27. Brave New World: The Dystopia That Came True?

How does Aldous Huxley satirise roaring twenties America? Is a Brave New World more realistic than 1984? And, what is the novel's Shakespearean connection? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of Brave New World, and the novel itself. Exclusions apply. Learn more at https://www.klarna.com/uk/buyer-protection-description/. Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ For analysis, book recommendations and more, sign up to our newsletter, Book Club Notes, introduced weekly by Tabby or Dominic. Sign up at: https://www.thebookclubhq.com/ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Joe Pettit Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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  From the studio that brought you WandaVision.

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  I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore.

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  The Vision returns from the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy. That family wasn't real.

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• 2:18Speaker 01

  The director and his students stepped into the nearest lift and were carried up to the fifth floor. Infant nurseries, neo-Pavlovian conditioning rooms, announced the notice board. The nurse is stiffened to attention as the director came in.

• 2:31Speaker 00

  Set out the books, he said curtly.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  In silence, the nurses obeyed his command. Between the rose bowls, the books were duly set out. A row of nursery quarters opened invitingly, each at some gaily-coloured image of beast or fish or bird.

• 2:44Speaker 00

  Now bring in the children.

• 2:45Speaker 01

  They hurried out of the room and returned in a minute or two, each pushing a kind of tall, dumb waiter laden on all of its four wire-netted shelves with eight-month-old babies, all exactly alike. A Bokunovsky group, it was evident, and all, since their caste was delta, dressed in khaki.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  Put them down on the floor. Now, turn them so they can see the flowers and the books.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  From the ranks of the crawling babies came little squeals of excitement, gurgles and twitterings of pleasure. The director waited until all were happily busy. Then?

• 3:15Speaker 00

  Watch carefully, he said, and lifting his hand, he gave the signal.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  There was a violent explosion, shriller and even shriller, a siren shrieked. Alarm bells maddeningly sounded. The children started, screamed, their faces were distorted with terror.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  And now?

• 3:32Speaker 01

  The director shouted, for the noise was deafening.

• 3:35Speaker 00

  Now we proceed to rub in the lesson with a mild electric shock.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  Wow. Hello, everybody. That is from the second chapter of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, published in February 1932. And we are in London in the far future. We're in the year 2540, to be exact. Or, as the characters in the book call it, AF, which stands for after Ford 632. So six centuries after the first Model T car rolled off Henry Ford's assembly lines.

• 4:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, hello, everybody. So we are on the fifth floor of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where the director is giving the students a tour. You chose the scene as the reading. It's a brilliant scene, actually. So he's shown them the fertilising room and the buckling room. He's shown them these places where these thousands of identical twins, who have already been sorted into their intellectual and social classes, and they're being born artificially using the Bokunovsky process. And now they're in the conditioning rooms and the babies are basically being taught to hate and fear books and flowers. So books, because they don't want them reading and they don't want them questioning the value of society. They definitely don't want them listening to books podcasts.

• 4:50Speaker 01

  Definitely not.

• 4:51Speaker 00

  And they don't want them to like flowers because then they would go on useless country walks and they wouldn't, they wouldn't consume anything.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  What purpose does that serve to society?

• 4:59Speaker 00

  Exactly. A love of nature keeps no factories busy, so it was decided to abolish the love of nature. So even if you haven't read Brave New World, you will gauge from the opening reading that Huxley's vision of the future is not necessarily all fun and games, is it?

• 5:14Speaker 01

  No, it's not. And I think because of that, because it's kind of, it's a dystopian vision of the future. It's often bracketed with George Orwell's 1984. They're both modern literature's great dystopian classics, and they offer sort of nightmarish warning about where the world is heading. And then, speaking of another great dystopian classic, in her preface to the Vintage Classics edition, Margaret Atwood said that in the latter half of the 20th century, two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures. One was obviously George Orwell's 1949 novel, 1984, and that offers a horrific vision of the future. And she says, a brutal, mind-controlling totalitarian state. And the other was Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which proposed a different and softer form of totalitarianism.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  One of conformity achieved through bottle-grown babies and hypnotic persuasion, of boundless consumption and of officially enforced promiscuity and of soma. And I think even people who haven't read Brave New World have heard of soma. And it's a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects. And in her own novel, The Handmaid's Tale, she draws on both of those. And we actually did that on a mini-series that we did on The Rest is History back in September. And we've also obviously done 1984 on the book club already. And we're going to delve a lot more into the personal links between Huxley and Orwell a bit later on. Because in some ways, yes, the books are very different and the visions that they offer are very different. But they're also pretty similar, wouldn't you say?

• 6:40Speaker 00

  I would say. So I was thinking about this, both 1984 and Brave New World. The opening chapters, we meet a disaffected employee of the state. So in 1984, it's Winston Smith. In this book, it's Bernard Marx. And they work in a towering sort of government office block in Bloomsbury in central London. And in both cases, it's decorated with a huge slogan, the slogan of the party or the state. So in this case, the slogan is community, identity, stability.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Fair, it's all warm and cuddly.

• 7:12Speaker 00

  It's very warm and cuddly, exactly. Well, actually, I think the mood, the mood is not quite as forbidding as in 1984.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  God, no.

• 7:18Speaker 00

  So when you start 1984, it's very physical straight away. It's very visceral. I remember when we did our episode, we were talking about the scene when Winston goes into Victory Mansions and there's the smell of boiled cabbage and the lift doesn't work. And he's got his ulcer or whatever his varicose veins. And it's very gritty and it's very textured. Yeah, it's very Soviet in feeling. It's very kind of, it's a, it's a sort of cross between the Soviet Union and 1940s bombed-out austerity Britain. This book is much more sanitised, cleaner, it's less physical.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  It's also quite chirpy.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  You know, everyone's quite chirpy because by the very nature of the society, everyone is happy.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  That's so true. It is chirpy. And even that scene, the, the bloke giving the kids an electric shock. He's pretty chirpy and he has to shout to be heard above the, the noise and all of that.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  But every, everything's nice, everything looks nice. Everything's where it should be, everything's clean, tidy.

• 8:11Speaker 00

  No, I hadn't read Brave New World before doing this, to my shame. But I've always seen people saying, well, actually Orwell's book is more physical and it's more, it's sort of grimmer and it's probably better known. But Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is a better prediction of where we're heading because of its vision of people enslaved by consumerism, by promiscuity, by drugs. This is what's happened to us under 21st century capitalism. Now, whether or not they're right, that's a different issue. Does it mean that Brave New World is better as a novel? I am not so sure, and we will, we will come to this. Had you read this book before, Tabby?

