You see the number of crossings-out going on on the ‘links’ bar at right? Looks like blogging is no longer the next big thing and everyone’s tired of it. Finally, thank God. However, in the interest of community, I’ve decided to bag something that everyone likes so people can come together in mutual disapproval.

So I was looking at T’s new diary and went into the ‘about’ part to see what I could see. It turns out her favourite books are A Clockwork Orange, Lolita, Brave New World and 1984 (Memoirs of a Geisha didn’t make the cut, thank Christ - otherwise I’d be talking about how much I hate that). It strikes me as strange that anyone would put A Brave New World amongst their favourite books - I’m sure everybody likes it, and it is a good book, but why a *favourite*? Isn’t there something a bit… you know about it?

It’s the classic sci-fi thing, isn’t it? Keep the audience at arm’s length from the characters - things happen to them and you certainly empathise, but only in a simple, two-dimensional, monophonic kind of way - and let the plot do the work. The story is there to give the audience a kind of message, to reflect the present by showing a dystopic future. It’s all plain and simple. All the time in these kind of stories, the characters walk out in protest, shouting

you’re using us
we’re just pawns in your game

because they know they’re there for demonstration purposes only. They are quickly replaced by union labour paper cutouts of themselves but it happens again in the next chapter.

you tell all our eulogies wrong

Bernard is never more than an agreeable protagonist - he is a failure in his life but he never fails to deliver the right line. Lenina might have her own arc but she’s not Lenina, is she? She’s a chorus of women, an infinite number of ingenuous and ignorant bystanders. She brings the dystopia home to us by standing in for someone we already know; nothing about her is extraneous or accidental, she is the idea of a woman only. Nobody who reads her really loves her. John is the same - his whole mind is a misquote from Shakespeare, his life is a hollow accident.

And I’m not just talking about characters, who are obviously sleepwalking through it, but the whole carry-on. When the curtains come down and Huxley closes the book and looks down from his rocking chair at his assembled grandchildren he will ask us: “what did the whole thing mean?” And we will be able to put it quite simply if we try, because there really wasn’t anything else to think about.

Everything that happens proves the point. We get the point. So where are we then? John sums up the situation well enough when he refuses to let Lenina kiss him* - the situation is a scam and Huxley is pulling all the strings.

*In short, he calls her a strumpet.