Due to the teacher’s recommendation I decided to read the novel Brave new world by Aldous Huxley. It was originally published in 1932 and it takes place in the future London, where technology controls virtually everything. The story is based on futurology and it has been voted as the fifth most successful novel written in English in the 20th century. Mr. Huxley himself was interested in, let’s say, unconventional things, such as parapsychology and mysticism. I wish I’d studied him a bit closer before I started reading, because this novel was clearly not intended for my kind of reader/ person.
I’m really unable to explain the plot, at least in a way that someone, who has not read the book, could understand a single word of it. So instead, I shall give you glimpses of the ‘’Brave new world’’, so you can decide on whether you want to proceed to the point when you have the book in your very own hand. Anyhow, the world is a very peaceful place to live and there is an endless supply of all necessities, because the population is permanently limited to 2 billion. People are divided into 5 castes (Alfa, Beta, Gamma, Delta, Epsilon) and each and every one of them has a predestined place in the society. To this point it all seems quite understandable, but then we have the Bokanovsky process, which has something to do with the reproduction. The whole novel is littered with these kind of words, that, at least to me, mean absolutely nothing.
This brings us to a critical point in my review: You CAN’T under any circumstances understand the novel without checking these terms from the internet, which can make the reading process rather tedious. The only term that I could understand all by myself was Fordism. It is a kind of a religion, where they worship Henry Ford. They have even replaced the cross with a T, which refers to the legendary Model T Ford from 1909.
The language is actually rather modern and understandable, when you consider that it was written in the early ‘30’s. Here’s an example: ’’ We don’t permit their magnesium-calcium ratio to fall below what it was at thirty. We give them transfusion of young blood. We keep their metabolism permanently stimulated. So, of course, they don’t look like that. Partly,” he added, ”because most of them die long before they reach this old creature’s age. Youth almost unimpaired till sixty, and then, crack! the end.”.
On the other hand: ‘’ Two, four, eight, the buds in their turn budded; and having budded were dosed almost to death with alcohol; consequently burgeoned again and having budded–bud out of bud out of bud–were thereafter–further arrest being generally fatal–left to develop in peace. By which time the original egg was in a fair way to becoming anything from eight to ninety-six embryos– a prodigious improvement, you will agree, on nature. Identical twins–but not in piddling twos and threes as in the old viviparous days, when an egg would sometimes accidentally divide; actually by dozens, by scores at a time.’’ I mean, I had to read this about a billion times to work out the meaning. (And I’m still not sure I got it right)
I got quite mixed feelings after reading this book. I knew it was a dystopia, so it was going to be a bit weird. But the oddest thing above all has to be this: I understood the text, but I haven’t got a slightest clue what I read. So go ahead, give the book a shot and tell what you think of it.