• 8:48Speaker 01

  I have. I had, I read it at university. I remember sort of enjoying it, but I didn't think loads about it afterwards. I definitely wasn't massively engaged with kind of the ideas it was putting across. I find it now, as I did then, a much easier read than 1984. Not necessarily better, but easier because of what we've just said. It's a much brighter, more colourful society, and there's a lot less fear than there is in 1984.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  Even if, you know, when I reread it this time, I found it much more disturbing. But again, there's a lightness to it that totally is totally at odds with kind of the heavy gloom of 1984.

• 9:24Speaker 00

  It's quite a whimsical at times.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  It is quite whimsical. And for instance, in a funny way, it feels much more old fashioned than 1984 does. I think even though it's very much rooted in a particular time, place, politically, economically, 1984 feels more modern in the reading. I felt like this felt quite old fashioned. I felt like it belonged alongside, I don't know, the C.S. Lewis's in terms of the way that it was written. But that brings us to Aldous Huxley himself, because like George Orwell, he's a genuinely fascinating and remarkable character. They even went to the same school.

• 9:57Speaker 00

  They did.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  But Dominic, indulge us with your own spontaneously conceived and very witty comparison, which we definitely didn't discuss before recording this episode.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  I like to amuse Tabby with my horrendous witticisms. And I said to you, Aldous Huxley felt to me like he was basically like if you put Virginia Woolf, P.G. Wodehouse,

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:15Speaker 00

  and George Harrison.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Oh, he's only gone and done it.

• 10:19Speaker 00

  In a blender, this would be the, Aldous Huxley would be the result.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Right. Is that my cue to laugh uproariously and congratulate you on your insight, which is what it says I should do in the notes?

• 10:30Speaker 00

  It is. This is great insight. What we should start the podcast here, it'd never get better. Yeah, okay. So basically, Aldous Huxley, he has something of the sort of the writer of the country house social comedy. He has something of the sort of bohemian intellectual upper class, hence Virginia Woolf.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Absolutely, he does. Yeah.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  He has the fascination with eastern mysticism of the George Harrison. So there you go. He is a product of the late Victorian intellectual elite. So his grandfather, a very famous man in his turn, Thomas Henry Huxley was known as Darwin's Bulldog. And Thomas Henry Huxley would go around having debates with people about evolution.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Sounds like such a ball.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  He was the great popularizer. No, you're quite wrong. In 1860, this was top quality entertainment. You'd go and see Thomas Huxley savaging the Bishop of Oxford or something.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  To be fair, that would be entertaining.

• 11:22Speaker 00

  So this is what would happen. And then Thomas Huxley's son was Leonard Huxley. So he was a teacher, he was a writer, he edited magazines, and he married the granddaughter of Dr. Arnold of Tom Brown's School Days fame.

• 11:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're a big fan of his, no?

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Massive fan. Loved Dr. Arnold, loved Tom Brown's School Days, loved all forms of boarding school culture.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  And she also, following in those lofty footsteps, she also set up a school.

• 11:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, set up a school herself. Brilliant. Brilliant family. Anyway, they do send, they're unbelievably worthy. I think I would, I would not have got on very well with them.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  No.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  So Aldous is their third son. He's born in Surrey in 1894. His family, they called him Ogie, which is short for ogre. Aldous Huxley gets sent to prep school in Eton, and he has three big traumas in his life. Number one, when he's fourteen.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Like Virginia Woolf, actually.

• 12:10Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. Actually, not dissimilar. When he's fourteen, his mother dies of cancer. Then his brother, who's called Trevanen, kills himself, and he was very old, close to his brother. His brother suffered from depression. And then at Eton, Aldous Huxley got this eye infection, which basically meant that he was virtually blind for two years. And weren't you telling me that he really was effectively blind for the rest of his life?

• 12:34Speaker 01

  He was, certainly in one eye. People disagree about this, but for instance, one thing I read said that Huxley had told him that he was basically totally blind in one eye, and the other one wasn't great eyes either. But he'd said, sort of very much in keeping with that sort of British stiff upper lip of that time, I don't give a damn. But you would give a damn, wouldn't you? And it's interesting, because if you watch him on YouTube, which I did, I followed down a bit of a tunnel, he looks blind. One of his eyes is totally clouded over. But the bad news is, for a very intelligent boy and with a very impressive family, this means that he can't become a doctor, which is what he'd hoped to be. The good news is that he's rejected for service in the First World War because obviously he can't see. So he goes to

• 13:15Speaker 01

  Balliol College, Oxford, he gets a first in English. I'm so struck by this. This is an epoch of very impressive, prolific young intellectuals, because he writes poetry, stories, he writes all sorts of novels, travel books, biographies. So impressive. But he also needs to make money. So he does all sorts of actually very interesting jobs. He works as a farm labourer, he works for House and Garden magazine, he even works for Vogue. Those are two things that you wouldn't think to put together, I think, in one's mind. And then he spends a year teaching French at his old school, Eton. And of course, one of the boys he teaches is a teenager called Eric Blair, and this is George Orwell. George Orwell never wrote about Huxley, or Eton, to be honest. But

• 14:00Speaker 01

  another boy, a guy called Stephen Runciman, who wrote these massive tomes about the Crusades, which aren't necessarily thrilling. He said that Huxley was a useless teacher and couldn't see anything, I mean, obviously, and was very nervous and had no authority. And I think that kind of fits with the image of him. He's kind of, you can imagine him at this time, being sort of a willowy young man, slightly caught up in his own ideas and his own work, not with those of the boys that he's teaching.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  And then in 1919, he marries a Belgian refugee called Marie. And it's during this time that he's hanging out with the Bloomsbury Group, and he becomes friends with the philosopher Bertrand Russell, whose writing had a massive influence on Brave New World. And actually, people said that it was basically just a copycat of some Russell's writing. I think that's a bit unfair. And the writer D.H. Lawrence, who I'm a big fan of. But he did, he actually clashed with the Bloomsbury Group quite a lot, because he disagreed with a lot, their ethos of free love, for instance. You can see that in Brave New World, their aesthetic approach to life. And he actually wrote a book satirising them, which a lot of them took offence to, and they had a bit of a falling out. And he's doing lots of that at this time, writing short stories, novels,

• 15:10Speaker 01

  most of them forgotten today, kind of a serbic comedies, a bit like that one, the satire of the Bloomsbury Group. Comedies and manners, it's posh socialites going around house parties, talking about alternative lifestyles. Terrifying. It's a window into my own life there. And people at the time, though, think that it's very free thinking and witty and original.

