Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (Barron's Book Notes)

Rating:
Summary: A Portentous Masterpiece
Review: Brave New World may be the most important novel of the 20th century. Huxley's work envisions a future society trivializing itself to death. What is sad is that we are well on our way to this brave new world and that most of your reviewers just don't get it. Soma is everywhere----television, Hollywood, politics as entertainment, etc. Read this book and try to understand what Huxley was saying. Brave New World is all around you.

Rating:
Summary: Brave New World: A Perception of the Future
Review: Creating a depiction of what the future can hold is a task that Aldous Huxley tackled in his 1932 published book, Brave New World. It tells the story of two main characters, Bernard Marx and John ?the Savage.? The rebellious Marx is filled with an inner hatred towards the Utopian society. John is an outsider with many dissimilar views on Utopia. Both live in a controlled world that divides humans into a caste system. The story begins 632 years after the brave new world (Utopia) has existed. Babies are born in test tubes, a person?s future is determined before birth, the state police control the people?s freedom, Soma is a substance that prevents the people from opening their mind, and the new world is ruled by dictators called World Controllers. Huxley enlightens the reader with a curiosity for the new world but does not give Marx or John the influence to change Utopia into democracy (or sanity). Marx is merely a thinker; he does not show any action towards his belief on society. I believe the intensity of the climax would be greater if Marx took initiative with John to spread the word of freedom and democracy. Although John tries to teach society of open-mindedness, he fails and ends up being in the hands of the people. The novel would serve a better purpose in change than in persistence.
With the climax not being fulfilled to my expectations, Huxley does create a forecast when writing about the topic of overpopulation. This is only one example in the novel where Huxley is picked out as a predictor and makes me speculate where our society could be headed. In the 1930?s economists were afraid that the population of life on earth was outgrowing the availability of natural resources (Paul, Warren. Brave New World-Cliff Notes). Huxley foretold this bold statement. In his novel, the depiction of the state police keeping track of how many infants were born and the plan of social role before birth, was comparable to the problem raised in the 1930?s. Issues like overpopulation and human restrictions add great curiosity to the story, making Huxley brilliant at his work. He leaves you wondering what this world may come to if our freedom is ruled by a higher dictatorship. I recommend this novel to anyone seeking a possible outlook on the future of our society.

Rating:
Summary: Please don't be stupid.
Review: I read a review someone gave of this book that said Brave New World is "boring" and "absurdly weak." The review stated that "the general portrait of the future is very brief and full of lacunes, [and] one of the characters spent the entire book just quoting Shakespeare." I disagree strongly with this view. I did not find this book to be at all boring; in fact, I thought it was extremely well composed and amazingly detailed in its view of a dystopian future. The above mentioned reviewer's statement that The Savage quotes Shakespeare too much is absurd. Huxley cleverly uses Shakespeare's writing to show the distinct difference between our society today (or how it was in the 1930's, rather) and this anti-utopia that he has created. Shakespeare is known as the greatest writer of all time in the English language for a reason: he wrote about the nature and lives of people in such a way that we can all relate to it. Shakespeare so gracefully characterized human nature; the point that Huxley is trying to make with Shakespeare is that this "Brave New World" has been so dehumanized that they can no longer even relate to basic universal truths such as love, jealousy and unhappiness. It is an extremely powerful way of making his point about his dystopian society. While Huxley's character development is not his strong point, the picture that he paints of a future society is frightening. Ignore the reviewer I referred to. Read this book.