Brave New World

I really, really, really wanted to enjoy this pretty famous book by Aldous Huxley. However, I was pretty underwhelmed.

Brave New World is a dystopian future novel, written in 1946. This is a world where people are split from 'birth' and childhood into regiments-Alpha, Beta, Delta, Gamma. There is a haunting scene that depicts some Delta toddlers being electrocuted and subjected to high pitch noise when they attempt to read books, so that they relate education as a negative thing.

Character-wise, there is Bernard Marx, a 'small' man who has a desire to escape the norms of this world. He is love with Lenina, a 'pneumatic' woman, yet relationships in this world are not as they are in our world. Casual sex is praised, the idea of only having one partner for an extended period of time is frowned upon. As children, it is encouraged that young girls and boys play 'erotically' with one another.

Bernard and Lenina holiday together in the Savage Reservations, an area where today's way of living is mostly intact, and it is here that events begin to spiral out of control, with Lenina bringing her 'New World' beliefs into the life of a man called John, who is in a committed relationship. His interaction with her and this 'New World' eventually has disatrious consequences.

If I'm honest, I'm struggling to remember what actually happened in the novel. With the exception of the incident with the Delta children, it would seem not that much really jumped out at me.

Maybe I went into this book with overly high expectations as I adore Orwell's 1984, and Huxley was frequently quoted in A Single Man. To add insult to injury it appears that Huxley agreed with the ideas he presents in the novel, he believed that a superior race of people was needed. In any case, I would recommend the wonderful 1984 over Brave New World any day.