• 15:31Speaker 00

  They sound, they sound terrible.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Really?

• 15:33Speaker 00

  I was reading up on those books.

• 15:34Speaker 01

  They sound quite Mitford, I think.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, my views, you know, my views on the sort of Brighton things and whatnot. I just think this sounds like Evelyn Waugh or something, but without the laughs.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true. But Nancy Mitford has a lot of laughs. Got to give her that.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  Okay, fine. I know you love Nancy Mitford. So anyway, he spends a lot of time abroad, doesn't he? A crucial moment, in 1926, he goes to America for the first time, and he is really overwhelmed by it. So this is America in the roaring twenties, the Jazz Age, it's Ford motorcars, it's skyscrapers, cocktail bars. And he, like a lot of British visitors at this point, you know, this is after the First World War, Britain feels quite tired, America's very exciting. And he thinks this is going to be this extraordinary threat to European civilisation. And a year later, he wrote to a friend, "The thing which is happening in America is a reevaluation of values, a radical alteration, for the worse, of established standards." And this basically gives him an idea. What would

• 16:32Speaker 00

  a world, what would the world look like if it all turned into America? What if it became Americanised? And ultimately, this is the genesis of what will become Brave New World. There are, of course, lots of other influences too, which we will come to. But he writes Brave New World in four months in the summer of 1931, when he's staying in France. And obviously, this is the book that ends up defining his reputation forever. It's not the only thing that he did, is it?

• 16:58Speaker 01

  No, no. If we just stick with Huxley himself. So he churned out dozens more books in the thirties, forties and fifties, all different themes he's, he's working with, novels, travel books, books about religion, politics, philosophy. He's considered kind of a great mind at this time, not as a great novelist. And it's really odd, given what you just read out, this antipathy that he has to American consumerism and capitalism. He moves to America in 1937, which is so odd.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  But it's the fascination. Don't you think it's the fascination, the mingling of fascination and repulsion kind of thing?

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Exactly. And particularly someone that's grown up in a very traditional aristocratic English family, this must just seem like a fantasy world, not necessarily in a good way. And then he moves to New Mexico, and then to Southern California, and then lived in Santa Monica, and then Hollywood. And he's hanging out with people like Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo, which seems so incongruous to me, given what he was like, a stick insect of an English gentleman.

• 17:57Speaker 00

  But even more incongruous is what he's doing, right?

• 17:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so weird. So he's, he's doing a bit of script work. So he writes a version of Pride and Prejudice, then Jane Eyre, and then Walt Disney gets him to do a script for Alice in Wonderland, which is never used. But in a way, that is quite fitting, because he's a man that loves a trip, and Alice in Wonderland is quite trippy.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  It is, yeah.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  And writer Christopher Isherwood visited him in California and said he looked like a bird, benevolent and quick, with interest in his surroundings. When he talked, his beautifully sensitive features seemed literally to shine with enthusiasm. He was interested in so many subjects, they could talk to anybody, anybody that is, who was also interested. I think that's like those ridiculously clever people that are like that. Children and teenagers, scientists, ranchers, actresses, priests and professors. And then he spent some time in the Mojave Desert, and then went back to Los Angeles. And in later life, he is notable for three great enthusiasms, which were very unorthodox, I would say, for this time, but very much forward looking. So

• 18:59Speaker 01

  one is pacifism. And this is philosophical pacifism, not religious, which is why he couldn't legally register it, himself as a conscientious objector in the US. And then also, and increasingly so, eastern spirituality. He becomes a massive fan of the Bhavad Gita. And he's always going on about meditations, love, you know, the visionary wisdom of India. I mean, so many ways, Dominic, you and he are birds of a feather, because when you're not talking about love, wearing a kaftan and open-toed shoes, I don't know what you're doing.

• 19:32Speaker 00

  Oh, my word. Yeah.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  A great meeting of minds there. But he's also, as I alluded to earlier, taking a lot of psychedelic drugs. So he takes mescaline in 1953, and this is when he writes The Doors of Perception about what he sees and experiences on that trip. And then he becomes an enthusiast for LSD, and he said of another trip that he had, that it was much more intense and he sort of learnt a lot more.

• 19:55Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  But then he tragically fell ill with cancer in the early 1960s. And so harshly and cruelly and unfairly, he lost the ability to speak for a man that loved ideas and loved talking. I just think that's tragic. And on his deathbed, he asked his wife to inject him with LSD. And he died on the 22nd of November, 1963. He dies on the same day as C.S. Lewis, but both of these great literary deaths are outshone by another much more famous death. And that is the assassination of JFK. And he dies six hours before Huxley dies. Seems an extraordinary coincidence.

• 20:30Speaker 00

  It is. Yeah. So Huxley's death was kind of totally overshadowed, as you say. So it was an amazing life, really. But he would be forgotten, I think, today if it weren't for Brave New World. And, well, let's come to the book. There are loads of influences to unpick, but if we just plunge into it, as the first readers did in 1932. So the first thing they would have seen, first thing you see when you read it is the title. It's a brilliant title, but then, of course, it comes from Shakespeare. It comes from The Tempest. So Act Five of The Tempest, Prospero's daughter Miranda says, "Oh, wonder, how many goodly creatures are there here? How beauteous mankind is, oh, Brave New World, that has such people in it." And even in The Tempest, this is an ironic joke. So Miranda is talking about a load of people who've turned up on her desert island.

• 21:14Speaker 00

  And she doesn't realise that these are actually very bad people, because these are the people who betrayed and exiled her father in the first place. And Prospero very wryly says, "Tis new to thee." And everybody laughs. Huxley's title is very well chosen as well, because Shakespeare is woven right through the book. So Shakespeare has been banned in this world in the future, but Shakespeare will find a way back in, as we will see. So we see the title, then we're into the book, and we're into the Hattery and Conditioning Centre. And basically, this is a device, something I think is quite neat. Some critics say it's a bit clunky. The director of the Hattery and Conditioning Centre is giving a load of students a tour. And because he's giving them a tour, he can explain exactly how the world works.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  I think this is really well done. And I actually thought that when I was rereading it this time. Because there's a long period at the very beginning when you don't, you think, oh, it's something to do with farming, maybe, or, I don't know, just some random lab work. And then you hear the word fetus and you're like, oh, what is going on here? I think it's very well done.

