In Other Worlds Part 6

NOTES.

1. Jorge Luis Borges, Other Inquisitions, p. 87.

2. The War of the Worlds, p. 117.

3. Silverberg, Voyagers in Time, p. x.

4. The "bra.s.s bra.s.siere" is from an oral history of science fiction prepared by Richard Wolinsky for Berkeley's KPFA-FM.

Never Let Me Go.

by Kazuo Is.h.i.+guro.

Never Let Me Go is the sixth novel by Kazuo Is.h.i.+guro, who won the Booker Prize in 1989 for his chilling rendition of a bootlickingly devoted but morally blank English butler, The Remains of the Day. It's a thoughtful, crafty, and finally very disquieting look at the effects of dehumanization on any group that's subject to it. In Is.h.i.+guro's subtle hands, these effects are far from obvious. There's no Them-Bad, Us-Good preaching; rather there's the feeling that as the expectations of such a group are diminished, so is its ability to think outside the box it has been shut up in. The reader reaches the end of the book wondering exactly where the walls of his or her own invisible box begin and end.

Is.h.i.+guro likes to experiment with literary hybrids, and to hijack popular forms for his own ends, and to set his novels against tenebrous historical backdrops; thus, When We Were Orphans mixes the Boy's Own Adventure with the 1930s detective story while taking a whole new slice out of the Second World War. An Is.h.i.+guro novel is never about what it pretends to pretend to be about, and Never Let Me Go is true to form. You might think of it as the Enid Blyton schoolgirl story crossed with Blade Runner, and perhaps also with John Wyndham's shunned-children cla.s.sic, The Chrysalids: the children in Wyndham's novel, like those in Never Let Me Go, give other people the creeps.

The narrator, Kathy H., is looking back on her school days at a superficially idyllic establishment called Hailsham. (As in "sham"; as in Charles d.i.c.kens's Miss Havisham, exploiter of uncomprehending children.) At first you think the "H" in "Kathy H." is the initial of a surname, but none of the students at Hailsham has a real surname. Soon you understand that there's something very peculiar about this school. Tommy, for instance, who is the best boy at football, is picked on because he's no good at art: in a conventional school it would be the other way around.

In fact, Hailsham exists to raise cloned children who have been brought into the world for the sole purpose of providing organs to other, "normal" people. They don't have parents. They can't have children. Once they graduate, they will go through a period of being "carers" to others of their kind who are already being deprived of their organs; then they will undergo up to four "donations" themselves, until they "complete." (None of these terms has originated with Is.h.i.+guro; he just gives them an extra twist.) The whole enterprise, like most human enterprises of dubious morality, is wrapped in euphemism and shadow: the outer world wants these children to exist because it's greedy for the benefits they can confer, but it doesn't wish to look head-on at what is happening. We a.s.sume-though it's never stated-that whatever objections might have been raised to such a scheme have already been overcome. By now the rules are in place and the situation is taken for granted-as slavery was once-by beneficiaries and victims alike.

All this is background. Is.h.i.+guro isn't much interested in the practicalities of cloning and organ donation. (Which four organs, you may wonder? A liver, two kidneys, then the heart? But wouldn't you be dead after the second kidney anyway? Or are we throwing in the pancreas?) Nor is this a novel about future horrors: it's set not in a Britain-yet-to-come but in a Britain-off-to-the-side, in which cloning has been introduced before the 1970s. Kathy H. is thirty-one in the late 1990s, which places her childhood and adolescence in the 1970s and early 1980s-close to those of Is.h.i.+guro, who was born in 1955 in Nagasaki and moved to England when he was five. (Surely there's a connection: as a child, Is.h.i.+guro must have seen many young people dying far too soon, through no fault of their own.) And so the observed detail is realistic-the landscapes, the kind of sports pavilion at Hailsham, the a.s.sortment of teachers and "guardians," even the fact that Kathy listens to her music via tape, not CD.

Kathy H. has nothing to say about the unfairness of her fate. Indeed, she considers herself lucky to have grown up in a superior establishment like Hailsham rather than on the standard organ farm. Like most people, she's interested in personal relations.h.i.+ps: in her case, the connection between her "best friend," the bossy and manipulative Ruth, and the boy she loves-Tommy, the amiable football-playing bad artist. Is.h.i.+guro's tone is perfect: Kathy is intelligent but nothing extraordinary, and she prattles on in the obsessive manner touchy girls have, going back over past conversations and registering every comment and twitch and crush and put-down and cold shoulder and gang-up and spat. It's all hideously familiar and gruesomely compelling to anyone who's ever kept a teenaged diary.

