After reading 1984 and Kallocain, I picked up Brave New World from my public library. Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel about a society 600 years into the future where everyone is engineered to be happy with their pre-destined place in society. Everyone is grown in a bottle and raised in batches of genetic twins. Through behavioural programming and sleep teaching, Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons all learn that exactly their place in society is the best.
I don’t think I ever read the novel before. I think we watched it as a movie back in school. Must have been the one from 1980. I vaguely remember people making the sign of ’T’ and a lady saying “an apple a day keeps the doctor away”. At 230 pages it is well worth picking up. It has aged well — but is the weakest of the three.
Brilliantly funny but not quite there
The writing is brilliant when Huxley let us see the brave new world for ourselves.
When the Director proudly demonstrates how a group of Delta infants is conditioned to dislike books and flowers. And when Lenina talks about whom to date next with her friend Fanny, and we learn that promiscuity is the norm. Bernard is weird, Fanny thinks, as he spends most of his time alone. But Lenina seeing only Henry for so long is also wrong.
“Somehow”, she mused, “I hadn’t been feeling very keen on promiscuity lately.“
The world is upside down and Huxley plays with our expectations to make the mundane absurd and funny. To us and — later in the book — to them, when a ‘savage’ arrive from the reservations. Born and raised among the unfortunate and uncivilised, the John becomes our eyes and ears in the later half of the book. Having the savage quote Shakespeare to tell us how he feels is of course brilliantly ironic.
The vision of the future has stood the test of time surprisingly well. It’s sex, drugs and rock-n-roll, something we otherwise associate with later decades.
Bernard and Lenina travel to the reservation on helicopter, a device not commercially available in 1932. They attend a dance with synthetic music, and they take grams of soma to knock themselves out and escape from reality for a while. Women avoid getting pregnant by following a daily routine and they meet weekly to have sex with random partners. They watch television and program machines to spread pleasant smells. As for growing humans in bottles: DNA wasn’t described for another two decades and Dolly wasn’t cloned until the 1990s.
“Once I had to wait nearly four weeks before a girl I wanted would let me have her.”
The character development is where Brave New World comes short for me. Lenina, Bernard, and John — whom we follow in different chapters — none learn or grow or manage to change the world they are trapped in. Bernard has a little interlude of enjoying a moment of fame and glory from hosting John, but in the end he too doubles down on a path of the misfit. You really want the freedom to be unhappy? The Director asks Bernard. He pays for his answer by being sent to remote Iceland.
We are never really invested in the emotional despair of the characters. Even as John quotes Shakespeare and we follow him as he lives out his dream — a dream that many of us have today. Even then we end up witnessing his suffering just as much as the visitors that seek him out for a laugh and selfie. We don’t feel his pain, we just watch it.
Brave New World
1984, Kallocain and Brave New World each describe a society and how it is to live there from the point of view of someone we can identify with. Lenina, Bernard, and John. Leo and Linda. Winston and Julia. These are not books about space travel, aliens, or technology even though technology has a role to play in all of them. They speak to us today from a time where totalitarian forces reached for world domination.
Did we heed the warnings? Did we avoid the traps? Did we give up our freedom and humanity and ability to love and trust each other even when it is painful to do so?
I think we did ok so far — but let’s not take it for granted.