• 22:17Speaker 00

  I think it is well done, but the comparison with 1984. So in 1984.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  There's a lot more show, don't tell, I would say.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. 1984 is show, don't tell, whereas this is a lot of tell. But also, two things. Number one, we already mentioned, 1984 is very physical and visceral. So when we go into Victory Mansions, it feels like there's just high stakes, emotional stakes. This all feels very bloodless. It's a tour of a laboratory, and therefore, you know, that can only be so interesting. There's a lot of exposition, but there's no feeling. And part of that is because we're not really introduced to an interesting character. Couple of chapters go by, and there's basically no real named character at all. So in 1984, we're in Winston Smith's head right away, and we really believe in Winston. We believe in him as somebody with a backstory. We think he exists.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  But we don't meet a single named character who really matters in the first few pages of Brave New World. Which suggests to me, when I was reading it, all this Huxley is much more interested in the world than he is in the story. And that's, that turns out to be correct, I think.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  The other thing with Winston Smith is, is because we are in his head the whole time, you automatically connect to a certain perspective. And you're kind of rooting for this tingle of, I don't know, rebellion or seditiousness or question, you know, he's questioning his world. In this, there isn't really a hint of that till halfway through. And all of the characters that we first encounter are very jolly, very at ease and very at peace with their world. So why would we question either? It's a flat terrain. There are no bumps, hillocks, and there's nothing three-dimensional. Which means you're automatically only skimming the surface to start with. Anyway, back to the world. So the year is, as we've said, is AF 632. So we're in the middle of the 26th century. And in the past, there was a terrible world war and economic collapse.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  And this actually ties back to Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale, because we get only a very, you know, small sprinkling of what happened in the past here. That's not really the point. Whereas in 1984, there's like, there's a long passage dedicated to explaining why we are where we are.

• 24:18Speaker 00

  Where we are, yeah.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  And then this economic collapse is followed by the foundation of the world state, and this dominates every aspect of life. But it is not domineering in any way, I would say, here in Brave New World.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  You mean as in overtly domineering?

• 24:33Speaker 01

  No, it's not overtly domineering, because it starts at birth and it quietly, casually guides you every step of the way. But it doesn't punish you, because you wouldn't think to deviate, I suppose. Yeah. So it's a world devoted to the cult of the US industrialist Henry Ford. And he is a Titanic figure in the 1920s, because his factories led the way in mass-produced assembly-line cars. So these are the cars of the future. And Ford here is a god-like figure. Not quite like Big Brother, I would say, in, he's more divine than that. Because in the way that we would say, oh, God, or my God, they say, oh, Ford, or our Ford, or Ford's Day.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  And it's taken the place of religion as well. So the top bar of the cross is being chopped off. So it's been replaced by a T, so it becomes a T.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  Like a model T, yeah.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  A model T, exactly. But Ford has also become conflated with Sigmund Freud, for reasons that we'll get into. And the world is divided into 10 zones run by world controllers. So the Western European zone, which is based in London, is ruled by his Fordship, Mustafa Mond, which is also kind of a clever-in joke.

• 25:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  And he's at the top of a social hierarchy of strict, strict castes and classes. So you have Alpha Plus, and they are sort of clever, brilliant intellectuals all the way down, so the book club, if you will. And then you have the very bottom, and this is Epsilon Minus, semi-morons. So the state's motto, as you said, is community, identity, stability. And it's a totalitarian collective dystopia, and all individuality is totally suppressed. So we saw that in that opening reading. All the babies, little newborn babies are dressed in the same khaki. You know, they're dressed in the same uniform as right from the very beginning. But unlike Big Brother, the controllers don't need to rely on any sort of secret police. There's no terror, there's no violence.

• 26:28Speaker 01

  They rule by conformity, conditioning, and essentially kind of happiness, contentedness is weaponized. Your role in society is determined before you're born. And often people say that it's uncertainty that unsettles humans. And the potential for deviation, or the potential for having to kind of question your future. People in this society don't have that. And, you know, because you've been conditioned not to question anything from birth. And assuming that you follow the preordained path laid out for you by your caste and by your conditioning. You're treated pretty well by the state. You have a sort of fairly lovely time.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  Exactly. So this is, so Orwell's prophecy is really about politics. This is one partly about science. So it's obviously an age written in the 1930s. People are fascinated by eugenics. People today have seen it as a prophecy of our world of genetic engineering and things. And the very first chapters of the book, as you were saying, Tabby, they do feel like a sort of scientific panorama. So you're touring the Hattery and Conditioning Centre. In his essay on the book, John Sutherland, great critic, says, "It's a bit like a twisted version of the Book of Genesis." So this is the, we get our sense of how the world began and how human beings begin. They're created not by God, they're created by scientists and test tubes and incubators.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  And thanks to this thing called the Bokunovsky Process, you can clone effectively tens of thousands of identical twins to carry out their allotted tasks in society. And of the embryos, when they get the female embryos, two-thirds of them, they give them male hormones. And they turn them into what are called free martins. And these are women who can't have children. Although, as the director says, they do have the slightest tendency to grow beards.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Lovely.

• 28:17Speaker 00

  There's a sense always in that Huxley is not really very frightened by his dystopia, that he's having a little bit of a joke.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  I felt that the whole way through. That's why there's absolutely no kind of jeopardy or anything, because he's kind of just having a laugh the whole time, too, I think.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  I think so.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  George Orwell is like, beware, beware.

• 28:33Speaker 00

  So these kids, they will use X-rays, and they use heat conditioning, and they use oxygen deprivation to affect their development.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  This is actually something that is quite unnerving. So they give or take away oxygen, depending on how clever they want that baby to be.