In the course of her story, Kathy H. solves a few of the mysteries that have been bothering her. Why is it so important that these children make art, and why is their art collected and taken away? Why does it matter to anyone that they be educated, if they're only going to die young anyway? Are they human or not? There's a chilling echo of the art-making children in Theresienstadt, and of the j.a.panese children dying of radiation who nevertheless made paper cranes.

What is art for? the characters ask. They link the question to their own circ.u.mstances, but surely they speak for anyone with a connection with the arts: What is art for? The notion that it ought to be for something, that it must serve some clear social purpose-extolling the G.o.ds, cheering people up, ill.u.s.trating moral lessons-has been around at least since Plato, and was tyrannical in the nineteenth century. It lingers with us still, especially when parents and teachers start squabbling over school curricula. Art does turn out to have a purpose in Never Let Me Go, but it isn't quite the purpose the characters have been hoping for.

One motif at the very core of Never Let Me Go is the treatment of out-groups, and the way out-groups form in-groups, even among themselves. The marginalized are not exempt from doing their own marginalization: even as they die, Ruth and Tommy and the other donors form a proud, cruel little clique, excluding Kathy H. because, not being a donor yet, she can't really understand.

The book is also about our tendency to cannibalize others to make sure we ourselves get a soft ride. Ursula K. Le Guin has a short story called "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," in which the happiness of the many depends absolutely on the arranged unhappiness of the few, and Never Let Me Go could be read as a sister text. The children of Hailsham are human sacrifices, offered up on the altar of improved health for the population at large. With babies already being created with a view to their organs-help for an afflicted sibling, for instance-the dilemma of the Hailsham "students" is bound to become more general. Who owns your body? Who therefore is ent.i.tled to offer it up? The reluctance of Kathy H. and her pals to really confront what awaits them-pain, mutilation, death-may account for the curious lack of physicality of Kathy's descriptions of their life. n.o.body eats anything much in this book, n.o.body smells anything. We don't know much about what the main characters look like. Even the s.e.x is oddly bloodless. But landscapes, buildings, and the weather are intensely present. It's as if Kathy has invested a lot of her sense of self in things quite far away from her own body, and thus less likely to be injured.

Finally, the book is also about our wish to do well, to attract approval. The children's poignant desire to be patted on the head-to be a "good carer," keeping those from whom organs are being taken from becoming too distressed; to be a "good donor," someone who makes it through all four "donations"-is heartbreaking. This is what traps them in their cage: none of them thinks about running away or revenging themselves upon the "normal" members of society. Ruth takes refuge in grandiose lies about herself, and in daydreams-maybe she'll be allowed to get an office job. Tommy reacts with occasional rage to the unconscionable things being done to him but then apologizes for his loss of control. In Is.h.i.+guro's world, as in our own, most people do what they're told.

Tellingly, two words recur again and again. One, as you might expect, is normal. The other is supposed, as in the last words of the book: "wherever it was that I was supposed to be going." Who defines "normal"? Who tells us what we are supposed to be doing? These questions always become more pressing in times of stress; unless I'm much mistaken, they'll loom ever larger in the next few years.

Never Let Me Go is unlikely to be everybody's cup of tea. The people in it aren't heroic. The ending is not comforting. Nevertheless, this is a brilliantly executed book by a master craftsman who has chosen a difficult subject: ourselves, seen through a gla.s.s, darkly.

After the Last Battle:.

Visa for Avalon.

by Bryher.

The novella-length fiction Visa for Avalon by the writer who called herself Bryher was first published in 1965 and was reissued by the Paris Press in 2004, before the U.S. presidential election of that year. Since it is set in the future-a future in which violent ma.s.s movements are causing uproar and a controlling government is restricting the freedom of ordinary citizens-it was seen by both its publisher, Jan Freeman, and by its introducer, Susan McCabe, as a book with a lot to say about the squeeze being put on liberal democracy by such draconian measures as the Patriot Act in the United States and by similar tendencies elsewhere.

The Paris Press is "a not-for-profit press publis.h.i.+ng work by women that has been neglected or misrepresented by the literary world." For this exemplary aim, Bryher is a strong candidate: few twentieth-century women's lives were more interconnected with their own era, and few others displayed her edgy bravery and intellectual curiosity, but she is little-known today.

Bryher was born in England in 1894, thus living through the First World War as a woman in her twenties, through the intellectually exciting 1920s in her thirties, and through the Second World War in her fifties. Her birth name was Annie Ellerman; she renamed herself after one of the Scilly Isles, a place that-in her inner geography-stood for remoteness, adventure, and freedom: as a child, she longed to run away to sea and become a cabin boy. Her family was well-to-do, which gave her the opportunity to develop her many interests.

