Island by Aldous Huxley || Goodreads || Amazon
Aldoux Huxley, for those who might not remember, is the writer of Brave New World (one of my favorite dystopian novels). An English writer who lived from 1894 to 1963 and wrote more than 50 books!
If you read Brave New World, then the Island definitely feels familiar in some places (although one is dystopian and the other is utopian), but it's generally not repetitive and pretty interesting. Huxley wrote Brave New World 30 years before writing the Island and they were both during vastly different places in his life. In fact, Island is the last book he published and he wrote it after he was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer.
The Island follows the story of Will Farnaby, an English journalist who is (intentionally) shipwrecked on the Island of Pala. He is there to convince the Rani (the queen of the island) to sell their oil to Joe Aldehyde, a British Lord. There is also Murugan, the prince of the island who will assume power in a few days when he becomes of age. Both Murugan and the queen were raised outside of Pala, so they are highly westernized and dislike Palanese culture. The Rani believes she is on a divine mission and that everyone on the island is misguided, while Murugan can’t wait to sell out and ‘modernize’ the island with fancy automobiles and all sorts of other material luxury goods.
In reality, Pala is way ahead of its time. The Palanese seem to have achieved perfect living practices to prosper as a community. They have the best of both worlds as they tap into western knowledge, literature, and scientific innovations, but infuse it into their own systems of eastern education and spirituality. Someone in the book observes, “So long as it [Pala] remains out of touch with the rest of the world, an ideal society can be a viable society,” however, in the post-WWII era they are living in, that is not an easy task, and the Palanese know that the future doesn’t hold much kindness for them.
Will is not an initially likable protagonist, though he somewhat grows on you. A description that Dr. Robert gives of him early on is very fitting, “The physique of a Messiah. But too clever to believe in God or be convinced of his own mission. And too sensitive, even if he were convinced, to carry it out. His muscles would like to act and his feelings would like to believe; but his nerve endings and his cleverness won’t allow it.”
He is cynical and apathetic and repeats several times in the book that he won’t take yes for an answer. He is highly skeptical about the utopian character of the island, and it takes a long time for the Palanese to wear him down. He is stubborn about his cynicism and so staunch in his belief that the Palanese are doomed that after seeing, first-hand, the ecstasy of a youth who praises the yoga of love, Will observes, “It was profoundly touching. But he refused to be touched. Noli me tangere—it was a categorical imperative.”
Throughout most of his stay in Pala, he hangs unto his “Gray Life” plague, his paranoia, and his disbelief in the possibility of good. He is proud and angst-ridden in a cliche way. He needs help but will never “stoop that low” to ask for it. But towards the end of the story, he reaches a level of self-awareness that endears him to the reader. He sees his before-Pala self as a “muddy filter” and describes it as, “The poor idiot hadn’t wanted to take yes for an answer in any field but the aesthetic. And all the time he had been denying, by the mere fact of being himself, all the beauty and meaning he so passionately longed to say yes to. ”
Although as a character he is not immediately likable, as a literary hero, he is brilliantly written. Huxley describes a scene for example, “Will questioned with that innocent air of total ignorance which he had found by long experience to be the best way of eliciting information from the simpleminded and the self-important.”
And because we see the island through the lens of Will, despite having a third person omniscient narrator, this wit seeps into the descriptions of the other characters. A good depiction of the Rani and Murugan is as follows:
“Murugan, meanwhile, had pushed up a chair. Without so much as a backward glance—regally confident that someone must always, in the very nature of things, be at hand to guard against mishaps and loss of dignity—the Rani sat down with all the majestic emphasis of her hundred kilograms.”
Another equally humorous passage:
“Doctor’s orders are doctor’s orders,” cried the Rani, overacting the role of royal personage deigning to be playfully gracious.
One of the things in the book that I loved conceptually were the mynah birds. The islanders have trained local birds to repeat “Attention” and “Here and now!” because, as Mary Sarojini explains, “That’s what you always forget, isn’t it? I mean, you forget to pay attention to what’s happening. And that’s the same as not being here and now.”
