Noisy Brains Brains থেকে Radi, Uttar Pradesh 274001, India
I read this book at thirteen and really enjoyed it. In fact I think I enjoyed it a little too much. Other reviewers have pointed out something I felt for years but was afraid to say, which is basically that the new world isn't nearly as horrible as Huxley wants it to be. Bear in mind that Bernard Marx, Lenina Crowne, and the other civilized characters live in a world without hunger, poverty, or violence. Bear in mind that a lot of Huxley's objections are rooted in Victorian notions of chastity (for women) modesty (for women) and subservient behavior (for women.) Is a world where women have as much right to sexual conquests as men really the ultimate hell on earth? Don't get me wrong, I get the points Huxley tries to make about privacy, individualism, etc. It's just that he doesn't make them with any great degree of skill. He asserts points rather than dramatizing. (Or as my wonderful father used to say, "Don't state. Render!") Related to this is the problem of the novel's "hero," John Savage. As a 13 year old, I thought he was pretty yummy. And I definitely wished he and Lenina could have lived happily ever after, instead of . . . well, you know. But looking back after thirty or, my God, forty years, it strikes me that the Savage himself is the biggest flaw in this book. The modern world Huxley imagines is charming, and thoroughly modern, and convincingly seductive. Maybe more than he intended! But his Savage, who is meant to be noble and tragic and sexy and menacing, comes off as a whining drip, a pervert, and a closet woman-hater. If we are meant to see him as the "natural man" trapped in an artificial society he doesn't cut it. He is neither hard and brutal enough to engage our sympathies as the ultimate Native American warrior (that would be Mr. Blue Duck in Larry McMurtry's LONESOME DOVE) nor is he nasty and deadly enough to cut it as the ultimate rebel in a futuristic society (that would be Mr. Alex DeLarge in Anthony Burgess' A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.) Just as this clean, sweet-smelling, sexy world never really seems all that bad, John Savage never really seems all that brave. Or smart. Or even, well, "savage." He just mopes around a lot and slaps around a lot of little kids eating eclairs. Personally, I don't buy that he would make it, or even survive, in a Comanche band led by real killers like Buffalo Hump or Blue Duck. Nor do I buy that his understanding of Shakespeare is really all that impressive. When he puts down the Brave New World, to me, he comes across as less Hamlet and more Malvolio. John Savage quotes Shakespeare ad nauseam, yet in his version of Shakespeare, and life, there's no room for cakes and ale! What kind of Brave New World is that? Let me qualify all this, as I close, by saying that at 13 I just assumed John Savage was Huxley's spokesman and nothing more. But it's quite possible a lot of what he says (and what happens to him) is meant to be ironic. Huxley may be pointing out that the "natural" man is just as sick and inhibited as the "moderns." But I doubt it.
Delightful!!