Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Blackstone Publishing
Fiction, Literary Fiction/Sci-Fi
Themes: Classics, Cross-Genre, Dystopias, Urban Tales
***+
Description
In the centuries since the Nine Years War ended the old, chaotic, wasteful ways, the world has thrived under a new World Order: inspired by the visionary Henry Ford, every aspect of human life, from conception to death, is carefully controlled and curated like parts on an assembly line. No longer must people strive or suffer or trouble themselves to think or worry; now, everyone knows their exact place and role, from the barely-human Epsilon menial workers to the Alpha scientists and controllers of civilization. Archaic concepts like "love" and "family" and "faith" have been relegated to the past, and the past relegated to oblivion, while any frustration or discomfort is easily dealt with via the omnipresent drug soma. Only in isolated islands and fenced off Savage Reservations do any humans follow the ancient ways, with their disorganized filth and outdated morals, rightly feared and derided by any enlightened mind. But even in paradise, there are those who are unhappy, even if they can't always identify how or why, let alone what to do about it. When the malcontent Bernard and his female companion Lenina visit a Reservation, they encounter John, a unique child of two worlds... an encounter that cannot lead anywhere but tragedy.
Review
First published in 1932, Aldous Huxley's classic depiction of a society entirely subsumed by shallow consumerism
and stripped of all pursuit of truth and meaning still resonates today, though some parts inevitably show their age.
In Huxley's future, Henry Ford's assembly line, the way it reduced workers from skilled craftsmen to mere
interchangeable cogs in a larger machine, was the first step on the road to a dystopian world government (which looks
like a utopia from within), to the point where, when religion itself was erased along with other traces of the
"irrelevant" past, "Fordism" filled the void... for the masses, at least. The controllers still have access to
forbidden materials and ideas, the better to fine-tune the ongoing manipulation and infantilization of the masses;
even the Alphas are subject to propaganda and subliminal messaging proscribing their thoughts and habits, while
anyone at any level who shows signs of rejecting their programming is either shipped off to remote islands where
they can't infect others with the sin of individualism or executed (though of course it's phrased more politely, for
all that citizens are desensitized to death from an early age).
This is a world and story populated pretty much exclusively with emotionally stunted, immature people, the inevitable
end results of a system so vast and monstrous that they don't even recognize how they've been psychologically and
intellectually mutilated; as a result, the characters aren't exactly pleasant to spend time around, even as they all
seem to recognize on some level that something isn't quite right with themselves or with society at large. Bernard,
whose oddities many attribute to some unfortunately incident in his gestation (all done artificially; the concept of
natural conception and birth, like some animal, is utterly repugnant, and the word "mother" is perhaps the greatest,
foulest profanity one can utter), feels discontented and drawn to risks and isolation. Lenina flirts with the
dangerous idea of only having one partner; in a society where people are expected to freely sleep around, forming
any manner of exclusive emotional attachment is considered a perversion. Bernard's sometimes-friend Helmholtz, a
slogan writer for propaganda and government programming, wrestles with strange yearnings that he literally has no
words for, those ideas - like all art and poetry and anything that speaks to deeper, truer human experiences -
having been excised from their lives and vocabularies. But the most tragically mutilated person of all is the young
man John. His mother was a Beta who got lost on a vacation to the Savage Reservation while scandalously (and
unknowingly) carrying the child of her Alpha partner; the boy is born among the "Savages", but - raised by a
disliked mother who yearns constantly for the comforts of soma and the World Order and has no clue how to bring up
a child, rejected by the locals for being an outsider (and because of the trouble his mother causes) - does not
belong among them, for all that he's absorbed their habits and spirituality alongside the stories his mother told
of the "heaven" beyond the Reservation. For selfish reasons (nobody in the World Order ever acts for anything but
selfish reasons), Bernard arranges to return John and his mother to London... but even before departure, the
writing is on the wall. John understands pain and longing and sorrow and all other manner of forbidden notions,
learning to read via a tattered copy of Shakespeare found on the Reservation (Huxley quotes rather extensively
from Shakespeare), his ideas of love twisted by a mother who, as a World Order citizen, has no concept of the term
and didn't grasp what her son needed from her. It goes without saying that things do not go well when he gets to
London and finally sees the truth with his own eyes.
This being more of a conceptual fable than anything else, it tends to wander and meander, bogging down in details
of the false utopia of the World Order and, later, in the ways of the "Savages" on the Reservation; there are some
iffy racial and cultural things going on here, and the less said about women's roles and character depictions in
either culture, the better, though again the whole book is best considered in the light of allegory, not
straight-up fiction. Here is where the tale shows its age the most, though it also is telling that, at the time it
was written, the idea that those in power would seek not to simply rewrite and literally reshape humans to serve
them but potentially eliminate most of them as unnecessary (automation and "artificial intelligence" doing all the
tasks for anyone under Beta, or even under Alpha, by Huxley's World Order standards) did not occur, or was not
considered a likely enough avenue to explore. Eventually, all the bogging down stops the story dead in its tracks
as John confronts the Controller for Western Europe, allowing Huxley to basically talk directly to his audience
about the problems the World Order thought it was solving (at least at first; if there ever were good intentions
behind the rise of the Fordian concepts in the wake of the devastating Nine Years War, those were long ago
subsumed by the bottomless pit of power-lust and sheer greed and the machinery eating its own tail as programmed
and psychologically proscribed Alphas took over leadership roles and the perpetuation of the Order) and the
rebuttals pointing out the unacceptably high cost for the stability such a system promises, the stripping away of
all basic human drives and needs and all things that make life truly worth living in service to shallow wants and
childish whims - wants and whims that aren't even one's own, but programmed into society at every level by higher
powers. The final parts just draw out the inevitable ending; I don't deal in spoilers, but this is a classic
cautionary tale, so don't expect sunshine and rainbows. In any event, this is another classic that I've meant to
get to for some time. I'm glad I finally read it, but I don't expect to revisit it any time soon, especially not
while I'm living in a futuristic dystopia myself.