Even Better Than the Iron Maiden Song - Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

I'm hoping to add a little more content to this blog and thought that diving into the world of reviews was a good place to start. It's another one of those things that I've just always wanted to do. : )

The concept for these reviews is to keep them short and sweet. I'll touch on a few quick ideas regarding the novel, and hopefully inspire some of you to pick it up. I will also endeavor to keep the posts free of spoilers, so I will never go into detail about the plot, though I will discuss the setting. I'll post a review as frequently as I read a new book, which you're about to discover is really not as frequent as it ought to be for an English Student.

Without further ado, I give you review number one!

A few days ago I read Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which is a book that doesn't really need an introduction, but I'll give you one anyway. The classic science fiction novel shows a dystopian world where people are not born, but decanted from bottles. People are segregated  into a strict and genetically-enforced caste system while the World Controllers work to keep us all in an infantile state of blind happiness through drugs, sex, and other base pleasures. Already sounds like something I'd pick up in an instant, but as you undoubtedly know, what makes this dystopian society so interesting are the striking similarities with  our own world today. The thought is that Huxley's predictions are actually coming true.

This is a fantastic thought to have in your head as you read. It creates an atmosphere of panic and urgency around the novel. What if you're reading the future? Obviously that's the question any good dystopian wants to ask, but Brave New World is one of the few which has been receiving answers in the affirmative. The novel  starts off with the aspect of society that I suspect may have been the most outlandish when the book was first published in 1932 - the Hatcheries and Conditioning Centres, specifically the fertilizing of an egg artificially and without sex. This is wonderful. You start off reading this book that's supposed to tell the future and the first thing it does is succeed. It's enough to get you started, to get you thinking, and even to get you believing it for a little while.

This beginning of the novel is fantastic, but not just because of the science - which falters, as it is wont to do in science fiction, but not out of this world. I should actually talk about the science a bit. As a biology student at university, I do notice and appreciate when a novel grounds it's ideas of new technologies in actual science. This gives science fiction, and particularly dystopias, that semblance of realism the readers need to really believe it. Huxley mastered this trick, and everything that he comes up with (if it hasn't already come to pass) is grounded in real discoveries and well-known science fact. The biologist in you will appreciate his imaginings in the hatcheries, and the psychologist in you will get a real kick out of what he does in the conditioning centres, and there are many more examples of this as the book goes on to expand on the world. But as I mentioned, this is not the only reason why the introduction to the novel is brilliant, it's also because of Huxley's style, which is clever and sneaky and cruel when it wants to be. I found endless enjoyment at how the introduction that seems to introduce the world is also introducing the main characters of the tale. There's a part where he switches between about three or four different scenes constantly, at times sentence by sentence, but he keeps it together so well and uses it to make his point in so creative a manner that I think it might be my favorite part of the book. (I've written a multi-scene scene kind of thing before, but nothing like what he did with it. Entirely going to try and bring some of that into my own writing.)

Another one of my favorite things is the huge part played by the works of Shakespeare. It's hard to go wrong when you incorporate the Bard, but 'Brave New World' (actually a quote from The Tempest - how did I not know this??) did some really neat things with his influence and the timeless quality of his works.

It's a very quick read, as the book isn't terribly long, so I definitely recommend it for a summer afternoon. I consider myself to be a slow reader and it took me two afternoons and a morning. As to whether or not it actually tells the future… perhaps not. I'm too much of an optimist to buy into it completely. However there are a few things in there that I could easily see coming about, along with a few things that already have, and a few that are too horrible and too possible for comfort, which is great.

This is one of those books that's been sitting on my to-read shelf for what seems like forever, so if any of you are in a similar position I can confidently tell you that the next time you browse for a new title, I hope your finger lands on Brave New World.