Brave New World

Brave New World comes with a pretty big reputation, and it turned out to be quite a letdown for me. It contains a lot of interesting ideas that have held up well over time, but as a novel, I did not think it was particularly well executed.

On the positive side, the whole concept of humans being happily pacified by consumerism, convenience, pharmaceuticals, biological engineering, casual sex, and mindless entertainment, is, well, prophetic. And his portrayal of a new kind of dystopia in which people are not merely oppressed but reportedly content with their oppression, is fascinating. And eerily recognizable.

Unfortunately, those strong ideas ended up forming the backbone to what I thought was a fairly weak story. From the beginning, the details of the World State are spoon-fed to us through interactions that feel forced and unnatural. This immediately made the society feel less convincing to me than those depicted in other classic dystopias such as 1984 or The Handmaid’s Tale, which build their worlds more gradually and organically.

That pattern continues throughout the novel. Many conversations and events seem to exist primarily to explain some feature of the society to the reader rather than as natural developments of the characters or plot. As a result, the characters themselves never feel fully fleshed out. Bernard, in particular, is not a great main character. He initially appears to function as a skeptical outsider, but his personality does a full 180 after gaining social status that felt abrupt and unjustified.

I was also bothered by the characters’ constant, exaggerated expressions of astonishment at the way people once lived. Although this may be part of Huxley’s satire, it felt a bit heavy-handed to me. Rather than making this place seem like a believable society with its own internal logic, these little exchanges repeatedly reminded me that the world had been constructed solely to communicate ideas to the reader.

The plot itself also feels disjointed, particularly once John enters the novel. His introduction did not fit naturally into the story. Rather, he seems to be a symbolic character used to impose various philosophical speeches upon for the last quarter of the book rather than developing a real narrative.

Book author: Aldous Huxley