When I was in Malaysia this summer, I reread Island, by Aldous Huxley. It's certainly not a great book, yet I was very interested in it and how it was written. I didn't know much about Huxley except for a few well-known facts - that he wrote Brave New World and The Doors of Perception, and that he died on the same day as John F. Kennedy.
Reading Island, I felt myself curious about what inspired him... It seemed that the book wasn't just a work of fiction, but rather that the fiction was a crude vehicle for his ideas about the perfect society. I was vaguely aware of the fact that's a sort of counterpart to Brave New World, his famous dystopia. So what exactly happened in his life to convince him that the island of Pala would be the perfect society.
To find out, I downloaded Nicholas Murray's biography. Of course, because Island was Huxley's last book, published just two years prior to his death, I didn't get the answers I wanted for quite a while. Nonetheless, it's a fascinating book. Huxley is a weird character - incredibly intelligent, bizarrely self-aware, and always on the move. Having now finished it, I almost feel as though I knew the man myself. Murray is indeed a talented biographer.
There were times it felt the biographer glossed over some unsavoury portions of the Huxley story, but he never entirely left anything out. Instead, he would mention and excuse anything that would detract from the Huxley legacy. For example, he often alluded to Huxley's interest in eugenics, but would always play it down and point out that it was fashionable at the time. He acknowledged the author's interest in dianetics, but played it down as just being interested in everything and never taking it seriously, which was likely untrue.
I will continue studying the life and works of Aldous Huxley with the goal of writing a long essay later this year on the subject of Island. There are other biographies of Aldous but Murray's was the only one available on Kindle. It does, however, appear to have the best reputation, building upon that of Sybille Bedford's earlier work with the advantage of new sources having come to light.
Reading Island, I felt myself curious about what inspired him... It seemed that the book wasn't just a work of fiction, but rather that the fiction was a crude vehicle for his ideas about the perfect society. I was vaguely aware of the fact that's a sort of counterpart to Brave New World, his famous dystopia. So what exactly happened in his life to convince him that the island of Pala would be the perfect society.
To find out, I downloaded Nicholas Murray's biography. Of course, because Island was Huxley's last book, published just two years prior to his death, I didn't get the answers I wanted for quite a while. Nonetheless, it's a fascinating book. Huxley is a weird character - incredibly intelligent, bizarrely self-aware, and always on the move. Having now finished it, I almost feel as though I knew the man myself. Murray is indeed a talented biographer.
There were times it felt the biographer glossed over some unsavoury portions of the Huxley story, but he never entirely left anything out. Instead, he would mention and excuse anything that would detract from the Huxley legacy. For example, he often alluded to Huxley's interest in eugenics, but would always play it down and point out that it was fashionable at the time. He acknowledged the author's interest in dianetics, but played it down as just being interested in everything and never taking it seriously, which was likely untrue.
I will continue studying the life and works of Aldous Huxley with the goal of writing a long essay later this year on the subject of Island. There are other biographies of Aldous but Murray's was the only one available on Kindle. It does, however, appear to have the best reputation, building upon that of Sybille Bedford's earlier work with the advantage of new sources having come to light.
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