Brave New World

⚖The case for it

The unsettling part is that the World State works. Readers keep admitting the soma and the feelies genuinely appeal to them, which makes this harder to dismiss than a straightforward horror-dystopia. Huxley invents his rituals with a satirist's ear, Ford's Day and Community Sings and the Solidarity Service running "somewhat-legitimate to patently absurd." His read on engineered wanting and distraction as social control has outrun his own era's excess by a distance. The Savage's confrontation with Mustapha Mond near the close is where the argument finally gets stated aloud, and the last pages draw praise as the best writing in the book. "Even tho it is a genuine 1930s shout," one reader notes, nothing about it reads as a period piece.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Huxley opens on a guided tour of the Hatchery, and readers keep naming that stretch as where the book stalls before a single character exists. Then the sentences: "flat footed and literal writing," gerund-headed lines and passive constructions left unrepaired. The names carry the satire, Bernard Marx and Helmholtz Watson standing in for characterization. Lenina pushes back on her society harder than either male lead and the plot "takes an unearned and mean-spirited revenge on Lenina" regardless. The philosophical fight is rigged too, since the Savage's entire counteroffer amounts to God and Shakespeare: "none of it presents a convincing argument," one reader objects, which leaves a nightmare most of its citizens are content inside.

— the honest librarian

5h

honest hours

7

sittings