Perhaps each deserves to be considered on its own merits, but the comparison between Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four is inevitable. I found Orwell’s work to be the more engrossing, but Huxley paints a much more frighteningly realistic picture.

Apparently Orwell reviewed Brave New World in 1940 and claimed that it “probably cast no light on the future” (with the unspoken implication that his own work did). During the Battle Of Britain this was a very reasonable belief, but now that fascism has fallen out of favor and societal fear and deprivation are virtually unknown in the West the slow, pleasant decay of Brave New World seems much more probable. (That is not to say that there are not ways in which modern society distrubingly mirrors Oceania. Winston Smith would find the perpetual Wars on Terror and Drugs entirely familiar.)

The World State worships stability and happiness, which are certainly among the causes du jure in the United States currently. One of the principal purposes of people in Brave New World is to consume, and Americans seemingly have become consumers first, labor second, and citizens a distant third in the mindsets of corporate managers. People who lived in the shadow of Stalin may find Nineteen Eighty-Four realistic, but it is the Brave New World that is strikingly similar to my experiences.

There are times when it seems Huxley could use a dash of sublety. For example, the second chapter of Brave New World describes the Pavlovian conditioning of lower-caste toddlers that makes it quite obvious what a horrific process is occurring. Orwell, I think, would have written about the scene from the perspective of one of his characters who finds it perfectly benign, making the reader all the more disturbed when he begins to grasp what is truly happening. In other cases, Huxley uses this same technique quite effectively, as in the frequent emphatic statements that Bernard Marx is very different from the rest of the population while the reader sees by his actions that he is well conditioned indeed.

Unlike most of the books that I have been reviewing, I had previously read Brave New World 8 years ago. Although that is not a very long time, I found that I had completely forgotten the characters and plot of the book, and only found them very vaguely familiar as I read through the is a second time. I had very vivid and accurate memories, however, about the setting of A. F. 632 and the society of The World State. I suspect this is indicative of the contribution of the work: the saga of Bernard and the Savage are simply a vehicle for the social commentary and warning.

As an aside, my attempts to understand John’s allusions made me aware that my knowledge of Shakespeare has similarly atrophied. I know Hamlet well and have at least a fair memory of Macbeth and Romeo And Juliet, but I can only remember a single thing about A Midsummer Night’s Dream: that one of the characters is a fairy named Puck.