Scan barcode
A review by msand3
Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley
2.0
This is the first disappointing work I’ve read from Huxley. While I’m sure it was considered razor-sharp satire in its day, I found the "elite British public school humor" to be grating -- either too dry/obscure for my American sensibilities or else overly-silly in a way that over-compensates for the rest of the novel’s snootiness.
I must admit a bias here: there is a certain type of early-20th-century British comedy of manners that I’ve never been able to enjoy. (Think Evelyn Waugh, Ronald Firbank, Max Beerbohm, etc.) I find that they are so enmeshed in the class they are satirizing that their novels simply become an artifact of that world rather than a work of universal essence. Writers like P.G. Wodehouse or Noël Coward also teeter on the edge of that style, but are often saved because they are, at heart, comedic writers, whereas Huxley, Waugh, et al., are great writers who are trying-on a comic style. The result is that novels like Antic Hay always feel like Terry-Thomas films without Terry-Thomas -- in other words, missing that vital hilarious element that elevates the work above its source material, which otherwise would be insufferable. (The whole point of Terry-Thomas’ marvelous persona is that he is able to take us into that world of upper-class twits and make us laugh at them rather than with them.) Instead of being that kind of work, Antic Hay simply becomes a novel about upper-class twits, which can be alienating and almost-insufferable for someone not of that particular class, culture, and era.
Perhaps I’m being too hard on Huxley, or perhaps I’m just the wrong audience for these kinds of novels. In either case, I just don’t enjoy them.
Thankfully, Huxley would move away from this style because I don’t know if I could take many more novels like this. I had planned to read [b:Crome Yellow|53672|Crome Yellow|Aldous Huxley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1415575803s/53672.jpg|16335152] soon, but I might skip it in favor of Huxley’s later fiction, which I very much admire.
I must admit a bias here: there is a certain type of early-20th-century British comedy of manners that I’ve never been able to enjoy. (Think Evelyn Waugh, Ronald Firbank, Max Beerbohm, etc.) I find that they are so enmeshed in the class they are satirizing that their novels simply become an artifact of that world rather than a work of universal essence. Writers like P.G. Wodehouse or Noël Coward also teeter on the edge of that style, but are often saved because they are, at heart, comedic writers, whereas Huxley, Waugh, et al., are great writers who are trying-on a comic style. The result is that novels like Antic Hay always feel like Terry-Thomas films without Terry-Thomas -- in other words, missing that vital hilarious element that elevates the work above its source material, which otherwise would be insufferable. (The whole point of Terry-Thomas’ marvelous persona is that he is able to take us into that world of upper-class twits and make us laugh at them rather than with them.) Instead of being that kind of work, Antic Hay simply becomes a novel about upper-class twits, which can be alienating and almost-insufferable for someone not of that particular class, culture, and era.
Perhaps I’m being too hard on Huxley, or perhaps I’m just the wrong audience for these kinds of novels. In either case, I just don’t enjoy them.
Thankfully, Huxley would move away from this style because I don’t know if I could take many more novels like this. I had planned to read [b:Crome Yellow|53672|Crome Yellow|Aldous Huxley|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1415575803s/53672.jpg|16335152] soon, but I might skip it in favor of Huxley’s later fiction, which I very much admire.