Aldous Huxley’s satirical Brave New World (1932) is widely considered to be one of the greatest novels to emerge from the ether of English Literature, and while it is a fascinating exploration of human values and society, it (in my opinion) also lacks the narrative flow that transforms an interesting idea or concept into a good story. Brave New World invests the majority of its time in setting up a futuristic utopia and less in inhabiting this setting with likeable or memorable characters. Even the protagonist doesn’t arrive until halfway through the book, and by then it is too late to become emotionally attached.
Brave New World is frequently compared to George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which shows an opposite and even more frightening direction humanity could find itself in. In contrast to Orwell’s totalitarian vision of the future, Huxley depicts a futurist world that has eradicated all previous forms of solitary pursuits and pleasures, such as reading, and replaced them with radical conditioning and frequent doses of the psychedelic drug Soma, which they receive as rations and ingest to take ‘holidays’ from reality. The citizens of this world are also no longer ‘born’, but are grown in labs, and the mere suggestion of the word ‘mother’ or ‘father’ has become offensive to all who hear it. In contrast to Nineteen Eighty-Four, in which people are forced to cooperate with the unfair way of life set out by Big Brother, the inhabitants of Brave New World are conditioned from birth to view their strange way of life as normal.
‘The world’s stable now. People are happy; they get what they want, and they never want what they can’t get. They’re well off; they’re safe; they’re never ill; they’re not afraid of death; they’re blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they’re plagued with no mothers or fathers; they’ve got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strongly about; they’re so conditioned that they practically can’t help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there’s soma.‘ – Brave New World
While both novels have a great setting, Orwell executes his better by having relatable characters (a protagonist that is with you from the beginning), TENSION (where is the tension in Brave New World?), and a strong narrative thread that links the whole book from start to finish. Brave New World felt a bit directionless in comparison and often like it was two books mashed together, the first being an essay on the direction society is heading towards, and the second – an afterthought of a story to tie it all together.
★★★ 3 stars