I’m rating this based on its memorability and not on how much I enjoyed it. The bone-chilling ending threw my thoughts on it sideways and I can't say I'd recommend it to anyone due to its sheer unbelievability. It also takes a long time to get into, partly because the main character isn’t introduced until halfway through the book and partly because the subject material jumps around. Huxley has created here a “utopian dystopia”, in which everyone is happy but for all the wrong reasons. Brainwashing, cloning, conditioning, and class stratification are all morally compromised in order to make the world a “better place”. The writer does a tremendous job undermining the philosophy of the World State by making examples of his characters. Supposedly it's a satire, but I only found it moderately funny. Books like 1984, Gravity’s Rainbow, and Infinite Jest must have taken ideas from Brave New World, so its influence cannot be ignored.
*Spoilers* The dynamic between Lenina and John is particularly interesting to me. John was affluent in Shakespeare and Brave New World ended up being sort of being a cross between Othello and Romeo & Juliet. It is a doomed romance, but only one of the lovers ends up committing suicide- the male one, for his guilt in raping (not killing) the woman he “loved”. You have to feel sorry for both Lenina and John. Lenina was this empty beauty queen who’d finally found a man that didn’t just want her for sex, and in the end, we see her crying and holding her heart because she clearly missed John. Then John broke her heart by doing what he did, but was it really his fault? John had to succumb to the conditioned masses because someone had released soma into the air. Then they harassed him into doing the very thing he sought to exile himself from. It begs the question: if drugs and conditioning made rape orgies socially acceptable, praised even to the point of glorification, would people still do it? I like to think not.
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