Book Review: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

     Is Aldous Huxley overrated? After reading Brave New World it is tempting to think so. Huxley’s classic utopian/dystopian novel is considered a classic. While it puts forth some interesting ideas, the narrative is a jumbled mess that does not do it justice.

     Brave New World is about a technological society of the future, totalitarian in nature but one where everybody is happy and pain has been almost eradicated. Families and biological reproduction are illegal since babies are farmed in test tubes, raised and conditioned by the state, and freed from all obstacles in life because their futures are planned by the government before they are even born. Sexual promiscuity is a daily routine. People’s moods are controlled with soma, part anti-depressant, part sedative, part hallucinogen, that is freely disbursed to prevent any psychological distress. Sports and cheap entertainment are used to stop anyone from thinking deeply. Everyone is happy because everyone is shallow.

     One way of thinking about utopian fiction is to view it as a critique of the society from which it was born. Conservative readers are quick to point out that Huxley’s novel was a warning about the dangers of communism. That point is certainly legitimate but also a superficial evaluation of Huxley’s thought. The London of Brave New World is not just totalitarian and oligarchical with science and propaganda being used as a tool of domination, but it is also a hyper-capitalist society at the same time. State propaganda is the same as advertising and Huxley’s future world is a consumerist culture where people are subtly persuaded to buy what the government wants them to buy. People are slaves to what they purchase. It is also a rigidly hierarchical, class-structed society in which people are unable, and persuaded to be unwilling, to rise above their class; hence the working-poor are conditioned to be happy in their subservient position and the ruling class designs technology to ensure their position at the top of the hierarchy is absolute. Huxley pairs consumerist-capitalism with communist totalitarianism to show how the two systems are both methods of social control that can arrive at the same endpoint. This argument is the strongest part of the novel.

     The narrative is the weak part. The story is ordinary and poorly defined. A socially awkward and disgruntled psychologist named Bernard Marx gets permission to visit Malpais, an Indian reservation in New Mexico. He takes a beautiful and plump woman (Huxley uses the word “pneumatic” to describe women who are fat and attractive) with him. The references to communist leadership are not accidental; Huxley himself had once been a communist-sympathizer who became disillusioned with the results after Stalin took over. On their trip they meet Linda, an exile from London who was abandoned there for biologically having a son named John. The man who befriends Bernard during his visit. The mother and son pair are outsiders in the Native American culture and dream of returning to London. Marx and Lenina bring them back but the results are a disaster. Linda goes into a neverending soma-induced coma and John quickly starts to reject and rebel against the utopian technological society.

     The story does not move along well, partly because the characters are two-dimensional and weakly defined. At a certain level that makes sense since they are supposed to be products of a shallow society. But the novel does not pull this off so well because the supposedly deep-thinking and deep-feeling John and Linda also come off as two-dimensional, merely looking like overly-simplified characters who represent an idea without actually embodying the idea they are meant to represent. Since the characters lack depth, it is difficult to focus on the central theme of the plot; it skips around from one rudimentary episode to another.

     The passages that revolve around John are the worst in the book. In one chapter, Lenina tries to seduce him after he tells her he loves her. She takes off her clothes and John starts ranting and verbally abusing her in anachronistic Shakespearean English that comes off as pretentious and ridiculous. Coitus interruptis. John despises Lenina because she has not suffered in her love for him. It is difficult to tell why Lenina loves him anyways since no details about her desires are ever given and in a society where promiscuity is the norn and individuality is minimal, some reason for her falling in love with John and no one else would serve the purpose of the story well.

     The passage that follows shows John having a temper-tantrum and starting a riot by disrupting the distribution of soma. He starts shouting at the people about freedom from slavery but they are too doped up with soma and conditioned to be happy to care; they can not comprehend what he says and a melee begins. Bernard and another man are brought in to calm him down then the police show up and shoot them with waterguns, Yes, waterguns since it is a society without violence, the police use toys to keep people in line. This scene was ridiculous and John the heroic liberator looked like nothing more than a whiney douschebag. What kind of person wants to make happy people unhappy? Answer that question for yourself. As it turns out, John is a masochist who believes people need to suffer in order to achieve happiness. Without the pain, pleasure has no meaning and John is more interested in meaning. John is problematical because he does nothing to make his ideal look more appealing than the utopian paradise he has encountered. He chooses misery over happiness but his misery does not lead to any higher truth and the shallow, ignorant bliss of everyone else looks more appealing. John is such a weakly drawn personage that it is hard to tell if he represents Huxley’s ideal or not. It is hard to tell if we should sympathize with him and Huxley makes it difficult to decide what he is supposed to represent. Brave New World introduces a dilemma and leaves the solution open ended but does not give enough description to make the consideration of alternate solutions worth while after the book is finished.

     Huxley’s vision of a future society is prophetic and some of his ideas, like virtual reality (feelies) and psychiatric drugs (soma), literally did come true. That reason along makes Brave New World worth reading once. The story, however, is mundane and cliché. The writing is clumsy, the descriptions are weak, and the characters are vague and un-sympathetic. Huxley was a good thinker and he had a keen perception of which way the modernist winds were blowing. Sadly, his writing skills were not good enough for him to fully express his vision.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. Bantam Books, 1962.