Brave New World

The spine holds. The book shows a world from its making to its uses and then to the one man it cannot absorb, and each block is required by the argument. The hatchery comes first so that every later pleasure is read as manufactured; the Reservation comes before London so that the Savage carries an outside into it; the Controller must speak because the book’s wager is that the system can justify itself. The subtractive test bites in three places. The exposition of the first two chapters runs past what the reader needs. Bernard Marx, set up with care as the misfit who wants to be different, is abandoned once his celebrity is shown to be vanity, and he and Helmholtz Watson are sent to islands in a sentence. Helmholtz, promised as the poet the state cannot use, is given almost nothing to do. Perhaps a fifth of the book is permitted rather than compelled.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it has held: a society can be governed not by pain but by pleasure, and a people given comfort, sex without attachment and a drug without a hangover will not want the freedom it has lost, so that the tyranny needs no police to speak of. The cost is named exactly. The World State gave up art, science, religion and the family for stability, and its motto, “Community, Identity, Stability”, is shown at work in every institution. The Savage states the counter-truth: “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy”, that suffering and the tragic are the price of a human life. What holds the axis below the summit is twofold. Much of the finding is spoken rather than shown: the Controller lectures, and the reader is told what the reader should already have seen. And the alternative is a straw one, as Huxley himself conceded in his foreword of 1946: the book discloses one condition sharply and the other in caricature.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The lowest of the twelve. The register is satiric and cool, and most of the book stays there by design; the heights are few, and real. Linda’s death in the Park Lane Hospital for the Dying, with a party of Bokanovsky twins, brought there for their death-conditioning, crowding round the bed and eating chocolate éclairs while John grieves, has a grotesque terror the book earns. The whipping at Malpais and the Savage’s own flagellation at the lighthouse carry a cold dread. The last page is the summit: the hanging body turning slowly, the feet pointing north, east, south and back, a man with no direction left in the world. The crosscut of the third chapter reaches a different height, the vertigo of voices conditioning one another. What holds the axis lowest is frequency: these are islands in a book whose ordinary level is wit and exposition, and a work that rises four or five times stands below one that rises throughout.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Myth is built here, and in places it bears weight. Ford is made a god: the T stands for the cross, “Our Ford” for Our Lord, the Solidarity Service is an inverted mass with its orgy-porgy, and Ford is confused with Freud. The Tempest supplies the frame of the Savage’s arc: he is a Miranda who has never seen the world and a Caliban who is brought to it, and the title phrase, said first in wonder and then in bitterness, turns on him. Eden is reversed: the Fall is engineered out, and the Savage’s hunger for sin and penance is a return to it. The Controller is the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevsky’s sense, and the seventeenth chapter is built on that dialogue. Beyond the book, the World State has become a modern myth in its own right. What holds the axis below the gate is the people: Lenina, Bernard and the Controller are types who do not bear the patterns as persons, and the Savage’s Christ-like end is evoked more than earned.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The turn is real. The utopian novel of Wells had imagined a rational world state as the good. Huxley took the same state, kept its science, its eugenics and its plenty, and showed it as a hell made of satisfactions. The dystopia of pleasure, set against the dystopias of force, is his swerve, and it cost something: a novelist of conversation pieces staked his reputation on a futurist satire in a decade when much of the left saw planned societies as hope. What holds the axis below the gate is the form. The visitor’s tour, the outsider who enters and the dialogue with the ruler are the inherited machinery of utopia from More to Wells, and Zamyatin’s We (1924) had already set an engineered, numbered happiness against the irrational man; whether Huxley had read it is disputed, and nothing here rests on it. A turn of vision, made on a proven frame.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The form knows something in two places. The third chapter crosscuts, line by line, the Controller’s lecture to the students, Lenina and Fanny in the changing room, and Henry and the Assistant Predestinator in the lift, until the voices interleave like the whispered lessons of sleep-teaching: the montage is the conditioning, and the reader is conditioned by it. And the war of languages is formal. The state speaks in slogans and rhymes, “A gramme is better than a damn”, “Ending is better than mending”; the Savage speaks only in Shakespeare; two kinds of speech carry two kinds of soul. Elsewhere the form is a container. The tour, the long debate in Peacock’s manner and the shifts of the third person among Bernard, Lenina and John could give way to an essay or a dialogue with much of the knowledge kept, and the late chapters with the Controller nearly are one.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The evidence of return is large. Ninety-four years of argument have not exhausted the book’s relevance, and each new technology, the contraceptive pill, in vitro fertilisation, the antidepressant, the screen, has sent readers back to it with a new question. That is real yield. The charge is that the yield belongs to the idea more than to the text. A second reading of the novel finds less than a first: the characters do not deepen, the speeches say what they mean, and the ironies, once seen, stay seen. What keeps the axis where it is, and not lower, is that the book’s central question will not close. The Controller’s case is not refuted and the Savage’s is not vindicated, and readers have divided ever since on whether the World State is wholly a hell. Evidence of return, on a text of limited depth.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The field is fiction in English of the 1930s, and beyond it the dystopian novel. The force: the book reorganised the possibilities of that form by showing that tyranny could be soft, consensual and pleasant, and this has been one of the form’s two poles since. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Huxley wrote to Orwell in 1949, on reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, that infant conditioning and narcotics would prove more efficient instruments of rule than the boot, and the two books have been read as a pair ever since; Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) is built on that pairing; the debates of bioethics on cloning and enhancement use the book’s name as a term of art; and its title is a phrase of ordinary speech in many languages. Its reach outran its decade. What holds the axis there is that its force lies in conception, not in the form of the novel, which it left where it found it.