• 28:48Speaker 00

  But crucially, they will make you love your condition. So in other words, you won't feel bitter that you're not very clever. They will make, they will condition you so that you would never want to be clever, and you'd rather look down on people who are.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Exactly. But also, so once you're born, you have more conditioning. So hence the stuff with the flowers and the books. And this is all inspired by ideas of the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov. And I think lots of people have heard of Pavlov's dog. And you're even conditioned when you're asleep. So this is called hypnopia, and this is actually still very popular today. This is, again, this is something that Pavlov wrote about. So for instance, it's when pregnant mothers will.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Play Mozart to their stomachs so that the children grow up with a love of Mozart.

• 29:30Speaker 00

  They become geniuses.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, they say it makes them more intelligent. Because of this, human beings are reduced to being totally passive creatures. You know, everything is predetermined. Your destiny is laid out for you. Your tastes are decided, your views, even the clothes you wear.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  Is determined by the state. Yeah. And listeners might be wondering, well, what about the place for parents and family?

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Interesting part of the ideology, I think.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  And there's absolutely no place at all. They don't occur whatsoever. And this takes us to the point that you made earlier about the conflation of Ford and Freud, our Ford and our Freud. So basically, the people of this world believe that sometimes our Ford used to call himself our Freud whenever he spoke of psychological matters.

• 30:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, the Holy Ghost versus the Father.

• 30:18Speaker 00

  Exactly. And that when he appears in the guise of Freud, he reveals the truth about the horrors of the old world, the world of fathers and mothers, of perversion, of sadism, of chastity, which is another form of perversion. And, you know, that this was all terrible and wicked and cruel. And that to the people growing up in, you know, the year AF632, the idea of having a mother and father at all is, it's not just immoral, it is actually physically repulsive. The word is obscene. The idea of any love, attachment, family relationship, they regard this with absolute horror.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not even just a taboo. It's, I don't know, it's the way that we'd, I don't know, look upon paedophilia or something, like something that you absolutely.

• 31:03Speaker 00

  It makes your skin crawl. Exactly.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, it makes your skin crawl.

• 31:05Speaker 00

  Exactly. And as a result of this, because they've severed completely the link between sex and procreation, sex itself is just a matter of leisure. So you can sleep with different people all the time. There's no consequence. And there's actually absolutely no emotional content to it. It's purely a form of sort of physical entertainment. And as a result, they're very happy for children to mess around kind of sexually, aren't they? Which is quite a disturbing detail in the early chapters.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  It is. But it's another form of conditioning, I guess. It's like another happiness drug. So children are encouraged to get stuck into what is called erotic play. So on this tour that these people have been taken on, which, you know, we described it in the opening reading, the third part of it is children playing outside naked in the sunshine. Oh, how lovely. And then I quote, "In a little grassy bay between tall clumps of Mediterranean heather, two children, a little boy of about seven and a little girl who might have been a year older, were playing very gravely and with all the focused attention of scientists, intent on a labour of discovery, a rudimentary sexual game." And you're like, God, what?

• 32:12Speaker 01

  Totally takes you by surprise. And the director says, charming, charming. And then a little boy is taken away because he doesn't want to join in. And the staff think this is weird and abnormal. And it leads into a conversation about how people in the ancient past, before the coming of our Lord.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  Our Ford, yeah.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, our Ford, were such freaks, they treated erotic play as immoral. And they did ghastly, disgusting things like get married and have a relationship with someone that, you know, gave birth to you.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Like, and it's motherly. The word mother and father is abhorrent.

• 32:48Speaker 00

  The ultimate, the ultimate swear words, effectively. So there's a couple of jokes, I think, going on here. So I think so much of Brave New World is meant to be, it's a big in joke. It's a sort of intellectual in joke. So a lot of it is, you mentioned Burton Russell. He had set, helped to set up this school called Beacon Hill, which was a progressive school that had kind of sex education and the kids were dancing naked and stuff. This is so like 1920s. And actually, it's kind of joking about that. I don't think they beat each other to death with con shells, though. I think that's the difference.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  That's a comfort.

• 33:16Speaker 00

  And then the other thing, the great joke that runs through, obviously Huxley is a Victorian. He was born at the end of the Victorian period.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:22Speaker 00

  And the joke goes through Brave New World is whenever people try to behave in a Victorian way, they're regarded as immoral. So there's a bit where a heroine, insofar as the book has a heroine, who's called Lenina. And she's talking to her friend Fanny and they're talking about the director. And they say, oh, the director, he's such a stickler for kind of morality. You know, he's so, always so well behaved. And Lenina says, yes, he patted me on the behind this afternoon. And Fanny says, there, you see, that shows what he stands for, the strictest conventionality. You know, because basically, free love is seen as moral and any form of self restraint is seen as really shocking. So in this world, the top

• 34:03Speaker 00

  fun that you can have is you go to a sort of dance or a singing session that escalates into what they call an orgy porgy.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Orgy, porgy, orgy, porgy. They all start chanting it. That I was slightly lost by.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  If you then went and you didn't enjoy yourself, you were unhappy, you would make yourself happy by taking soma, by taking the drug. And the drug, again, is that I think there's an element of an in-joke about the drug. The Victorians, the 1920s actually is an age of big backlash against drugs. So people have been anxious sort of from the 1880s, the last sort of 30 or 40 years, they've become increasingly anxious about intoxication. It's the age of prohibition in America. It's an age when actually a lot of drugs are being outlawed in the 1920s. So the idea that people are giving out drugs for free and making themselves happy, again, it's Huxley kind of poking fun at the taboos of his own time.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it serves to keep society happy and therefore passive, because the minute people start to have sort of apparent, you know, sort of different thoughts or start to question things, you take your lovely soma and you drift off a little cloud of contentment.

• 35:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  So this is the world that we're in. So what about the story? I think it's really telling that we haven't mentioned any characters yet, because this book is definitely not really about characters or story. They're secondary to the ideas. So insofar as we do have characters, we have one, we have Bernard Marx, Marx, tellingly, tellingly called. And he's an alpha plus sleep specialist. And his conditioning, we're constantly told, has gone wrong because he's too short for his cast. He doesn't fit in. He's a loner. He doesn't really like promiscuous sex or communal fun. He has a crush on someone. You're not meant to have crushes on people. You just sleep with people for the hell of it. He also doesn't really like taking soma, which is also totally weird.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  He wants to feel things and you're not really meant to want to feel things.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Exactly. You're not meant to feel things. He doesn't have a backstory, though, unlike Winston Smith. Winston's just gradually revealed to us.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  Remember the thing about his mum, when he, Winston, lost his parents?