Palanese philosophy is ever-present in the book and I highlighted a lot of things because they seemed like generally useful principles to live by. For example, in one section, Susila is explaining to Will why it’s important to understand what it means to truly love someone and she says, “Because I always have the same name and the same nose and eyes, it doesn’t follow that I’m always the same woman. Recognizing that fact and reacting to it sensibly—that’s part of the Art of Loving.”
Some other gems:
- “It isn’t a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past. How to be there with the dead and yet still be here, on the spot, with the living.”
- “When in doubt,” said Dr. Robert, “always act on the assumption that people are more honorable than you have any solid reason for supposing they are. ”
- “[O]ne has no right to inflict one’s sadness on other people. And no right, of course, to pretend that one isn’t sad. One just has to accept one’s grief and one’s absurd attempts to be a stoic.”
- “Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very first that all living is relationship.”
- “Balance, give and take, no excesses—it’s the rule in nature and, translated out of fact into morality, it ought to be the rule among people.”
- “We shall be permitted to live on this planet only for as long as we treat all nature with compassion and intelligence.”
One thing that I appreciate about Huxley is that although he is not a contemporary writer, he never feels inaccessible. On the contrary, I really enjoy his writing because not only is it witty and philosophical, but it also gets quite lyrical at times. For example, the second chapter of the book ends with, “so that the whole universe seemed to be fairly splitting its sides over the enormous joke of existence.”
Later in chapter four, we have, “There were daisies in the grass and dandelions, and across the water towered up the huge church, challenging the wildness of those soft April clouds with its austere geometry. Challenging the wildness, and at the same time complementing it, coming to terms with it in perfect reconciliation.”
And its philosophy, at times a little convoluted, is still profound. Will is given a booklet called, “Notes on What's What, and What It Might be Reasonable to do about What's What” on Palanese philosophies in order for him to know “what always and everywhere has to be done by anyone who has a clear idea about what’s what.”
This booklet has charms like:
- “If I only knew who in fact I am, I should cease to behave as what I think I am; and if I stopped behaving as what I think I am, I should know who I am.”
- “Knowing who in fact we are results in Good Being, and Good Being results in the most appropriate kind of good doing. But good doing does not of itself result in Good Being.”
- “[G]etting to know oneself to the point where one won’t be compelled by one’s unconscious to do all the ugly, absurd, self-stultifying things that one so often finds oneself doing.”
And of course, Huxley has pages full of criticisms on materialism, consumerism, organized religion, obligatory suffering, codependence in relationships, and nuclear families. And for the most part, they are quite poignant social commentaries.
For the Palanese (and Huxley), “Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse.”
One ruthless recipe Susila gives of the European family is, “Take one sexually inept wage slave,” she went on, “one dissatisfied female, two or (if preferred) three small television addicts; marinate in a mixture of Freudism and dilute Christianity; then bottle up tightly in a four-room flat and stew for fifteen years in their own juice.” In contrast, the Palanese recipe for a happy family is, “Take twenty sexually satisfied couples and their offspring; add science, intuition and humor in equal quantities; steep in Tantrik Buddhism and simmer indefinitely in an open pan in the open air over a brisk flame of affection.”
And some other pointed monologues about the lack of thinking and reason, the focus on medications and not cures, the emphasis on theory but the lack of practical implications, use of propaganda and Pavlovian techniques for brainwashing and benefiting tyrants rather than encouraging compassion and trust etc. etc.
Some similarities that I caught between the Island and the Brave New World:
- Drug use – in one, it’s a tool for enlightenment, in the other it’s for pacifying people
- Big families — in one, it’s to have healthier children with more outlets and role models, in the other it’s to erase individual thinking
- Free contraception — in one, it’s to encourage free sexual expression and agency, in the other it’s to increase hedonism and promiscuity
- Omnipresent slogans – in one, the mynah birds encourage mindfulness and compassion, in the other hypnopædia is used to indoctrinate children
Overall, I would definitely recommend it as a book, and encourage you to also read Brave New World if you haven't. The experience can be eye-opening and awe-inspiring at the same time.