Aldous Huxley: Ape and Essence (1948)

Edition: Vintage, 2005
Review number:1473

When I came across Ape and Essence in the local library, I was surprised. I like Huxley, and I have read a lot of science fiction, but here was a science fiction novel by Huxley I'd never heard of before, let alone read.

On reading it, the reason that Ape and Essence is comparatively obscure is pretty clear. It is, firstly, not a conventional novel. It purports to be a short description of the discovery of a film script in a Hollywood studio's reject file, followed by the script in question. Huxley himself worked in Hollywood as a script writer, unsuccessfully: the story, retold in David Bradshaw's short biography printed as the introduction to this edition, is that Walt Disney rejected a synopsis of Alice in Wonderland, explaining that he "could only understand every third word". The pairing of Disney and Huxley is incongruous in itself, without wondering what the eventual author of Doors of Perception might have made of Lewis Carroll - and what the children who watched a Disney cartoon using the script would have thought of the result. On the basis of the screenplay incorporated in this book, it would not have been one of the studio's greatest successes.

Ape and Essence, the screenplay, is a post-apocalyptic story, set in a devastated Los Angeles in 2108, decades after a nuclear war, on the occasion of the landing there of an exploratory mission from New Zealand, which was isolated enough to escape destruction. The savages who now inhabit the ruined city interpret the war as the time when Satan took control of the earth, and they are first encountered looting the graves in an exclusive cemetery. Their purpose in the story is almost too clearly satirical: there is no real subtlety here. The theology of the savages, who are portrayed at one point performing a ritual in praise of Satan, is something which would probably provoke protests even today if a film were ever made of this script.

Controversial material is not the only problem with Ape and Essence. The script has a large role for an off-screen narrator, who is very pretentious, almost to the point of parody, drawing conclusions about how the real events of 1948 lead into the world depicted as its future. The voice is similar to the best-skipped introductory essays which George Bernard Shaw added to many of his plays, especially that in Back to Methuselah, which also depicts the future of humanity. The narrator is irritating even in the script; in a cinema I think it would be unbearable, and makes me wonder whether Huxley had been to any films since sound came in. There's also a kind of masque forming the first section of the screenplay, a symbolic drama featuring baboons and multiple Albert Einsteins which is very dated, and might well have seemed so in 1948, even though its subject matter is firmly post-Hiroshima.

The title is picked up in the body of the script, most clearly on p. 55: "Only in the knowledge of his own Essence has any man ceased to be many monkeys." Huxley's point in Ape and Essence is to discuss the relationship between the bestial and civilised parts of human nature, and what he wants the reader to pick up is that it is only by understanding that he or she has a bestial side that it is possible to have any hope of overcoming it. It is a potentially pessimistic point of view, and motivates a thoroughly pessimistic tale. There are some good lines in the story, but generally, anything of interest in Ape and Essence has already been said better in Brave New World. My rating: 4/10.

Aldous Huxley: The Island (1962)

Edition: Longman, 1980
Review number: 605

Huxley's last novel is one of his most flawed. It is his Utopia, contrasting with his masterpiece, Brave New World. Basically, the island of Pala is a hippie paradise; a Buddhist state in the Indian Ocean, with a drug to bring higher consciousness (like LSD, in which Huxley was interested, was supposed to). Western journalist Will Farnaby is washed ashore on Pala, and falls for the charm of its inhabitants.

The novel basically consists of a guided tour of Pala, rather like that given to the Savage of London in Brave New World. The island is under threat from oil companies wanting to exploit its resources, and from its militaristic mainland neighbour, Rendang. While the titular ruler of the island, who was educated in the West and who has fallen for the dictator of Rendang, remains under age, things are likely to remain relatively stable, but there is little that the pacifist Palanese are willing or able to do to maintain their paradise any longer.

Apart from being a weaker rehash of Brave New World, The Island contains too much philosophy and too little plot and characterisation. It is a dull academic exercise, and its drug friendliness has rather gone out of fashion since the end of the sixties.

