Brave New World

Writing a review of a book that I finished reading five minutes ago seems like a violation, a desecration, blasphemous (and on and on goes the pseudo-religious rhetoric). But I need to sort my thoughts and I can only do this with words. I have just put down Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

I had expected something more shocking, something more like Do Androids Dream... or The Dispossessed, something that twists and turns, and beats you into an interpretation. But some of the power of this book is in its subtlety, the extent to which you buy into this society that buys into itself, its insidiousness. A less shocking consideration of the nature of happiness, and therefore being, and of free will.

Yet, at the same time, it posits two extremes, as all good moral dilemmas do, superficially forcing you into one of the camps. This reminds me of the lasting effect of your relationship with your parents: you either choose to inhabit their values or react against them (there's a private joke in this). As much as you may promise yourself otherwise, you have little psychological free will - you are the manifestation of the small violences of your unconscious.

And I have proof.

To continue, below the superficial manipulations and because of its insidiousness, the novel asks you questions about society in general and (your role as) the individual within it (insert the above again here). It is its own proof (not mine - mine is not imaginary, although on second thought in a sense it is). Who are you? What is your responsibility to yourself? To the collective?

The final scene (without giving anything away - don't worry, I would never deprive you of the joy of your first reading of a good book) is the only possible one. Even had the physical reality been different, emotionally it would have remained the same. Does this undermine the questions of the rest of the novel? Question upon question, some turning in on themselves, others content to bite their own tails. And hear I desperately want to make an allusion to the ending of another book but won't. Just know my lips are quivering with the impulse.

There is a sequel: Brave New World Revisited. Will it set up a 'No trespassing' sign in front of the winding paths of its ancestor (another private joke)? Will it wear away new paths (how?)? Will it stand on the shoulders of this novel to see further or will it cut this giant off at the knees? The blandness of the word tacked on at the end worries me. But is it a red herring? Oh, the drama of being a bibliophile, an aesthete, a navel-gazer.

Before I get to it, I have this overwhelming desire to reread Shakespeare, to immerse myself in its catharsis, to avoid losing myself (and my tenuous grip on the here and now) down those paths.