The beginning of the book was very engaging and immersive. The sterile, scientifically advanced, super communal, social hierarchy Huxley envisages has some remarkably prescient features. Unlike 1984, where the state largely oppresses the population into submission, here the population are complicit in their own subjugation albeit with the aid of extensive social conditioning. Of course, there are still characters like Mustapha Mond and the other members of the ‘World Controller’ class but the fact that the vast majority of the oppressed believe themselves to be happier than ever struck me as probable and cleverly observed. Through a combination of genetic engineering, social conditioning and drug addiction the population are effectively controlled and prevented from rising up against the established order. Several aspects of this bear more than a passing resemblance to the world of 2019: obsession with economic growth and producing more, consumption as the greatest aim of the individual with an attendant abhorrence of thrift, addiction to drugs, an estrangement from the natural world and an obsession with superficiality. For example, John the savage’s mother is considered too ugly and horrific to be seen in society even though she is an example of the ‘naturalness’ of motherhood that almost all current societies hold sacred. I was really impressed at how Huxley had taken the existing order of society and reimagined it so completely. One theme that Huxley failed to anticipate was climate change and the ability of the planet to continue to support an ever larger human burden.
Things that I felt were a bit less skillfully handled included the sex life of the Brave New World (BNW) inhabitants. They’re divorced, both physically and psychologically, from the idea of reproduction as desirable or even attainable in the case of the freemartins. However, they appear to retain a similar obsession with sex to Old Worlders! I wondered if this would really be the case. First, wouldn’t BNW citizens be bored of sex having been exposed to ever since they were toddlers? In one sense, I can see how the pleasure of sexual sensation is entirely in keeping with the BNW ambience of feelies and soma induced euphoria. Secondly, I wondered how fully the sexual urge could be separated from the egotistical desire to reproduce one's own genes, which is entirely out of sync with the BNW attitude that places the needs of society in front of the needs of the individual. For example, I was surprised to find Bernard Marx using his newfound status to make sexual conquests and boasting about them to his friends. I would have thought that sexual relationships would have ceased to be of such all-consuming interest once divorced from egotistical desires to reproduce or monogamous concerns about coupling. Nonetheless, the desire to be attractive and desirable could also be seen as entirely of a piece with the BNW’s obsession with aesthetics.
John, the quasi savage, was also a slightly problematic character for me. Rejected by the society of the savages for his light colouring and strange, promiscuous mother he finds solace in Shakespeare and develops a highly principled and improbable personality. He seems devoid of sexual desire in and of itself and is only interested in sex as an expression of monogamous love. Later on in the book it becomes clear that he is, in some senses, a character like Jesus in the New Testament or Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s ‘The Idiot’ insofar as he is there to show the depravity of the world through his other worldliness. Through his character he shows the BNW to be cruel and heartless and the world of the savages to be superior in spite of its primitive science and status as a forgotten ‘badlands’ from the perspective of the BNW. Nonetheless, the savage world is also depicted as cruel and heartless in its rejection of John so he really is a special case. I found his refusal to sleep with the object of his desires, Lenina, and his rejection of her as an ‘impudent strumpet’ because of her attempts to have sex with him weird in the extreme. My conclusion was that John is supposed to be a God like figure or a sacrificial lamb, as his death also implies, who’s function within the story is to show the soullessness of the BNW. However, he also, less understandably, shows the failings of the of the savage world order too so I couldn’t see him as a straightforward representation of the superiority of the old world over the new.
The fact that John is allowed to stay in the BNW even after he has rejected it seemed unlikely to me given that he is an adherent to ‘banned’ knowledge like Shakespeare. Clearly, the point is to have him rail against the nature of the world he finds himself in and eventually kill himself in the face of its unfeeling brutality. For me, this wasn’t a very successful part of the book. I found the chapters where John tries to define and justify his position against the world to be boring, preachy and condescending. It felt to me like the author is trying to cover too much ground and what results is a rather long, unstructured and unclear lecture on the nature of man. Of course, John’s passion for freedom, his belief in true love and his grief at the death of his mother go to the core of what current humans feel humanity is. However, I felt like the world of the savages also has unappealing characteristics, like rape, alchoholism, racism and violence; but these are conveniently edited out of John’s character so he can appear perfect. This perfection really robs him of his humanity. Just because the BNW is a pretty horrible and weird place doesn’t mean that there is a Christ-like figure of goodness somewhere. This seems facile and needlessly one sided. More interesting to me is the tension between the BNW and the world of the savages. It’s true that the BNW has dispensed with eternal, ephemeral concepts like love, loyalty and the family unit but it has also brought the end of wars, blood feuds, honour killings and the like that seem to go on unabated in the world of the savages. In this sense, I felt like this book wasn’t really addressing the extremely interesting problem it raises: would society be better off if the most powerful and potent human desires were neutered or otherwise managed? The book seems to answer that both the world of the savages and the BNW are bad and the only way to be good is to read Shakespeare and exist outside of both societies, which ends up being impossible and leads those who try to kill themselves. However, to me both the BNW and the zones controlled by savages are expressions of humanity, albeit extreme ones, which the author seems to caricature and then reject. This struck me as a bit condescending and also fantastical.
In conclusion, I loved the world that Huxley creates and enjoyed the narrative of Bernard Marx’s rise and fall. When compared with John, who is presumably the ‘hero’ of this bookThe character of John and the tension between the BNW and the world of the savages was less well handled. In the end, I felt like the book span off into a grandiose attempt to explain the entirety of human nature and history. I would have preferred it if it had had a more nuanced, less ostentatious ending.
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