Today,
another guest review, by Chris King:
Ah, the
modern world! Currently we all strive to have a place in the world. The
previous generation cajoles the members of the younger one to get jobs, find
their place in society and fulfil their role. However, with unemployment being
countered with more low-hour and zero-contract jobs, there is still a lot of
time for people to think about how little their contribution is needed, as they
struggle to find their temporary place in the world. Huxley’s Brave New World solves this problem –
but every utopia has its horrible side, the part of humanity that is sacrificed
to create what is, if not a perfect world, then at least a well-run one where
everyone has their place.
Written in
1931, Brave New World portrays an
ordered world of individual happiness at the expense of people’s humanity.
Huxley has very biting wit regarding human history and endeavour. He once
remarked that after each major war a generation was scarred, and that we might
‘look forward to a period, not indeed of peace, but of limited and only
partially ruinous warfare’; he remarked that the old style totalitarianism of
mass imprisonment and killings was going out because it was inefficient, and
that the new style totalitarianism would have slaves who love their servitude
and write the propaganda that they read to each other. In this book Huxley has
created his perfect, terrible, utopia, years before Nineteen-Eighty Four.
Everyone
has a purpose, everyone has a place and everyone has a job waiting for. There
is no need for German Darwinism because everything has been pre-planned. For
example, if, in twenty-four years, the administrator of a tropical island is
set to retire, then right now a foetus whose mind is predicted to be up to the
task, is being immunised against the tropical diseases in that location. I
thought it very reminiscent of Plato’s Republic;
Brave New World has, like Republic, all the new-borns gathered
together and allocated a caste. These become children who are
psycho-conditioned to fill roles according to their assigned caste. Manual
workers of the future are given building toys but have electrical shocks when
they approach something creative like painting, to provide emotional
suggestions against that life.
The World
State produces near identical embryos, then chemically alters them to be strong
or weak. There are five castes. Alphas lead. They are the smartest and the
tallest, and their height and physical prowess instils in others a feeling that
Alphas are the best and so should lead. The Betas are smaller and administrate.
The work gets more physical and the people smaller as the castes rank down. The
fifth caste are the epsilons, who are the smallest and fulfil menial chores.
Everyone is the best for their type of job and could not comprehend being
anything else. Not because of some chemical or hypno-therapy (though this
surely plays a factor) but because they would be no good at any other type of
work. The Alpha leaders would hate manual work or even basic administration. Betas
similarly would hate the drudgery of manual work and feel they would be lost the
Alphas above them – and as for the Epsilons, nothing beats a solid day’s work. It
is just as my childhood hypno-conditioning told me: everybody is happy now.
I seem to
end up looking at dystopian worlds and thinking is it so much worse that our own? I am sure there is something we
could take from it of value. Is breeding people for specific jobs worse than
having classes that limit job choices? Today a rich child of business owners
will be hard pressed to convince their parents that they really want to be a
builder and do manual work, while a child from further down the social spectrum
is not going to know the right people, and may well be passed over in the job
selection of big business management. I could go on and on about the book’s setting
and its alternate political value because the setting is the story. The entire plot is about seeing the world from the
inside and the outside.
Even with
job conditioning, not everyone likes their job. A couple of people think they
have been conditioned wrong. Bernard Marx thinks he is too small as an Alpha so
the lower casts keep taking a second look before following his orders. His
friend Helmholtz Watson thinks he has been made too clever to just write
hypnopaedic script. Bernard is unusual in this society in that he shows
preferences for being monogamous. This makes him a character the 1930’s
audience can relate to and puts forward a theory of Huxley’s that as society
gets more oppressed then sexual freedom rises (I theory I do not think is
correct considering the sexual revolution in liberal countries). Bernard and
others provide the point of view of those inside the system, while John is the
viewpoint of the outsider.
On a New Mexico
reservation are “savages” who do scandalous things like reproducing and not
forcing their children into rigid castes. From the reservation comes John, the
child of a savage and a World State mother, who is brought back, Tarzan style,
to see the new world. John confuses people by not having casual sex and
repressing his feelings and they laugh at his Shakespeare recitals because they
contain love and marriage. John also hates the absence of art, science and
religion and the use of soma, a drug that stops you feeling sad. John feels
like there is no humanity anymore; science and religion have been given up and
people instead celebrate Ford for giving the last inventions they needed.
Many of
the other characters are present for very transparent roles: the confusing love
interest, the woman destined to die to provide angst-driven motivation, and the
clever man who will blindly argue the merits of the system. However, as the
setting is the story I didn’t mind so much that these were devices to explore
the world. The overall style was of tell not show, but for once this was done
rather well. I just wanted to see this interesting world.
Normally I
would be particularly critical of the misplaced and clunky exposition in this
book. Often there are sentences in a similar vein to, ‘said the worker who had
just returned from his shift, thinking of his early years in hypno-therapy’.
However, the world is so interesting that I really couldn’t care less about how
unusual the exposition can be; I just wanted to know more about this strange
new world, its social structures and political theories.
Unlike Triumff (which I recently reviewed),
I would not call Brave New World a
page-turner. I should point out that I do not think being a page-turner is a
good thing; it just makes the book leave you sooner. With Triumff I turned the pages quickly to get it over with – the book
equivalent of a fast-forward button. However, for Brave New World I wanted there to be more on the page, it just
seemed so rich.
I loved
this book because it made me think about politics and humanity in an
interesting way. For motivation to world-build, even in your head, I think it
may be unsurpassed. Like Nineteen-Eighty
Four, Brave New World shows a
society that cannot strive or advance anymore and so the goal is to make people
generally happy. What does it matter if we are predestined through genetics and
cannot think to question the system? After all, everyone is physio-chemically
equal…
Greatest Strength: Such a wonderful setting that
makes you think of it long after you have finally put the book down.
Greatest Weakness: Rather flimsy and bland
characters; after a year I could barely remember that there was a ‘savage’
character, I had no chance of remembering his name.
Let’s finish on a quote: ‘Reality, however utopian, is
something from which people feel the need of taking pretty frequent holidays.’
With many thanks to Chris King for
this review. I’ll be back next week with another review.
Click below for more of Chris’s reviews:
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