At the age of twenty she encountered Ezra Pound and Imagism, and through them, the poet H.D. Bryher and H.D. formed a lifelong friends.h.i.+p and sometime partners.h.i.+p, although they did not always live together. The two of them took up psychoa.n.a.lysis in the 1920s, and Freud and his teachings remained important to Bryher throughout her life. She was a poet, a supporter of the modernists, and a foster mother of the experimental writers and filmmakers of the 1920s and 1930s. With the rise of fascism she foresaw the coming horror, and when it came she devoted herself to rescuing Jews and intellectuals, using her home base in Switzerland as a transfer point. When Switzerland expelled most foreigners in 1940 she went to England, where she lived through the blitz. After the war she published a series of historical novels that were widely read at the time; but from these, Visa for Avalon is a departure.

Bryher was seventy-one when Visa for Avalon was published. She had eighteen years yet to live-she died in 1983-and several books left to write; still, anything produced by an author of this age cannot help but be retrospective in mood, and Visa for Avalon has something of an autumnal feel to it. As the hand of Death readies itself for the definitive knock on the door, the writer toils even harder: Wait! Wait! I have just this one very important message I need to get across! A writer's age at the time of a work's composition is never irrelevant: The Tempest is not a young man's play, and Visa for Avalon is not a young woman's work.

In her introduction, Susan McCabe links Visa for Avalon to the twentieth-century dystopian tradition that includes Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley's Brave New World, and such a link is not entirely inappropriate. Yet Visa for Avalon is very different from either in tone, and-insofar as one can say anything about a writer's intent-in intent as well. It's an odd duck of a book, and placing it within the Orwell-Huxley frame does it a slight disservice: the reader enters the book expecting the kind of specific and quasi-satirical detail that abounds in these works-the religion of Our Ford, the Ministry of Love, the babies grown in bottles, the use of Newspeak, and so forth-but such sardonic, bat-winged flights of invention are not to be found in its pages.

What then is to be found in them? The word allegory has been used about Visa for Avalon, but it is not an allegory, since its characters and events cannot be interpreted one-for-one. In Spenser's Faerie Queene, Una stands for the True Faith, Duessa for the false one, the Faerie Queene herself for Queen Elizabeth I, and so forth; but there are no such connect-the-dots certainties in Visa for Avalon. Part of this book's crepuscular charm is that it eludes definition-its arrangement is fuguelike rather than linear or schematic, and it achieves its effects partly by a seemingly artless syncopation of motifs.

Insofar as Visa for Avalon has a central character, that character is Robinson, a man of retirement age whom we first discover waking up by the sea. His name connects him with islands (Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson must have been known to Bryher, who as a child "devoured" everything in print), and Robinson will soon develop a yen for another island-the island nation of Avalon. Robinson is on vacation in a Cornish-sounding village called Trelawney; he's staying at Rose Cottage, owned by his landlady, the widow Mrs. Lilian Blunt. (Those lilies, those roses: the innocence of the garden in Tennyson's Maud, before the catastrophe. Bryher, like most writers of her generation-Pound included-used armfuls of images and much stock vocabulary from the Victorian literature they claimed to be heaving out the window. The hand of Tennyson in particular lay heavily upon them, a point to keep in mind when the significance of "Avalon" is considered. The practical "Blunt" of Lilian's last name stands in opposition to the more romantic elements: this is a landlady who cooks eggs and does other bustling, domestic things, but her Blunt element is-we will discover-somewhat of a disguise.) After a working life that sounds confining and tedious, Robinson has planned to spend his retirement years in Trelawney. He often goes fis.h.i.+ng with a younger man called Alex. But the peaceful scene is disrupted when a "Movement" youth group in green uniforms and caterpillar formation worms its way into the village, when Mrs. Blunt is informed by a bureaucrat that her beloved cottage-her lifelong home, her only possession-is to be demolished to make way for a factory access road, and when it swiftly becomes clear that worse upheavals are in store. The rights of individuals are about to be mashed underfoot in the name of collective progress, as the fate of Rose Cottage exemplifies.

Robinson and Lilian decide to flee, not only from Trelawney but from their no-name England-like country itself. They travel to the also no-name city by means of jammed and filthy trains; they attempt to get a couple of the rare visas for the mysterious island nation called Avalon; they are helped in their efforts by Alex, who works at the Avalon consulate; and finally-joined by a couple of other visa-holders-they make it onto the last tiny plane for Avalon, just before the moblike Movement closes the airport and prepares to "laugh at international law."

