Classic Book Review : Brave New World

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 5 out of 5.

Huxley’s classic but timeless dystopian masterpiece

A dystopia that effortlessly disguises itself as a utopia: The premise of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World couldn’t be more timely as we enter 2021. A favourite in our household and now a popular series on Stan, Huxley’s Brave New World quickly has the reader immersed in a world both familiar and yet completely unrecognisable in the what is known as The World State in the year 2450.

“Hug me till you you drug me honey, kiss me until I’m in a coma,” are the familiar chants of the beta class of Future London as they learn from an early age to plunge into a life of extreme hedonism, engaging in constant sexual activity (with encouragement to indulge in many partners) while taking copious amounts of the drug soma. For some like Lenina, it is a lifestyle they enjoy and these citizens remain ignorant to issues such as social engineering and stratification. For others like Bernard, this lifestyle cannot hide the ugliness created by the world around them.

Normally, I would begin the plot summary with ‘ The plot is straightforward’ but in this case it’s more complex. Brave New World starts with a group of boys being given a tour of the central hatchery where they are shown a method of fertilization that will produce thousands of identical embryos. Each is manufactured for a specific focus: Alphas are the leaders and epsilons are a network of servants and there’s everything else in between. The plot thickens when Bernard, an Alpha outsider decides to take his friend Lenina to visit an Indian Reservation in New Mexico for recreation, where he soon discovers the man John aka “the Savage’ is the illegitimate bastard of his boss. On a path of revenge, Bernard takes John and his mother from the reserve and subjects them to all manner of exploitation as a way of enacting his plan and to entertain the fickle masses of Alphas and Betas.

At the core of Brave New World is the search for identity in a totalitarian society socially engineered to allow the most fortunate a meaningless pursuit of hedonism, while thrusting others into servitude. Whether you’re an Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta or heaven forbid an epsilon, there is the all consuming undeniable fact that you are not free in this brave new World, and very open to exploitation as John ‘the savage’ quickly surmises. An all consuming but excellent novel with rather a chilling glimpse into a not-too-distant future.