• 36:05Speaker 01

  And the chocolates.

• 36:06Speaker 00

  The chocolates, yeah.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  He has no personality beyond a mild strain of bitterness born of being the runt of the litter. And we know so little about him. He's just a vehicle. But he has this other, I think, more interesting dissident friend, who's a guy called Helm Holtz Watson. He is too clever for this society. Basically, he's, he's lusting after some strain of original thought. And he's strifled by the world and he loves writing. He writes the state propaganda. But he writes heretical poems instead about being lonely. And he basically thinks that this is a world that doesn't have enough sadness to write well, which is also, I think, kind of like a bit of an in-joke. And then we have one other vaguely interesting character

• 36:49Speaker 01

  who you mentioned, and this is our heroine of the kind. And this is Lenina Crowe. And she is a beta vaccination technician. She's basically fits in very well into this world. And it doesn't really occur to her to question most of it. But there is one thing that's slightly unusual, and that is that she has an inexplicable fondness for Bernard, despite him being adweed by the standards of the, and the Dallas man in the world, yeah. And she also, for instance, has an affair with someone for a month, when you're not meant to do that. You're meant to continue to sleep with lots of different people. And people think that's a bit odd. She has no personality, though, really. We're just told again and again that she's pneumatic. And that basically is her personality.

• 37:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is. Basically, she's, she's very fleshy, good looking.

• 37:35Speaker 01

  No whiff of rebellion. She just has a lovely waist. She's got auburn hair and that's all we need to know.

• 37:40Speaker 00

  Yeah. So about a third of the way through the book, we get to the great turning point in the story. So Bernard wangles a pass to take Lenina on holiday. And he chooses to take her to one of the few places on earth that is not under the control of the world state. There are a series of reservations where sort of indigenous life can continue. And this is what they call the Savage Reservation in New Mexico. And there, the descendants of the Pueblo Indians live basically untouched by the modern world. And when Bernard and Lenina get there, they're in for a massive shock, because they're going to meet a character who will challenge their assumptions and their principles in a way, Tabby, that they cannot possibly imagine.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  We'll meet him ourselves after the break.

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• 39:29Speaker 06

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• 40:03Speaker 01

  So, welcome back to the book club, everybody. Now, just before we resume our story, we have a little bit of our own social conditioning for you. So a reminder that there will be more about this book and all the other books that we've done in our brand new and totally free newsletter. And this lands in your inbox every Saturday and there are loads of tips about further reading, we have reviews, you can send in your own thoughts, let us know what you thought, give it your own rating. And lots of listeners do that. So it's a beautiful little tender chat community of listeners. And you'll also get advanced warning about, you know, events, tickets to live shows and about the books that we'll be doing way, way in advance.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  So I think both, both of us would totally agree that you ought to sign up at thebookclubhq.com for Book Club Notes.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  Book Club Notes, exactly.

• 40:55Speaker 01

  Now, back to Brave New World. So what happens when Bernard and Lanina arrive in New Mexico?

• 41:02Speaker 00

  So they've got to the Savage Reservation, which is cut off by electric fences in the world state. And they're really sort of shocked and surprised by what they see because here, life goes on. Huxley does not present the world of the Savage Reservation as a bundle of laughs.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  It's not utopian at all.

• 41:19Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no. It's a lot of tribal dancing, which I mean, some people may think sounds brilliant, but it's a lot of like ritual flagellation. There's a lot of alcoholism, a lot of sexual jealousy, violence, all of this kind of thing. And they meet here, however, two characters who completely blow their minds. So one of them is a woman called Linda. And Linda is actually from their world. She was a beta minus from the fertilizing room. And she came, she was the director's girlfriend, very briefly, and he brought her to the Savage Reservation more than 20 years ago. But she got lost in a thunderstorm and she got left behind. And so she's been there ever since. And because she was from the world state, she believed in kind of free love and stuff.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:00Speaker 00

  So she slept with all the men on the Savage Reservation and their wives all hated her, obviously. And she became a massive hate figure. She became ostracized and she's completely addicted to kind of booze and mescaline and stuff.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Because she doesn't have soma, she craves soma and so she has to fill the gap with alcohol.

• 42:17Speaker 00

  Exactly. And then here's the thing, when she came to the Savage Reservation, she was actually pregnant by the director, although she didn't realize it. And she had the child there, which was a traumatic event for her because she didn't even know what childbirth was.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  No.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  And she, it kind of, it seems like she's been part in some obscene ritual.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  She doesn't even have a word for mother, you know, and you know, she knows it, but she's repulsed by the fact that she is one.

• 42:44Speaker 00

  Exactly. And she had this son who she called John. And John is basically, in this story, what Miranda is in Shakespeare's play, The Tempest. So he's the offspring of the person who got trapped on the desert island. So marooned. And John, like Miranda in The Tempest, when he first sees his visitors, he basically is like, oh, Brave New World, oh, isn't this brilliant? And he, and his, and his mother are going to come back with them to London. And they're very excited about what they're gonna, you know, he can't wait to get to see this world that he's dreamed of. What's it, what's it gonna be? It's gonna be great fun. And actually, of course, it isn't.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the second half of the book is really John's story. So it's so interesting, you know, if there is a protagonist in this book, it's probably John. We only meet him halfway through. And the first thing is he tells Bernard all of his recollections of growing up and it's so grim and miserable because it's the side effects of a mother brought up in this dystopian society, raising a boy that's, has a mentality more akin to our own. And the confusion that comes with that, I think that's so well done. But people call him the savage or Mr. Savage. And he's a celebrity when he returns. And that's basically how he functions in this story. He's kind of, he's sort of a classic noble savage from the 18th century, from 18th century literature.

• 44:01Speaker 01

  He reminded me of Pocahontas when she came from the New World to London. And he's innocent and idealistic. He is the product of nature and he's unspoiled by civilization. But there is one huge cultural influence on him, and this is Shakespeare, because a volume of Shakespeare was left in kind of the savage camp by someone else. And all he knows of the world and human nature comes from Shakespeare. So he's always quoting The Tempest Hamlet, for instance. His understanding of love comes from Romeo and Juliet. So his morality and his cultural touchstones are basically that of a 16th or 17th century English person. You know, think about the strength, you know, how, how important religion was at that time,

• 44:46Speaker 01

  how much there was to disapprove of. So John is absolutely appalled by what he discovers of life in AF632. He's in love with Lanina, but because of the Shakespeare that has been his conditioning, he can't get his head around her promiscuity and her sensuality and he's disgusted by it. Just as people in AF632, 632 are appalled by him and Linda, but especially Linda, because they find her disgusting. And the thing is, Huxley writes her as disgusting.

