Brave New World - Review
Truly a brave new world’
The book starts us off with some heavy world building, getting to know the depressing city of London, year 632 AF (After Ford). From these early chapters, the thing that stuck out to me the most was the Hatcheries and the conditioning of the children. Of course, Hatcheries will not be recreated (hopefully) soon, but as for the conditioning of the children chapter. Truly did turn out to be true. Though not through the means of a centralized government, children are, at least to my belief - spending half of their available time being conditioned, whether its evil propaganda machine AKA a phone or an institution you paid to teach your child things you don’t want to bother with AKA kindergarten.
In the book the conditioning is done through the means of discouragement. They give them books and flowers. Innocent. When the children go onto the platform to touch roses and books. They electrocute them and play siren sounds. Still, far from reality. Can’t help myself but wonder… are books and flowers being discouraged nowadays as well? Think about the last time you saw a flower (though this might not be a great example if you live in a rural area, but the whole book is set in a futuristic city so it might make sense in this context). What about books? How many people do you know that read? I don’t know many. Even if they do read, they usually read… well let’s not judge anyone’s tastes.
About the hatcheries. Basically, they make kids in a lab. There are no mothers, no fathers, no families, just kids made in a lab. Kinda interesting about it is that the only purpose it serves is to ensure a stable influx of workers due to the fact that pregnancy is a social taboo. The thing thats “in” in the future is sex. A lot of sex. Sex with anyone. At any time. If you are the proper… caste that is. Maybe I forgot to mention that as well. The thing we see a bit coming up these days is the “social classes” but that was a phenomenom of old times. Classes still exist and in this book they are portrayed as a thing assigned at birth and a man/woman cannot go up in their class. Odd, yet predictable. In order to ensure social stability you must control all parameters of society. Getting rid of unpredictablity would guarantee you get social order.
And this is like, two chapters of the book. There is a lot more interesting world building and introduction of the characters, but to spare everyone the pain of reading through my notes. I’ll skip ahead to the actually interesting characters and part. We are currently at the half of the book and we get to meet the most insufferable loser in all literature history. Except maybe Yozo in “No longer human”. The thing with him is he was born a loser and he couldn’t accept it, even though his classification is alpha he was still gamma sized. And he wouldn’t accept it. He was carrying his inferiority complex along him the entire book. It annoyed me. How can someone go through the whole book and not develop a single trait apart from being more annoying. Next to him is Helmholtz Watson who is just oozing with character and waits to breakthrough with all his interesting character dilemmas but cannot due to Bernard’s annoyance.
Roughly when we meet them, Bernard goes onto his little trip to the reservation to get to know some savages and to you know, gain some perspective. And he goes on and on about how interesting they are but his lover always nags him that she wants to go home and take “soma” to relax. Loser activities if you ask me, both of them are complete and utter losers. I hate the main characters in this book because they are what they are. When they encounter a ritual for rain and a bountiful harvest that’s where our new character comes in, John. John is a savage, although his mother is someone from London, left and stranded in the reservation, she gave birth to John. His mother, Linda, doesn’t belong in the reservation, she is a promiscuous woman in a conservative society. John being a part of that society, he starts to get annoyed with that (well, who wouldn’t get annoyed at his mother being piped by another guy every night in front of him). He gets a chance to leave once he gets introduced to Bernard. And he accepts it. He decided to leave the reservation and to escape to the brave new world.
He doesn’t belong there.
John is absolutely unfit for that world. He is a man who lives his life with emotion, purpose and now he is cast into this purposeless world where all people do is do drugs and have sex which for him is… meaningless. He feels lost, and when his mother dies he feels grief. He grieves and grieves and starts causing havoc. So much in fact him and his friends (at this point only Watson and Bernard) get arrested and the two of them get exiled to an island! John doesn’t though. He is an experiment. But he escapes anyway to an abandoned lighthouse and spends his days there. Undisturbed he assumes the life of an ascetic and lives his life in rigorous disciplining of himself. He aims to be pure. Which I admire in a way. In a way I lived like that for some time until I realized it’s pointless. But anyway, he gets himself discovered and harassed by the news, which bothers him, he starts going crazy, they release a movie about him and in the final chapter… the whole fleet comes. A swarm of Alphas. They want to watch the savage monkey whip himself into submission. When the only woman who actually liked him for who he is came to see him, he couldn’t bear it anymore, he whipped himself. He whipped himself as a punishment. For his unpurity, for he was corrupt. A few days later. He hung himself.
There is a lot to intake in this book. You must understand the context of the new world. The characters. I liked John. Even when he went crazy. This is my favorite quote of his
“But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
It was a sign he was human. I feel like I want that as well, but I cannot help but feel like a robot at times. It is truly a beautiful paradox.