As compared to reading Melville's Moby Dick, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley went by in a flash. It took a concentrated 3 weeks to read through its 18 chapters, written in refreshingly plain English. This book is Vladamir Lenin's dream of Dystopian future, i.e. extreme socialism and human conditioning concentrating on economic productivity. The reader follows a pathetic man, Bernard Marx, through a completely government controlled society that aims to keep people medicated, sexually exploratory and content. Through a visitation to an uncivilized reservation, Marx encounters a "savage" who's previously "civilized" mother had become stranded at the reservation. Marx gets permission to bring John, the savage, and his mother Linda back to civilized society. The savage symbolizes the individual- demonstrating a desire to practice religion, admonish all sexuality aside from passionate love, and experience a full range of emotions including suffering. He violently collides with this new society and ultimately isolates himself in a tower, until taking his own life when isolation proves to be impossible.
Rating: 4/5 stars.
It's both comical and impressive to hear Huxley's predictions for a future. As this novel was published in 1931, his future is my present. His predictions (although exaggerated) are not completely inaccurate. He describes people conditioned by commercialized slogans to become the ultimate consumers, shallow and unthinking, the masses devour material possessions as quickly as they ingest the "soma" mood elevating medications. Living in the present, surrounded by wasteful materialism and a Valium popping middle class America- I experienced an eerie feeling of familiarity when reading the passages.
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