Aldous Huxley: Eyeless in Gaza (1936)

Edition: Penguin, 1955
Review number: 579

The title of this novel refers to the Biblical story of Samson. Having told Delilah the secret of his strength - that it depended on his hair remaining uncut - Samson was betrayed to his enemies the Philistines, and taken with a shorn head to be a slave in their city of Gaza. Blinded to make him harmless, he was forgotten until brought before the crowd on a feast day. By then his hair had regrown, and even blind he was able to pull down the temple on the heads of the celebrating Philistines (and kill himself at the same time).

This story may not seem immediately relevant to Huxley's novel, which is about the confused arguments of thirties intellectuals, mainly left wing, and the events which shaped their ideas. This is particularly the case when we remember that the novel was published several years before the Second World War broke out, so that the war cannot be seen as the bringing down of the temple unless we credit Huxley with an uncanny gift for accurate prophecy. (Additionally, Samson deliberately brought down the building to destroy others, and this cannot be said of the origins of the Second World War in the political debates of the thirties.)

The real meaning of the title must be a pointer to the way in which the characters in the novel think that they are doing something new and revolutionary, something that will destroy the outdated society around them. This would of course give it an ironic twist, since Huxley must have been aware that this feeling was shared by the radical intellectuals of every generation and of every political viewpoint.

The novel is centred around Anthony Beavis, and tells the story of his life by picking out the important events in the development of his personality, from the death of his mother during his childhood onwards. The arrangement of these events is not chronological, but parallel - dated chapters, like entries in a diary, are arranged so that the significant events are revealed together, alternating between the different periods of Beavis' life. Some days have several chapters - a description of a party in 1926 occupies six of them - and the main concentration is on the period from autumn 1932 to spring 1935, which sees Beavis involved in an uprising in Central America and in public speaking for the pacifist movement.

An oblique connection is made between the events of the novel and the First World War. One of the most important sequences of events, which leads up to the suicide of one of Beavis' closest friends, takes place in July 1914 between the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and the declaration of war on Serbia by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This war was of course the one which entailed the self-destruction of the former world order, as the major colonial powers tore themselves apart. The War itself is hardly mentioned directly; Beavis' part in it was minor and overshadowed by the suicide.

The clear symbolic nature of this event leads one to look for connections between historical events and other important turning points in the novel. The most prominent of these are accompanied by two of the most repulsive descriptions in modern literature. The end of an affair between Beavis and Helen Elberley is caused by her repulsion when a dog falls from an aeroplane onto the house where they are staying, covering them in blood; and the revolution in Latin Anerica causes another old friend of Beavis', Mark Staithes, to lose a leg when a wound becomes gangrenous. (Other important moments are the abduction of Helen's later lover, the Communist agitator Ekki Giesebrecht, by Nazi agents in Switzerland, and the final event of the novel, in which Beavis goes to speak at a pacifist meeting in the fact of death threats.)

None of these events actually coincides with important dates in the history of the thirties, as far as I can tell, but they certainly have a symbolic air about them, particularly the dead dog. Whatever the meaning of these events individually, taken together they symbolise the ferment of the thirties, the opposition between political extremes (communism/fascism, pacifism/militarism) that was eventually resolved by the war.

Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)

Edition: Penguin, 1969

Review number: 553

One of the most important novels of the twentieth century, vital to the development of science fiction, Brave New World ranks with 1984 as a chilling dystopia. Huxley portrays a world, considerably further into the future than Orwell's, in which a eugenically preserved class system maintains a static society. Everyone is graded from Alpha to Epsilon, and malnourishment of the embryo in the machines which have replaced human motherhood is used to ensure that Epsilons, for example, are stunted and moronic, fitted for the menial tasks which form their lot. Conditioning through tapes played to dormitories of children at night ensures that people are happy with their position, and the euphoric drug soma banishes the need to feel anything unpleasant.

Even with the conditioning and the drug, there are still people who are unhappy, who do not quite fit in. These are usually from the top caste, the Alphas, for two reasons: their greater intelligence, and because the lower caste members usually come in large groups of artificially created groups of identical siblings, who all work together and whose company makes it difficult to feel isolated and different. One of these misfits, Bernard Marx, sets the events of the novel in motion, through a visit to a Savage Reservation.

