Time Must Have a Stop (Coleman Dowell British Literature Series)

Rating:
Summary: Highly Recommended
Review: Huxley explores the fickleness of mortality with his usual clever pen and knack for irony. This beautiful book examines materialism and morality through the eyes of a young man and contrasts this with the protagonist's reflections of years later.

Rating:
Summary: Huxley is a genious.
Review: Huxley is the master of complex philosophical writing. This is not "Brave New World" at all. It is much more complex, and it's theme is different.

Rating:
Summary: Huxley is a genious.
Review: Huxley is the master of complex philosophical writing. This is not "Brave New World" at all. It is much more complex, and it's theme is different.

Rating:
Summary: Intermittently brilliant
Review: Huxley was a man of many bizarre ideas as well as an uneven writer, but he could also be quite a deep and compelling thinker. This book is a particularly vivid example of this contradiction. I found parts of the novel almost painfully bad (one of the characters trying to communicate from the afterlife through an incompetent medium, or the epilogue that in effect abandons any pretense of being part of novel in order to become an unconfortable mix of essay and sermon). There is also the lingering problem of Huxley's uninformed and unfair attitude towards natural science. But in exchange for accepting these failures the reader gets two extraordinary character portraits: one of a monster (Mrs. Thwale) and one of a saint (Bruno the bookseller), both very convincing and immensely insightful. Add to that a penetrating study of the perils of self-absorption, a sound case for moral restraint, and the best diagnosis I have come across of why artists who express the most sublime insight about human nature can still behave like swine. It's sad and doubly ironic the Huxley himself should have been an impeachable character. Anyway, quite a worthwhile read.

Rating:
Summary: A rather trite and overused metaphysical parable
Review: Masked by large quantities of frighteningly erudite British/cultural social satire. As an eager young American, I found myself entranced, and initially a little intimidated, by Huxley's god's eye view of Oxford-educated, limerick-composing, medieval-theologian-reference-making, pre-WWII upper-middle class Europeans. Imagine my incredulity at discovering at something like one fourth of the way through that the author was attempting to make some sort of serious and self-important point about the fate of humanity. Then, imagine my further incredulity at discovering about halfway through that this was one of those horrible 'instructive' works of literature where all literary merits are subordinated to a moral lesson. Finally, imagine my relief mingled with new-found disrespect for Aldous Huxley when I saw at the book's end that the aforementioned moral lesson involved nothing more than a cheap, pretentious, unimaginative leap-of-faith argument that has probably been around since the time of Plato himself. Oi. Now at last I can say with confidence: Huxley? Please. That is *so* passe...