DoomZappo's Blog - Island (Aldous Huxley, 1962) - Review

Before reading this, you should know: I don’t normally do something like this, so I apologize in advance if I’m a little incoherent in this review, but I’ve never had such an unpleasant experience reading a book as when I read this garbage and I really need to vent.



Island, written by Aldous Huxley in 1962, is the story of a cynical oil company representative named Will Farnaby who comes to the island of Pala in the Indian Ocean, where people have created a paradise on earth by combining western technology with eastern philosophy. Will, predictably, falls in love with the island and abandons his mission. Nothing special, but I have to admit that a lot of thought has been put into the world in which the story takes place, and the novel tries its best to describe every detail of the society of Pala. Sadly, this is where the good news ends.

In fact, this actually leads to the novel’s biggest problem: the vast majority of it consists of drawn out exposition. That’s not to say that Brave New World, Huxley’s most famous work as well as one of my favourite novels, didn’t have its fair share of exposition, but there are three major differences between the two books, that Mr. Huxley somehow managed to overlook.

1: the amount of exposition. Here, it makes up about 95% of the whole book.

2: All of the exposition in Island happens through dialogue between Will and the inhabitants of Pala. This results in the novel mostly consisting of dreadfully prolonged conversations, in which the people of Pala are usually the only ones saying anything essential. These conversations also feel very unnatural. For example: does “This fashionable abstract non-objective expressionism of yours is so fundamentally irreligious” sound like something you would say to a random stranger?

3: Brave New World had a STORY, so the exposition didn’t feel like pointless padding. Island, on the other hand, seems to be a book written merely for the exposition, and as such perfectly fits the description that Ride once used to describe Brave New World: “an endless slew of ideas with little to no substance”. It has no structure and no conclusion. It has none of the subtlety and wit that made Brave New World such a joy to read. Instead, the point of the novel seems to be to make you needlessly feel as miserable as possible without offering any consolation.

Those are some general problems, but there’s so much more wrong with this book. The nice and joyful inhabitants of Pala are actually a bunch of relentlessly sanctimonious douchebags. While explaining everything about how Palanese society works, they spare no expense at reminding Will of how fundamentally corrupt and decadent the outside world is in contrast. Literally every conversation between Will and the natives you’re supposed to sympathize with contains at least one snarky remark of the like, and this wouldn’t annoy me nearly as much if Pala actually was the utopia it’s portrayed as.

It’s not, for instead of creating the utopian counterpart to Brave New World, Huxley has created a Foucaultian nightmare in which people are indoctrinated through Pavlovian techniques and rigorous upbringing in order to create a completely uniform society. All potentially dissident thought is effectively wiped out through excessive psychological treatment, including the use of psychedelic drugs, which Huxley repeatedly endorses throughout the novel. The people of Pala are meant to come across as enlightened heroes, but instead seem more like mindless drones, an impression which isn’t helped by their annoying habit of repeating their own and each other’s words ad nauseam. The original reason Huxley put this book together was to show what could happen if the dystopian world government from Brave New World would use its technology for “good” instead of “ill”, but I find it hard to see any significant fundamental differences between Brave New World’s Soma (the government-produced drug used to pacify the masses) and Island’s psychedelic mushrooms (euphemized as “Moksha-medicine”), or between Brave New World’s use of mechanical voices to indoctrinate people while they’re sleeping, and Island’s use of parrots that shout slogans all day.

Of course, in order to make the Palanese society seem even more precious in comparison, the book has to introduce bad guys who want to exterminate said society for their own selfish needs. One of them is a delusional religious fanatic, and the other is a spoiled brat who admires Hitler. These characters are introduced at the very beginning, and the book wastes no time in confirming how wretched and evil they are. Not only does this make them look contrived and one-dimensional, but it also makes Will’s transition from cynical oil company representative to one of those lovable Palanese eccentrics less meaningful.

Not that it really matters, of course. The novel is so ham-handed and so awfully paced that up until the last chapter, it still feels as if I’m right at the fucking beginning. My version of the book has a foreword by David Bradshaw, a professor of English literature, who describes Island as “the story of how the offshore utopia of Pala [...] falls victim to the age-old menaces of material progress and territorial expansionism”, but that’s a dirty lie. It’s not like the book follows the progress of the Palanese people being disillusioned with their old lives and defecting to Western materialism. Pala doesn’t actually fall victim to anything until the last three pages, when it is invaded by a foreign army. By then, Will has had his first psychedelic experience and has been transformed from a hopeless sceptic into a naive idiot. And that is where the book ends, like I said, without a real conclusion, unless Mr. Huxley genuinely believed in the half-assed message of “All you need is love” that’s tagged on at the last minute.

There. I hope any of that made sense, and if you think I misinterpreted this book in any way or if you think I’m an idiot for any other reason: please tell me, because I really want to believe that there’s more to this book than what I’ve been able to find.