Score: 8.7 / 10

The highest of the twelve. Ninety-four years are weighed as ninety-four years: the text survives whole and has been continuously in print, read, taught in schools across the English-speaking world, translated widely, and set on the shortest shelf of twentieth-century books every general reader is expected to know. A survival of that length with the widest presence stands at the top of its step. What holds the axis a tenth below that top is a surface fixed to its moment. The Malthusian belts, the zeppelins and rocket planes, the sleep-teaching that research has since discounted and the cult of Ford all date the furniture, and the eugenic premise of the castes belongs visibly to its decade. The vision has outlived those conditions, and much of it has become more current, not less. Fame is presence, not proof, and it is counted for no more than a tenth.

Score: 9.1 / 10

The prose is quick, exact and often brilliant in satire. The opening tour of the Hatchery, a squat grey building with the motto over its door, cold light within and students taking notes, sets the tone in a paragraph. The hypnopaedic slogans are made with a jingle-writer’s skill. The montage of the third chapter is a technical feat, sustained over many pages without confusion. The making is charged elsewhere. The characters are drawn from outside and speak to illustrate; Lenina is a type the book half pities and half despises without deciding which; John’s Shakespearean speech is pastiche and grows mechanical; the chapters with the Controller are an essay in the form of a dialogue; and the pace stalls under the exposition of the first two chapters. The book shows both the mind and its limit as a novelist: the intelligence is first-rate, the novelist’s gift for persons is not.

Score: 8.0 / 10

One law governs: conditioning, and the stability it buys, explains everything from the decanting of embryos to the death ward and the crowd at the lighthouse. Take the two most distant elements, the clinical comedy of the Hatchery and the Savage’s self-scourging at the end. They obey the same physics, for the crowd that comes to watch him whip himself comes for the feelies’ reason, and it ends in the orgy-porgy. The Reservation, a world of dirt, pain and religion, is not exempted from the satire: it is the World State’s opposite and equally deforming, and the book holds both in one judgment. What holds the axis there is a wavering of the law in two places. The tone shifts from satire to tragedy without settling which the Savage belongs to, and the Controller, the system’s voice, is granted a wit and a doubt that the system should not have made.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The orders held are many, and one mechanism joins them. Reproduction and biology, in the Hatchery and Bokanovsky’s Process. Labour and class, in the five castes from Alpha to Epsilon, each conditioned to its work. The state, in the ten Controllers. Religion, in Fordism, the Solidarity Service and the Controller’s locked shelf of theology. The family, abolished, with “mother” an obscenity. Sexuality, in the rule that “everyone belongs to everyone else”. Art, in the feelies against Shakespeare. Science, held to its use; history, under Ford’s “History is bunk”; and consciousness itself, under soma. That is close to the full range the axis asks for, held in one structure. What holds the axis there is outline: the castes are seen from above and never from inside an Epsilon, the natural order is a background, and the short span gives each order a scene rather than a world.

Score: 8.2 / 10