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A review by wintersavenger
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
5.0
Any book I get through in three days deserves five stars, even if this was a little on the shorter side.
Before three days ago, all I knew of Brave New World was that it was another book about a dystopian future that sits on shelves alongside 1984. Having enjoyed George Orwell's horror of a future, BNW popped up on a kindle sale and I pulled the trigger on it.
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.
The irony of John's quotation would struggle to be lost on anyone that picks up this book. Though long before we meet 'the Savage', we're introduced to the artificial world of the post 'Ford' London. A world changed by just enough science to keep the bottle bred population in a blissful ignorance of anything but the present.
Conditioned by drugs, propaganda, the control of information, it's easy to draw eerie comparisons between the world of BNW and our own. Despite the 'Everyone belongs to everyone else' mentality, most of the characters we meet from 'civilisation' are only concerned with themselves, with blocking out each and every negative emotion with soma until they can call themselves 'happy'. Even Bernard, introduced as a man who stood on the outside of the general populace thanks to his differing physicality, quickly succumbs to the allure of content civilisation once the opportunity presents itself.
It's difficult to like Bernard. He's angry, he's disillusioned, he jumps on the very first opportunity he has to exploit the savage son of the Director the second he can. John, on the other hand, easily managed to draw my sympathy towards him. Born an outcast in a Savage Reservation, he lived a life between two worlds. Torn between circumstance and the civilisation his abandoned mother longed for, there is no place for John in either world.
Before three days ago, all I knew of Brave New World was that it was another book about a dystopian future that sits on shelves alongside 1984. Having enjoyed George Orwell's horror of a future, BNW popped up on a kindle sale and I pulled the trigger on it.
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.
The irony of John's quotation would struggle to be lost on anyone that picks up this book. Though long before we meet 'the Savage', we're introduced to the artificial world of the post 'Ford' London. A world changed by just enough science to keep the bottle bred population in a blissful ignorance of anything but the present.
Conditioned by drugs, propaganda, the control of information, it's easy to draw eerie comparisons between the world of BNW and our own. Despite the 'Everyone belongs to everyone else' mentality, most of the characters we meet from 'civilisation' are only concerned with themselves, with blocking out each and every negative emotion with soma until they can call themselves 'happy'. Even Bernard, introduced as a man who stood on the outside of the general populace thanks to his differing physicality, quickly succumbs to the allure of content civilisation once the opportunity presents itself.
It's difficult to like Bernard. He's angry, he's disillusioned, he jumps on the very first opportunity he has to exploit the savage son of the Director the second he can. John, on the other hand, easily managed to draw my sympathy towards him. Born an outcast in a Savage Reservation, he lived a life between two worlds. Torn between circumstance and the civilisation his abandoned mother longed for, there is no place for John in either world.