• 45:15Speaker 00

  He does.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  Fat, dirty, smelly, stinking of booze. And there's this great scene when it all comes to a head and Linda is dying in hospital. And John thinks of her as his mother and so loves her and is attached to her. And you're not really meant to get attached to people. So there's, there's universal horror at the fact that he insists on coming to her bedside. People don't watch people die, you know, who cares? You no longer serve society, you're, you're done. So no one understands it. They don't get why he's sad. They think he's gone mad. And then these small children are brought in, are brought on a tour to get used to the idea of death. It's more conditioning, but you know, and get used to it. Basically, you watch it and you feel nothing and they're eating eclairs and they're shocked.

• 45:59Speaker 00

  They're trying to eat their eclairs, this is like sobbing.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  And this is disgusting savage crying over his mother. They're appalled to see him cry. They probably wouldn't really know, even know what crying was.

• 46:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  And then he gets in a massive row with the staff who say, you know, you're getting in the way of their conditioning. You're going to put two months on to their conditioning. And then he lashes out and causes a riot because he's so repulsed by these little twins and their confusion and their questions about Linda. So he hurls everyone's soma out the window, which starts a riot. And he shouts, but do you like being slaves? Do you like being babies? Yes, babies, mewling and puking. Don't you want to be free and men? Don't you even understand what manhood and freedom are? You can see there's almost a bit of Shakespearean, like, I don't know, Julius Caesar or something in there.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  I'll teach you, I'll make you be free, whether you want it or not. And there you get a hint of the zealotry that will later consume his character. So finally, John, Bernard and Bernard's mate, Helmholtz, are brought in to see Mustafa Mond. And this is when we really meet Mustafa Mond in the flesh and he's the world controller. And this is the climax of the novel. And this is a bit like that, that sort of scene with Big Brother in 1984.

• 47:11Speaker 00

  O'Brien.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  O'Brien, where you discuss what it all means and the ideology behind the world. You look behind the curtain. It's a bit like when they go to the Wizard of Oz.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. So actually, this is a good moment to stop and to say, well, what, what does it mean? What is Huxley trying to say? So we said at the beginning that the genesis of it was when Huxley went to America in 1926. So Huxley, I think, was primed to look down on America because basically that was what intellectual bohemian people in Europe did. And that was a tradition that, you know, is deeply rooted in kind of British writing, like Charles Dickens did it when he wrote Martin Chuzzlewit and stuff. And Huxley had said to his brother at the end of the First World War, you know, the worst thing about the First World War will be the inevitable acceleration of American world domination. And what he means by that is kind of American culture and American economic power as much as political.

• 48:01Speaker 00

  So I think a lot of Brave New World is explicable as Huxley's disgust, his contempt for what he sees as everything wrong with modern American consumer culture. So especially LA. He went to LA. I like LA, by the way, but Huxley didn't. Huxley said, called it Joy City, and he didn't mean it kindly. He said, well, he said to a friend, it's the nearest thing to utopia yet seen on our planet. After 24 hours of it, you begin to pine for the slums of Dostoevsky's St Petersburg. So the things that I like about LA, I like the fact that it's very different from European cities. I like the, the sky, the, the blue skies. I mean, admittedly, there's a lot of smog, the beach, the kind of California lifestyle, the sunniness and stuff.

• 48:45Speaker 00

  But lots of British visitors go and they find that repellent.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  I didn't find it repellent, but I think I know something, like I slightly understand something of what Huxley is saying, that I find it a little bit without feeling and without depth. There are sedimentary layers of, I don't know, history and there's nothing old. And so I know what he, I know what is meant by that kind of Dostoevsky St Petersburg thing, you know, so I'm terribly pretentious. So there's that. But similarly, I think clearly, clearly Huxley does have a love hate relationship with it because yes, he despises its shallowness. But as we said earlier, he finds it intoxicating and fascinating. There's a reason that he ends up living around there.

• 49:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  And in lots of ways, the London of Brave New World is essentially California in 1926.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  They use dollars, they live in skyscrapers. There's this obsession with looking young and beautiful all the time. Hence, they're so disgusted by Linda. They chew sex hormone chewing gum. They wear clothes with zippers and Huxley said the zipper was America's national crest. You know, everything, everything happens quickly and easily and everything looks nice. The music is clearly jazz. So the Westminster Abbey cabaret uses electric sky signs to advertise Calvin Stopes and his sixteen saxophonists.

• 50:03Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  Literally, that's just gold to me. And there's an even more obvious target, and this is Hollywood. And Aldous Huxley had visited America at precisely the point when silent movies are being overtaken by the talkies. So there's the jazz singer in nineteen twenty seven. And then Brave New World, I think quite cleverly, takes this a step further with the feelies. And Leonina takes John, who she has a crush on, to see three weeks in a helicopter and all super singing synthetic talking colored stereostopic feelie with synchronized scent organ accompaniment. So it's all, you know, it's meant to be kind of overwhelming and totally take you away from the real world. It's a bit like taking soma or something.

• 50:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, you're sort of, it's almost like a kind of VR type thing. You'll feel it, you'll smell it. It's completely immersive.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  It's playing with the idea of escapism, I guess, in the extreme.

• 50:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, completely. But the film they see, it's kind of very dodgy, isn't it?

• 50:59Speaker 01

  Really dodgy. It's like Birth of a Nation or something. It's really simplistic racist plot. It's a black man whose conditioning accidentally is reversed. So he kidnaps and rapes a blonde woman. Then she is rescued by three handsome young alphas and thanks them by having sex with them. John is repulsed by this and totally unmoved by it. Leonina is swept away on a tidal wave of romance and eroticism.

