Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Brave New World is the perfect book to follow Nineteen Eighty-Four. Both novels are utopian dystopias, both are far ahead of their times, both are frighteningly relevant in today’s world, and both are straight up great reads.
Huxley captured me from the beginning. He dedicates the first four chapters touring readers through a hatchery and conditioning centre, hiding nothing of the government’s processes to condition, shape, and control its populace. His careful detail of “men and women with purple eyes and all the symptoms of lupus” (p. 8) gives gross form to the basic concepts on which Huxley’s novel is written.
Although the tour is a world building–infodumping device to introduce the story’s setting and some of its characters—the touring students represent the reader, even though those characters never reappear later in the story—it eliminates the need for further infodumping as the story progresses. All that follows from the first four chapters is a consequence of those bottled embryos.
The one difficulty I had with Brave New World, and which stayed my rating at four stars, is the lack of a clear protagonist. Since the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning leads the book’s opening tour and propels the story’s initial action, I must assume the Director is the protagonist. However, the narrative soon shifts to Lenina, and not long after, to her sexual interest Bernard.
The narrative more or less stays with Bernard and Lenina until the two make a foray onto a Reservation that introduces them to John the Savage. The narrative then latches on to John for the remainder of the novel, treating Bernard, Lenina, the Director, and all the other characters as mere props in the plot.
I do appreciate how the shifting protagonist is reflective of the communalist society. Individuals are not individual or unique beings free to choose and act, but rather replaceable, factory-made objects following their predetermined roles in society. However, for the reading experience, the shifting protagonist is confusing and tiring. Perhaps a half-gramme of soma would make it more digestible.
Speculosity 