5 February 1932
* The Guardian, Thursday 5 February 2009
Brave New World. By Aldous Huxley. London: Chatto and Windus. Pp. 306. 7s. 6d. net.
There are few more brilliantly clever writers to-day than Mr. Aldous Huxley. Yet the title which he gave to one of his earlier books, "These Barren Leaves", is applicable to very much that he has written. He has been persistently drawn to dissect the body of a decaying civilisation, and, although he has often incidentally thrown light upon the principles of life and even at moments almost wistfully affirmed them, he has been obsessed by the processes of death. For him all our immediate yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death - the death of false refinement, of sexual perversity, and of self-conscious isolation.
In "Brave New World" he projects his death-consciousness into all our to-morrows. And the death which he portrays here with an extraordinary fertility of invention and an almost diabolical wit is not the death of morbid introversion but of indistinguishable superficiality, and sameness.
He transports us into a world in which every human being is manufactured according to plan in a laboratory. Mr. Huxley's description of the fertilising, the bottling and the social predestination rooms is a really brilliant tour de force.
The result of this application of mass-production of biology is to produce an entirely stable and sterile civilisation, a world in which people are happy because they have no individuality to be unsatisfied. And if the delusion of happiness momentarily fades, there is "soma", a drug which transports whoever takes it into a holiday world of absolute conviction.
Mr. Huxley manages very skilfully, however, to discover in this world characters who are both automata within the prescribed limits and appreciably human. And one of them, Bernard Marx, through some error in his "conditioning", has an unhealthy and unsocial desire to be not somebody else but himself. And he in turn brings back from an expedition to the New Mexico Reservation a young man born and reared in a primitive and pre-Fordian manner. The story turns upon the reactions of the "savage" to a civilisation sterilised not only against every physical and mental disease, but every experience of spiritual value.
The book suffers from Mr. Huxley's characteristic inability to believe really in anything. There is nothing which he can imaginatively affirm. The dread of sentiment and the habit of disillusionment are too strong for him. It is easier to exploit the possibilities of mental death than to meet the demands of creative life. H. L'A.F.