myself with it, had not read since high school. It’s good to be reminded not to drug ourselves, or let someone else do it to us!
By the way. There’s a TV show. Link.