Along the way, Robinson and his several fellow travellers provide a running commentary on the trends unfolding. What has caused things to go so thoroughly to the bad? Is it overpopulation? The fact that "people are apathetic until it becomes too late," as Alex says? The repression of this or that urge or pa.s.sion, bound to burst forth in a thuggish fas.h.i.+on? The unconscious desire of the majority for a return to barbarism? Whatever the reason, no good will come of it. "If an individual's right to a place of his own were not respected," Robinson muses, "it was the first link in a chain that would ultimately lead to the elimination of the unwanted by any group that happened to be in power." Lawson-Avalon's representative at the consulate, and a straight arrow, as his name implies-takes the psychoa.n.a.lytic view: "Why was there so deep an urge for destruction in people ... They used so much research to introduce automation into everyday life and so little to find out what really went on in a nation's mind."

But all of this political chat-although true enough, and informed by Bryher's considerable experience with head-in-the-sand denial, and psychoa.n.a.lysis, and the rampages of iron-fisted and destructive political movements and the stifling of the rule of law-seems almost like flotsam on the surface of a different sea. There's a dreamlike air to the narrative, even apart from the this-can't-be-happening sensations that overtake people when they're caught in sudden violent upheavals. What deeper current was carrying Bryher along as she composed this strange book? She knew the work of Kafka, and his name, too, has been used in connection with Visa for Avalon-again with some reason: the facelessness of the malevolent forces, their apparent lack of any definite goal, and the pettiness of the bureaucrats representing them recall, perhaps, The Trial and The Castle.

But you don't name a book Visa for Avalon by accident, especially if you are Bryher, composer of historic novels. "Avalon" in Arthurian legend was the place to which King Arthur was boat-lifted after his last battle. Susan McCabe mentions Geoffrey of Monmouth's version, in which Avalon is a sort of apple-filled Edenic island where Arthur will be healed, and also Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, in which Arthur dies there, surrounded by weeping women. She does not, however, invoke the most likely influence on Bryher, who as a voraciously reading child went through her father's library. That late-Victorian library would have contained the works of Tennyson, including his long narrative poem, Idylls of the King. What Bryher's novel means to signify is intimately connected with what Tennyson's Idylls meant to signify.

The final section of Idylls, "The Pa.s.sing of Arthur," begins with "that last weird battle in the west," a misty affair filled with confusion and the difficulty of being able to identify the enemy-a confusion and a difficulty mirrored in Bryher's book. Both works have to do with a man's fated journey toward his possible death, the collapse of a civilization and its return to savage and lawless ways, the betrayal of the n.o.bility in man, and-underneath these themes-the sadness of getting older and finding yourself surrounded by young people who don't understand what you've lived through or even what you're talking about. Tennyson sounds this note repeatedly in "The Pa.s.sing of Arthur," which is told by Sir Bedivere in his old age, when he is living among "new men, strange faces, other minds."

The new men, the strange faces, and the other minds are already a problem for both Lilian and Robinson, quite apart from any green-uniformed Movement. There's a considerable amount of grumbling about "change," and "development," and "progress," and how things aren't the same as they used to be, and about the rudeness of the young, and also that of waitresses-themes not unheard-of among any group of retirees sharing doughnuts at the corner coffee shop. In addition to this, Robinson is a man who from the outset feels that he's no longer of the present day and finds himself resigned to his own end. "Do you know," he says, toward the beginning, "I wish I could step ash.o.r.e and die with this moment as my memory of earth."

Section Two begins as Robinson takes his "final walk" beside the waves: "They were full of the terror of death, of the return to the caldron of the sagas, where what was finished was swept away and new patterns formed from the atoms ... Age was rather an exhaustion of the emotions than a physical fatigue ..." Or, as Tennyson's Arthur put it, "The old order changeth, yielding place to new ..." Will Avalon-for Robinson-be a place of death or a place of healing, or will the latter be a version of the former?

And what will Avalon be for the other folk headed there? Each one of the travellers has different hopes connected with it. A young girl thinks happily of love, Alex wants "the truth," the pilot-an Avalonian-is torn between the domestic and the adventurous. Avalon is said to be a place of more freedom, but there's mention of a mysterious "them" who seem to be a controlling bunch, if only in the way of a posse of quasi-benevolent religious supervisors checking to see if you've pa.s.sed some never-specified test. It's a land of peace, but then, so is the after-life. Is Avalon really the country from whose bourne no traveller returns, as we're led from time to time to believe? But then we're led to believe otherwise, because Alex has been there and has come back. No sooner does Bryher strew around a few literary and metaphysical allusions than she tramples them underfoot. This is maddening in the way of vampire novels that break the long-established rules ("What do you mean, you like garlic?"). Sometimes it's as if Bryher forgot exactly what it was she'd set out to do.

