Date finished 13 Feb 2021
Recommendation: 7/10
A very different dystopia from the brutal totalitarianism of 1984. A civilisation where everything is stable and happiness is only a pill away. There’s little disease and hunger, pleasure is on tap yet there’s also no real intimacy. A ‘savage’ visits and learns that this world is empty and superficial. It’s an interesting future and despite feeling like the characters weren’t much developed it was a readable book. But I found it unsatisfying.
In this world either we’ve got savagery, pain and suffering or empty superficial lives of pleasure and consumerism. The book paints an ‘either-or’ picture which didn’t resonate with me.
Huxley himself said more than a decade later that there should have been a middle ground. It’s insufficient to merely have the choice of embracing suffering or rejecting a life of meaning. The world is not that simple and clearly the more comfortable your position in life, the easier it is to decry the boredom of a stable society where all basic needs are met. He never clearly states that the ‘civilisation’ is worse than the savagery, but I felt it was implied weakly and if there was a philosophical point it wasn’t properly developed.
Huxley looks prophetic given the book’s echos of the consumerist society we live in today (it was just emerging at the time he wrote it) and the superficiality of our social media culture. People will see what they want to in this and make all sorts of comparisons (after all, it’s natural to see patterns); not a bad thing. Still a good book but if you’re only going to read one dystopian classic then make it 1984.