Aldous Huxley - Brave New World (Big Book List)

 This book is not what I expected. I talked with an administrator at my college about this book recently, and he told me that it was the first book he was assigned to teach when he started teaching high school English. He may have said he had to teach it to freshman. That seems remarkable to me. There is so much sex in this book. While there is no sex depicted explicitly on the page – this entire society revolves around sexual gratification for sex sake because it is no longer tied to reproduction. There is a deeply conservative heart beating behind the pages of this book. I don’t often do this but I found an interview with Huxley from the 60s after I finished this book because I wanted to get a sense of the man as I was mulling over his ideas in the book. 

 I will say this first, the whole book leads to a final conversation between the Savage and the regional World Controller which is delightful and sort of the glorious "accuse your gods" moment that a certain subset of fiction wishes for like the monster accusing and lamenting to Victor Frankenstein level satisfaction. There are so many delightful and unexpected turns in this book that make it very clearly worth the label of classic literature. This is especially true with the final confrontation is the savage getting his time in the sun then being sort of conscripted to live out his life in observed obscurity which is sad and strange. 

You can see the echoes of this story in every other dystopian novel written since. It is truly a delightful and difficult read. When Bernard asks the Savage to retell his life story to him and we see the development of the savage through the eyes of child, it is very, very unsettling. To see him not understand why his mother, a stranger in a strange land, is acting the way that she is and the context rejecting her but certain portions of the culture participating and the fractures this creates is truly, deeply unnerving in a way that I was not prepared for. 

This is the master turn of the endeavor. Many versions of this story exist, not all of them excellent in the way this book is truly and unbelievably well done is this moment where the child has to begin to reckon with the ways his mother is acting out of fashion to what he is aware of and has been exposed to.  I cannot tell you now how deeply this section affected me. I was listening to this book as an audio book while working with my hands outside. It was hot. I was sweating, but beyond this I was so deeply, almost physically uncomfortable that I had to take a long break from this book. This is one of the positive benefits of this project that I have other books that I can turn to if one gets dull or difficult but I cannot move forward until I finish this text. I may not have finished this novel having encountered this portion. This is true at several points in this text. The Soma Orgy scene was difficult to read. The ways that the treatment of children is presented was difficult to read. But more than any other, the savage retelling his mother's behavior was very difficult to read. It is the confusion and perversion that the child feels in these moments that I think I couldn't wipe from my mind if I wanted to. Thinking about it now as I type this disturbs me. This is a genius move on Huxley's part that to me now seems breathtaking. There are so many different ways to write this scene that seem even more intuitive than to locate the telling of in the eyes of the child. It is remarkable. 

This is an expert work of fiction that has a particular perspective it is coming out of that I am not sure I totally agree with but you cannot deny its beauty and precision of execution. It is terrifying and delightful all at the same time. I am glad that this project has forced me to read it, and more than any other text so far I feel like it creeps in the corners of my mind and at times reminds me that this is a thing that in fact happened and transcends my ability to forget it.