Visa for Avalon purports to take place in the future-television and computers are mentioned in pa.s.sing-but the foreground is taken up by a great deal of linoleum: good, bright linoleum, and bad, squalid linoleum, and even a linoleum hat. Nothing dates an era more tellingly than floor coverings, and 1965 was the Age of s.h.a.g Carpeting, not the Age of Linoleum. In the physical details of its setting, Visa for Avalon suggests not a future but a past-two decades of it laminated together. There's the utopian brutalism of the fascist and n.a.z.i 1930s ideologies, with their impulse to destroy the systems of the past and streamline the present, and there's the dinginess of the war years in England, with their crowded trains and depressing waiting rooms. The emotional climate, too, is that of wartime: the inability to get anywhere or obtain much-needed doc.u.ments or do anything effective, combined with a grinding boredom, and, at the same time, the acute, stomach-churning anxiety of not knowing what is really going on.

In these areas of observation, Visa for Avalon has the texture of lived experience. We don't know what to think about the tyrannical government or Movement that's taking over-are they left or right, or does it matter?-but we certainly learn to the last traffic jam and hastily packed suitcase and nasty armband-wearing guard and eerily deserted street how such a takeover would feel to ordinary folk trapped inside it. As people do when their adrenaline levels are high and there's no overt means of expression, the characters focus on single details perceived with hallucinatory clearness: the rusty oil drum, the splintered piece of timber, the cable wheel. The handling of these sections is realistic in the extreme.

Once on the plane with the small saving remnant, we find ourselves back in a quasi-symbolic universe. Robinson wonders whether the whole experience he's just lived through has been an illusion; he decides it's real, but we're wondering. Soon he's speaking the language of salvation by Grace: "What had he ever done that had made him worthy of rescue?"

"Things do come to an end," says Lilian. As she remembers with nostalgia her life in Trelawney, she has an amazing insight: By a terrific effort of will and with the physical force that she had needed to stand against the autumn gales, she stammered, but who heard her against the roar of the engines, "I wanted to be out on the Seven Seas, I never wanted to be in Rose Cottage at all!"

It now seems that Lilian-unknown to herself-has wanted to run away to sea all along, like the young Bryher. Is a visa for Avalon a kind of litmus paper that shows us the truth about ourselves?

Right after this surprising cri du coeur the plane plunges into fog, the radio fails, the novel takes us through a near-death experience, and Robinson is back in Tennysonian mode: "All of us have our fate ... none of us can escape it." But whatever his fate may be, it doesn't include a crash-landing in the sea, since Avalon itself is glimpsed briefly at the book's end: "... the clouds parted for an instant and Robinson saw far below them, as they came in for a perfect landing, gorse bushes, the valley full of apple trees and a stretch of white sand." Or, as Tennyson had it, I am going a long way With these thou seest-if indeed I go For all my mind is clouded with a doubt To the island-valley of Avilion; ... it lies Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair, with orchard lawns ...

Is life a waiting room or a journey? In Visa for Avalon, both options are proposed. If a waiting room, what comes after you've done the waiting? If a journey, what is its end? Bryher doesn't tell us, partly-one feels-because Tennyson doesn't tell us whether Arthur lived or died, and partly because she hadn't made up her own mind about life after death; but partly, also, because she wisely judged that in a narrative such as this, to travel is much better than to arrive.

There's some suggestion that Avalon is whatever you think it is, and the same can be said of Visa for Avalon. In part, it's a trip through the nightmare of political repression and mob takeover, in part a veiled encounter with approaching death: Everyman meets The Pilgrim's Progress crossed with "The Pa.s.sing of Arthur" with undertones of The Seventh Seal, as domesticated in Trelawney-by-the-Sea. It would be stretching matters to call it an entirely successful work of art-its threads are too loose-but, despite this, it remains a suggestive and beguiling fiction by one of the twentieth century's most interesting artistic figures. The Paris Press should be thanked for republis.h.i.+ng it.

Brave New World.

by Aldous Huxley.

O brave new world, that has such people in't!.

MIRANDA, in Shakespeare's play The Tempest, on first sighting the s.h.i.+pwrecked courtiers In the latter half of the twentieth century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures. One was George Orwell's 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its horrific vision of a brutal, mind-controlling totalitarian state-a book that gave us Big Brother, and thoughtcrime and Newspeak and the memory hole and the torture palace called the Ministry of Love, and the discouraging spectacle of a boot grinding into the human face forever.

