Crome Yellow, by Aldous Huxley

I'm back after previously suggesting I might give up this blog... Well, as it turns out, I shall use my new blog for new books, and this blog for when I read older books. 

I'm currently on holiday and recently I stocked up for my travels by visiting Amazon and downloading a number of new Kindle books. As well as some more recent publications, I also picked up the classics for either free or a nominal price. One of these was Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow. 

Chrome Yellow is a satirical novel set in a big English country house, following the convention of the country house novel. It features a range of characters - each of them a type of person - who come to the country house in question, called Crome. The book is made up of dozens of short chapters in which the protagonist, Denis, meets with each of the other characters. 

The book was based upon a real house and many of the characters were likewise based upon people Huxley knew there. Last year I read his biography but I cannot recall exactly who these people were. In any case, I recall them being rather pissed off at Huxley's portrayal of them. Indeed, these are not flattering portrayals. The book is very funny partly because it is so mocking of these wealthy types. It is clear Huxley is mocking himself, too.

Aldous Huxley, by Nicholas Murray

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. 

What I Want to Read...

I'm currently reading Hilary Hemingway's Hunting with Hemingway, and almost finished. Next up on my reading list is Aldous Huxley: A Biography, by Nicholas Murray. That's not a book I'm reading for pleasure, although of course I hope I'll enjoy it... but rather one I'm reading for study. I plan on writing an essay on Huxley before the end of this year.

After that, I'm incredibly excited about Homo Deus, by Yuval Noah Harari. His 2014 book, Sapiens, is probably the most important book you could ever read, and I realize how insane that sounds. But seriously, have the world read this and will would all find our lives improved. I reviewed Sapiens somewhere on this blog. Hit the tag below the post to find it.

I'm also excited about the final book in Liu Cixin's Three-Body Trilogy, Death's End. Alas, the second book was not brilliant, but I have my fingers crossed for this one. 

Island, by Aldous Huxley

Here’s a classic novel which somehow I’d managed not to read over the years. Actually, I thought I had read it… somewhere in the back of my mind I told myself that I’d already read this one, and put it aside to “reread” much later.

Island is Aldous Huxley’s vision of utopia – a mysterious, remote, tropical island nation in Southeast Asia. It is a rather clunky novel, actually, which serves, from my perspective, as an often careless vehicle for Huxley’s philosophical and political perspectives. It revolves around the arrival of a newspaper reporter, Will Farnaby, on the eponymous island, Pala. He has been sent to negotiate on behalf of his employer for the rights to drill for oil on Pala.

The entire book essentially follows Will as he recuperates from a fall whilst arriving on the island, and at absolutely every conceivable turn, he is taught in bizarrely eloquent terms, the precise history and philosophy of Pala. The island was once a Buddhist society, rather primitive in its ways, but with many valuable qualities. At some point a Scottish doctor arrived, and the perfect hybrid of Eastern and Western ideas came about.

The book is not awful by any means but it is certainly a bit ridiculous. Nothing happens in it that isn’t a means for Huxley to present his reader with his personal viewpoints on everything from sex to drugs to religion. Some ideas, like the Mutual Adoption Club (MAC), are patently fraught with problems that are never addressed, while actually many of his ideas – while impossible to ever implement anywhere – are very admirable. In particular, his keen awareness of ecology.

I was very surprised to notice a staggering amount of concepts lifted and adapted from Scientology – or, more likely, from L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics. I haven’t had internet access since reading the book so I haven’t been able to gauge what Huxley’s relationship was with the Church, but it shocked me that his famous utopian society – an antithesis to that presented in Brave New World – contains so much from a now maligned cult. I shall have to investigate further…