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Aldous Huxley - Brave new world

Boekverslag 6 September 1997, gemaakt door Walter ter Maten, Son en Breugel.

Author:	Aldous Huxley.
Title:	Brave new world, 1932.
Publisher:	Penguin Books Ltd., UK.
Pages:	201.
Genre:	Fiction.
Setting:	Future.

Other work:

Crome yellow, 1921.
Antic hay, 1923.
Those barren leaves, 1925.
Point counter point, 1928.
Eyeless in Gaza, 1936.
The doors of perception, 1954.
Heaven and hell, 1956.
Brave new world revisited, 1959.
Island, 1962.
After many summer.
Brief candles.

Main Characters:

Bernard Marx, alpha. He has individual feelings, is misshaped (small) due to an incorrect phase with alcohol when he was an embryo. He likes to be important, but he is a coward that does not trust others. Because of his misshape and because of his behavior he is not very popular.
Lenina Crowne, beta. She is a happy, not too clever, beautiful young woman that is very popular to the alpha men. She recites often the rules she has learned during hypnopeadia. She is a model young person.
John the Savage. John a self-made man, grown up as a white boy in the Indian Reservation. He knows all the poems by Shakespeare. He does not understand everything of them, but he feels the meaning. Deep emotions like true love and punishment are important to him.

Summary:

The book describes a society of a future World State, which motto is "Community, Identity, Stability":

Community:	They need everybody, they do not accept individualism, everybody belongs to everybody (in practice only pretty girls from a lower class can make friends with men from a higher intellectual class).
Identity:	There are only five classes of people (alpha to epsilon), standard men and women are cloned from a few eggs by the Bokanovsky process (many twins result after treating the eggs with x-rays, changes in temperature, alcohol).
Stability:	No extreme emotions (no love for one particular man or woman, no god, no father and mother), satisfaction is found in the work one is intend to do.

Mass production (invented by the creator of the Ford Automobile Company, Henry Ford) is applied to biology. They have created special kinds of classes of people, who are supposed to do and to appreciate their work. The Bokanovsky process ensures that they have just enough brains that are necessary to do their work well. There are no mechanical robots to do the dirty work. In fact the only useful machines found in the book are:

Helicopters:	Replace cars.
Rocket planes:	Long distance planes.
Feelies:	A cinema, where one can also feel sensations.
Scent organ:	Creates happy atmospheres.
Synthetic music:	A rather old fashioned gramophone with a cylinder.
Microscopes:	Used to study eggs in the important Hatchery and Conditioning Center.
Band-system:	with bottles that contain the embryos.
Radio, TV.

There are no computers, in fact the HCC has an archive formed by 88m³ of card-index. In special Infant Nurseries with the young kids are emotionally trained to behave as world citizens and to like their later work conditions. In their training shocks are used, hypnopeadia, community meetings.
Soma is the universal drug. Sex is important to maintain good contacts with all your friends. There are no hard deceases, and they have conquered the effects of the old age.

Bernard Marx (alpha), Henry Foster (alpha), and Lenina Crowne (beta) are colleagues in the HCC in London (London has no Big Ben, but a Big Henry and no Charing Cross, but a Charing T - after Henry Ford and his car, the T-Ford. Bernard has strong individual feelings, which he tries to hide: he wants Lenina for his own, he also likes to walk alone in nature, which he is supposed to dislike. For this behavior the director of the HCC tries to transfer him to Iceland, during the visit of Bernard and Lenina to the savage reserve (Indian Reservation).
Here they meet John the Savage, the son of Linda and the director of the HCC. Bernard succeeds to get permission to take John and Linda with him to London. This visit destroys the career of the director and saves that (for the moment) of Bernard. The Savage becomes a sensation in London and because of their relation to John, Bernard and Lenina become quite popular in the London society. His mother Linda had described her old world as a paradise to John. However, John becomes to dislike the 'Brave new world' more and more. There are no proper, pure, individual feelings, emotions, thoughts. There is no high art with really meaning ful sentences like in Shakespeare. He finds the sexual behavior of Lenina with relation to other men disgusting. He dislikes a world with so many twins.
Chapter Sixteen gives a discussion between John and the Controller, Mustapha Mond. The controller argues that now the world is stable. People are happy. They get what they want. They never want what they cannot get. They are save. They are never ill and not afraid of death. They are ignorant of passion and old age. There are no mothers, fathers, wives, children or loves to feel strongly about. Of course all at the price of individual freedom. Soma, feelies and the scent organ replace High Art. People are happy with their work (in fact work is more important than holidays). God and religion are not important anymore to happy people who always feel young. It is a world without drama, without pain, without tears.
After the death of Linda, John creates many disorder in the hospital. As a result his friends Bernard and Helmholtz are transferred to an island, where they will find other society misfits. John likes to join them, but they only allow him to live in a lighthouse somewhere on the hills of Surrey. For a moment he can live as an individual in nature. He tries to purify himself by punishments with a whip because of his thoughts on Linda and on Lenina. When a journalist discovers this, John is filmed and shown (and felt) in the feelies. Lots of twins come to see him and shout for more strokes with the whip ("We want the whip"). After a final emotional meeting with Lenina John hangs himself.

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