The other was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), which proposed a different and softer form of totalitarianism-one of conformity achieved through engineered, bottle-grown babies and hypnotic persuasion rather than through brutality, of boundless consumption that keeps the wheels of production turning and of officially enforced promiscuity that does away with s.e.xual frustration, of a pre-ordained caste system ranging from a highly intelligent managerial cla.s.s to a subgroup of dim-witted serfs programmed to love their menial work, and of soma, a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects.

Which template would win? we wondered. During the Cold War, Nineteen Eighty-Four seemed to have the edge. But when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, pundits proclaimed the end of history, shopping reigned triumphant, and there was already lots of quasi-soma percolating through society. True, promiscuity had taken a hit from AIDS, but on balance we seemed to be in for a trivial, giggly, drug-enhanced Spend-O-Rama: Brave New World was winning the race.

That picture changed too, with the attack on New York City's Twin Towers in 2001. Thoughtcrime and the boot grinding into the human face could not be got rid of so easily after all. The Ministry of Love is back with us, it appears, though it's no longer limited to the lands behind the former Iron Curtain: the West has its own versions now.

On the other hand, Brave New World hasn't gone away. Shopping malls stretch as far as the bulldozer can see. On the wilder fringes of the genetic engineering community, there are true believers prattling of the GenRich and the GenPoor-Huxley's Alphas and Epsilons-and busily engaging in schemes for genetic enhancement and-to go Brave New World one better-for immortality.

Would it be possible for both of these futures-the hard and the soft-to exist at the same time, in the same place? And what would that be like?

Surely it's time to look again at Brave New World and to examine its arguments for and against the totally planned society it describes, in which "everybody is happy now." What sort of happiness is on offer, and what is the price we might pay to achieve it?

I first read Brave New World in the early 1950s, when I was fourteen. It made a deep impression on me, though I didn't fully understand some of what I was reading. It's a tribute to Huxley's writing skills that although I didn't know what knickers were, or camisoles-nor did I know that zippers, when they first appeared, had been denounced from pulpits as lures of the Devil because they made clothes so easy to take off-I nonetheless had a vivid picture of "zippicamiknicks," that female undergarment with a single zipper down the front that could be shucked so very easily: Zip! The rounded pinkness fell apart like a neatly divided apple. A wriggle of the arms, a lifting first of the right foot, then the left: the zippicamiknicks were lying lifeless and as though deflated on the floor.

I myself was living in the era of "elasticized panty girdles" that could not be got out of or indeed into without an epic struggle, so this was heady stuff indeed.

The girl shedding the zippicamiknicks is Lenina Crowne, a blue-eyed beauty both strangely innocent and alluringly voluptuous-or "pneumatic," as her many male admirers call her. Lenina doesn't see why she shouldn't have s.e.x with anyone she likes whenever the occasion offers, as to do so is merely polite behaviour and not to do so is selfish. The man she's trying to seduce by shedding her undergarment is John "the Savage," who's been raised far outside the "civilized" pale on a diet of Shakespeare's chast.i.ty/wh.o.r.e speeches, and Zuni cults, and self-flagellation, and who believes in religion and romance, and in suffering to be worthy of one's beloved, and who idolizes Lenina until she doffs her zippicamiknicks in such a casual and shameless fas.h.i.+on.

Never were two sets of desiring genitalia so thoroughly at odds. And thereby hangs Huxley's tale.

Brave New World is either a perfect-world utopia or its nasty opposite, a dystopia, depending on your point of view: its inhabitants are beautiful, secure, and free from diseases and worries, though in a way we like to think we would find unacceptable. "Utopia" is sometimes said to mean "no place," from the Greek "O Topia," but others derive it from "eu," as in "eugenics," in which case it would mean "healthy place" or "good place." Sir Thomas More, in his own sixteenth-century Utopia, may have been punning: utopia is the good place that doesn't exist.

As a literary construct, Brave New World thus has a long list of literary ancestors. Plato's Republic and the Bible's Book of Revelation and the myth of Atlantis are the great-great-grandparents of the form; nearer in time are Sir Thomas More's Utopia, and the land of the talking-horse, totally rational Houyhnhnms in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, in which the brainless, pretty "upper cla.s.ses" play in the suns.h.i.+ne during the day and the ugly "lower cla.s.ses" run the underground machinery and emerge at night to eat the social b.u.t.terflies....

Insofar as they are critical of society as it presently exists but nevertheless take a dim view of the prospects of the human race, utopias may verge on satire; but insofar as they endorse the view that humanity is perfectible, or can at least be vastly improved, they will resemble idealizing romances. The First World War marked the end of the romantic-idealistic utopian dream in literature, just as several real-life utopian plans were about to be launched with disastrous effects. The Communist regime in Russia and the n.a.z.i takeover of Germany both began as utopian visions.