The Reservation is more or less the flip side to the main society portrayed in the novel. In those parts of the world which had not been considered worth bringing the "benefits of civilisation" to, a primitive way of life has continued to survive. The impression given of these places is that they are a kind of exaggerated version of a rundown American Indian reservation. There is no escape from them or, indeed, to them. Bernard is drawn to them because he expects life there to be purer; instead, it is squalid. The Reservation is meant to be the way we live, as seen from the point of view of the brave new world.

The event which catalyses the rest of the novel is Bernard's discovery of a young man and his mother (an obscene concept to him); she had come to the Reservation on a visit and become lost, already pregnant because of a lack of care over contraception. This couple are brought back to London by Bernard, and the rest of the novel is about the way that the Savage reacts to his new environment and vice versa.

Huxley later felt that the extreme contrast he introduced with the Savage Reservation was a mistake (as he says in the foreword written in 1946) and it is certainly true that it is not necessary to the point of the novel. It might have made it more chilling to have presented the society without a strong disapproving voice like the one provided by the Savage, letting the reader draw his/her own conclusions.

The importance of Brave New World for science fiction as a genre is manifold. Most science fiction in the early thirties was purely escapist hack work - this was the era of the pulp magazines. It was extremely unusual for a respected literary figure to use it as a vehicle for social criticism. The only precedents I can think of (other than fantasy) are H.G. Wells, who was not as highbrow a figure as Huxley by a long chalk, and Samuel Butler, whose Erewhon is only marginally science fiction, being modelled on Swift. Wells was actually quite an influence on Huxley, Brave New World having definite traces of The Time Machine visible in it.

Huxley took the genre seriously as a vehicle for social criticism, and since his time it has become something of a tradition in science fiction. The idea behind much serious science fiction is to use the future to comment on the present. Brave New World is really about the ideas being debated in 1932 - by the date at which the book is set, the debate is long over. Huxley's main target is of course eugenics, an idea driven out of serious consideration by the Nazis but today increasingly returning to the agenda as advances in genetics make correction of smaller and smaller "faults" in the embryo possible.

The really chilling part of Brave New World is not the caste system, but the fact that people are generally happy. Would it be worth being conditioned into happiness? Where does the border lie between "feelgood" mass media and subliminal conditioning? Huxley's world has "feelies" - films with texture that can be experienced as a kind of virtual reality - with no content but incredible effects ("You can feel every strand of hair..."). The main leisure activities are sports which are specially designed to encourage spending on complex equipment. How far is that from designer football shirts?

Huley aims at other, lesser targets throughout the novel, including some interesting digs at religion. Though the society described in Brave New World is said by its members to have outgrown religion, it has a strongly religious centre, worship of the ideas of Henry Ford and Sigmund Freud (who are confused with one another). Ford is referred to as "Our Ford", and is the focus of a parody of Christianity, including a ceremony based on the eucharist in which much soma is consumed - and soma is Greek for body as well as being a hallucinogenic in Indian religious traditions - before an orgy. (This is one part of the novel which some might still consider offensive.) More humourously, there is a scene in which the Savage beats up a reporter from the (Christian) Science Monitor, who denies the existence of bodily suffering. The attack on religion is of course prompted by Huxley's general atheistic philosophy, though in view of what he thought of spirituality it is interesting that he considered Fordianism a necessary part of his future world.

Aldous Huxley: Point Counter Point (1928)

Edition: Albatross
Review number: 383

Point Counter Point is about contrasts (hence the title) as well as Huxley's perennial themes of dehumanisation and futility in the modern world. It is full of mismatched couples, people committed to psychological and political opposites. It is one of Huxley's longest novels, and is full of philosophical argument.

There is no single central character. Rather, it is about a dozen or so equally important people, vaguely connected through mutual acquaintance. They are mainly English upper class, though popular politics is an important part of the novel. It is set in the thirties, possibly the heyday of extremism in British politics, and includes both Fascist and Communist characters.

The plot is virtually non-existent; this is a novel of ideas, of characters. The events that happen - deaths, affairs, separations - are there to parade a series of people before the reader, to show us their differences. It is superbly written, and rather more subtle than (say) Brave New World. The philosophical discussions, mainly revolving round the question of whether human beings are purely mechanistic of whether there is more to life than that, have dated somewhat, but are at the core of the contrasts which are the heart of the novel.