But as most literary utopias had already discovered, perfectibility breaks on the rock of dissent. What do you do with people who don't endorse your views or fit in with your plans? ... It's rats in the eyes for you-as in Nineteen Eighty-Four-if you won't love Big Brother. (Brave New World has its own gentler punishments: for non-conformists, it's exile to Iceland, where Man's Final End can be discussed among like-minded intellects, without pestering "normal" people-in a sort of university, as it were.) Utopias and dystopias from Plato's Republic on have had to cover the same basic ground that real societies do. All must answer the same questions: Where do people live, what do they eat, what do they wear, what do they do about s.e.x and child-rearing? Who has the power, who does the work, how do citizens relate to nature, and how does the economy function? Romantic utopias such as Morris's News from Nowhere and W. H. Hudson's A Crystal Age present a Pre-Raphaelite picture, with the inhabitants going in for flowing robes, natural settings in abodes that sound like English country houses with extra stained gla.s.s, and lots of arts and crafts. Everything would be fine, we're told, if we could only do away with industrialism and get back in tune with Nature, and deal with overpopulation....

But when Huxley was writing Brave New World at the beginning of the 1930s, he was, in his own words, an "amused, Pyrrhonic aesthete," a member of that group of bright young upstarts that swirled around the Bloomsbury Group and delighted in attacking anything Victorian or Edwardian. So Brave New World tosses out the flowing robes, the crafts, and the tree-hugging. Its architecture is futuristic-electrically lighted towers and softly glowing pink gla.s.s-and everything in its cityscape is relentlessly unnatural and just as relentlessly industrialized. Viscose and acetate and imitation leather are its fabrics of choice; apartment buildings, complete with artificial music and taps that flow with perfume, are its dwellings; transportation is by private helicopter. Babies are no longer born, they're grown in hatcheries, their bottles moving along a.s.sembly lines, in various types and batches according to the needs of "the hive," and fed on "external secretion" rather than "milk." The word mother-so thoroughly wors.h.i.+pped by the Victorians-has become a shocking obscenity; and indiscriminate s.e.x, which was a shocking obscenity for the Victorians, is now de rigueur.

"He patted me on the behind this afternoon," said Lenina.

"There, you see!" f.a.n.n.y was triumphant. "That shows what he stands for. The strictest conventionality."

Many of Brave New World's nervous jokes turn on these kinds of inversions-more startling to its first audience, perhaps, than to us, but still wry enough. Victorian thrift turns into the obligation to spend, Victorian till-death-do-us-part monogamy has been replaced with "everyone belongs to everyone else," Victorian religiosity has been channelled into the wors.h.i.+p of an invented deity-"Our Ford," named after American car-czar Henry Ford, G.o.d of the a.s.sembly line-via communal orgies. Even the "Our Ford" chant-"orgy-porgy"-is an inversion of the familiar nursery rhyme in which kissing the girls makes them cry. Now, it's if you refuse to kiss them-as "the Savage" does-that the tears will flow.

s.e.x is often centre stage in utopias and dystopias-who can do what, with which set of genital organs, and with whom being one of humanity's main preoccupations. Because s.e.x and procreation have been separated and women no longer give birth-the very idea is yuck-making to them-s.e.x has become a recreation. Little naked children carry on "erotic play" in the shrubberies, so as to get a hand in early. Some women are sterile-"freemartins"-and perfectly nice girls, though a little whiskery. The others practise "Malthusian drill"-a form of birth control-and take "pregnancy surrogate" hormone treatments if they feel broody, and sport sweet little faux-leather fas.h.i.+onista cartridge belts crammed with contraceptives. If they slip up on their Malthusian drill, there's always the lovely pink-gla.s.s Abortion Centre. Huxley wrote before the pill, but its advent brought his imagined s.e.xual free-for-all a few steps closer. (What about gays? Does "everyone belongs to everyone else" really mean everyone? We aren't told.) Of course, Huxley himself still had one foot in the nineteenth century: he could not have dreamed his upside-down morality unless he himself also found it threatening. At the time he was writing Brave New World, he was still in shock from a visit to the United States, where he was particularly frightened by ma.s.s consumerism and its group mentality and its vulgarities.

I use the word dreamed advisedly because Brave New World-gulped down whole-achieves an effect not unlike a controlled hallucination. All is surface; there is no depth. As you might expect from an author with impaired eyesight, the visual sense predominates: colours are intense, light and darkness vividly described. Sound is next in importance, especially during group ceremonies and orgies, and the viewing of "Feelies"-movies in which you feel the sensations of those onscreen, "The Gorillas' Wedding" and "Sperm Whale's Love-Life" being sample t.i.tles. Scents are third-perfume wafts everywhere, and is dabbed here and there; one of the most poignant encounters between John the Savage and the lovely Lenina is the one in which he buries his wors.h.i.+pping face in her divinely scented undergarments while she herself is innocently sleeping, zonked out on a strong dose of soma, partly because she can't stand the awful real-life smells of the "reservation" where the new world has not been implemented.

Many utopias and dystopias emphasize food (delicious or awful; or, in the case of Swift's Houyhnhnms, oats), but in Brave New World the menus are not presented. Lenina and her lay-of-the-month, Henry, eat "an excellent meal," but we aren't told what it is. (Beef would be my guess, in view of the huge barns full of cows that provide the external secretions.) Despite the dollops of s.e.x-on-demand, the bodies in Brave New World are oddly disembodied, which serves to underscore one of Huxley's points: in a world in which everything is available, nothing has any meaning.

Meaning has in fact been eliminated, as far as possible. All books except works of technology have been banned, pace Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451; museum-goers have been slaughtered, pace Henry Ford's "History is bunk." As for G.o.d, he is present "as an absence; as though he weren't there at all"-except, of course, for the deeply religious John the Savage, who has been raised on a Zuni "reservation" off-limits to normal Brave New Worlders. There, archaic life carries on, replete with "meaning" of the most intense kinds. John is the only character in the book who has a real body, but he knows it through pain, not through pleasure. "Nothing costs enough here," he says of the perfumed new world where he's been brought as an "experiment."

The "comfort" offered by Mustapha Mond-one of the ten "Controllers" of this world and a direct descendant of Plato's Guardians-is not enough for John. He wants the old world back-dirt, diseases, free will, fear, anguish, blood, sweat, tears, and all. He believes he has a soul, and like many an early twentieth-century literary possessor of such a thing-such as the missionary in Somerset Maugham's 1921 story "Miss Thompson," who hangs himself after sinning with a prost.i.tute-John is made to pay the price for this belief.

In the Foreword to Brave New World written in 1946, after the horrors of the Second World War and Hitler's Final Solution, Huxley criticizes himself for having provided only two choices in his 1932 utopia/dystopia-an "insane life in Utopia" or "the life of a primitive in an Indian village, more human in some respects, but in others hardly less queer and abnormal." (He does, in fact, provide a third sort of life-that of the intellectual community of misfits on Iceland-but poor John the Savage isn't allowed to go there, and he wouldn't have liked it anyway, as there are no public flagellations available.) The Huxley of 1946 comes up with another sort of utopia, one in which "sanity" is possible. By this, Huxley means a kind of "High Utilitarianism" dedicated to a "conscious and rational" pursuit of man's "Final End," which is a kind of union with the immanent "Tao or Logos, the transcendent G.o.dhead or Brahmin." No wonder Huxley subsequently got heavily into the mescaline and wrote The Doors of Perception, thus inspiring a generation of 1960s hopheads and musicians to seek G.o.d in altered brain chemistry. His interest in soma, it appears, didn't spring out of nowhere.

Meanwhile, those of us still tottering along on the earthly plane-and thus still able to read books-are left with Brave New World. How does it stand up, seventy-five years later? And how close have we come, in real life, to the society of vapid consumers, idle pleasure-seekers, inner-s.p.a.ce trippers, and programmed conformists that it presents?

The answer to the first question, for me, is that it stands up very well. It's still as vibrant, fresh, and somehow shocking as it was when I, for one, first read it.

The answer to the second question, Dear Reader, rests with you. Look in the mirror: do you see Lenina Crowne looking back at you or do you see John the Savage? If you're a human being, you'll be seeing something of both, because we've always wanted things both ways. We wish to be as the careless G.o.ds, lying around on Olympus, eternally beautiful, having s.e.x and being entertained by the anguish of others. And at the same time we want to be those anguished others, because we believe, with John, that life has meaning beyond the play of the senses and that immediate gratification will never be enough.

It was Huxley's genius to present us to ourselves in all our ambiguity. Alone among the animals, we suffer from the future perfect tense. Rover the Dog cannot imagine a future world of dogs in which all fleas will have been eliminated and doghood will finally have achieved its full glorious potential. But thanks to their uniquely structured languages, human beings can imagine such enhanced states for themselves, though they can also question their own grandiose constructions. It's these double-sided abilities that produce masterpieces of speculation such as Brave New World.

To quote The Tempest, source of Huxley's t.i.tle: "We are such stuff/As dreams are made on." He might well have added: and nightmares.

Of the Madness of Mad.