• 51:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, she thinks this is brilliant. And I think this is another joke because basically there was, there was a film franchise in the nineteen twenties that, that had this plot effectively. It was the Rudolph Valentino films, The Sheik and Son of the Sheik. So it's about a woman being kidnapped and, you know, sort of ravished by princes in the Arabian desert and stuff. Hugely popular silent films. So when people read about this, they'd have, they'd have seen the joke. And actually, I think if you read Brave New World with that in mind, so much of it, so much of the so-called prophetic forward-thinking critique of consumer culture is actually your standard nineteen twenties intellectual, slightly sort of sneering at mass culture.

• 52:06Speaker 00

  You know, so basically it was so common for the Bloomsbury Group and their descendants to sort of look at mass culture, mass entertainment in the twenties and to say, it's for morons, it's so shallow.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  It's a form of snobbery, actually.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  It is, I think, a little bit. So I think this is a difference with George Orwell. So Orwell in nineteen eighty four, remember he says like, if there's hope, it lies in the proles. He kind of likes ordinary people and their, the songs they sing and they, what they, you know, their sort of everyday culture. Aldous Huxley, in his world, the masses are basically absolute morons who are brainwashed. So the things that he doesn't like, obstacle golf or the game they play, which is called centrifugal bumble puppy.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  They're mindless and slightly infantile, aren't they? But everything's shiny and.

• 52:54Speaker 00

  But the nineteen twenties and thirties is a huge age for the expansion of leisure, like in Britain. So dance halls, cinemas, all of these things, football matches, whatever. Huxley, I think, is one of those people who looks on these things and says, you know, this is just flipping popcorn for morons.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  But what, what would Orwell have made of something like LA or that sort of booming American culture?

• 53:15Speaker 00

  Well, he was very anti-American himself, actually. So you're right. Orwell has the sort of instinctive suspicion of America of a British intellectual, definitely.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  When Orwell speaks about liking the proles, whatever, I think he kind of means a doughty Englishman.

• 53:29Speaker 00

  He does.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  Who sits in a country pub or whatever. There's, it's side of, but I know what you mean. I do think that occasionally Huxley slips over into sneering a tiny bit.

• 53:39Speaker 00

  A little bit, I think a little bit.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  A little bit. Anyway, but it's not just American consumerism that he's satirising here. There's loads more going on. So in May nineteen thirty one, Huxley started writing, when, when Huxley started writing, he told a friend that it was a novel about the future on the horror of the Wellesian utopia and a revolt against it. So who's he targeting here? It's one of the great British writers of the earliest twentieth century. You're a big fan of his work, I think.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  I am, yeah.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  And he's another enthusiast for utopias and dystopias. And he's always imagining possible futures. And this is H.G. Wells.

• 54:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  And in nineteen twenty three, he wrote a book called Men Like Gods. And it imagined a man from Sidnum called Mr. Barnstaple, who was accidentally transported into the far future, three thousand years ahead. The future there, he, he discovers the future is actually brilliant. And there's no religion, there's no politics, everybody's free, everybody's honest and everybody's happy. Then he comes home, determined to make it a reality, committed to this revolution that will not stop until old earth is one city and utopia set up therein. It's like, you know, kingdom of heaven on earth or something.

• 54:48Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  He knew clearly that this revolution is life and that all other living is a trafficking of life with death. So this is clearly Aldous Huxley's main target. He wants to parody this idea that we're moving towards some sort of rose-tinted progressive paradise. But sans religion, religion is taken out of it, which is kind of interesting because that's what Blake is doing as well, in many ways with his writings. And Aldous Huxley tells him a friend, I've been having a little fun pulling the leg of H.G. Wells, but then got caught up in the excitement of my own ideas.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  So I actually had a look at this book. I found a copy of it online.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Did you?

• 55:24Speaker 00

  Men Like Gods. It looks rubbish.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  No, oh, how come?

• 55:29Speaker 00

  Well, it's forgotten. I think forgotten for a reason. It's a terrible name. Mr. Barnstaple is a really boring character.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  He sounds boring.

• 55:35Speaker 00

  It's a ridiculous idea that he's catapulted into the future. It's brilliant. Then he comes back and he decides he wants to, I mean, there's no story. It's no tension.

• 55:43Speaker 00

  Anyway, so clearly what happened is Aldous Huxley sat down in nineteen thirty one and he thought to himself, well, I've been to America, I've been to LA, it was awful. H.G. Wells has written this terrible book. I'm going to spoof H.G. Wells's book and combine it with the parody of LA. And that's what Brave New World is going to be. But he's also drawing very deeply on the anxieties specifically of the early nineteen thirties. In the everyman classics edition of Brave New World, there's a brilliant essay by David Bradshaw, a great literary scholar. And he talks about Brave New World, the ideas that run through it. And the central ideas, he says, are stability and control. So stability is one of the words of the motto. Control, I mean, obviously there's world controllers. And the reason that people are interested in this at the time, it's obviously the world fell apart in the First World War.

• 56:28Speaker 00

  And then there was the Russian Revolution and whatnot. And in nineteen thirty one, when Aldous Huxley wrote the book, the world has fallen apart again because the Great Depression has happened. In Britain, there was a massive political crisis. The Labour government fell apart, huge spending cuts, like massive unemployment and whatnot. Huxley was planning to go to America that summer to basically do research for his book. And he postponed it because the world was falling apart. So you can see that the idea of getting back to some form of stability is very much on his mind. He's always been interested in state planning. He's always been interested in the idea that's so common among intellectuals in the twenties and thirties. They're like, there should be a national plan by very clever people like him, which so they plan everything out.

• 57:13Speaker 00

  So nothing like this can ever happen again.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  A philosopher utopia or something.

• 57:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And so you've got that idea on the one hand. And then the other idea, which you, we've said so many times now, Henry Ford, our Ford, is the presiding genius, the deity of this society. And this is Fordism. And the idea of Fordism runs right through Brave New World. So basically Fordism is the idea of mass production using assembly lines. So basically the factories that built the Model T car from nineteen oh eight. And then that similar technique is rolled out in factories worldwide, is what we're so familiar with today. And lots of people at the time said, Fordism is like the wave of the future. It's catapulted this into entirely new age, basically in the future. I mean, they weren't wrong.

• 57:59Speaker 00

  In the future, skilled workers will stand on assembly lines, they'll be trained to work the assembly line. They'll make thousands and thousands of identical products. And then they'll go home and they'll watch TV or whatever, built by themselves in their factories that they've bought with the, with the wages that they've earned. And the man behind Ford is Henry Ford.

• 58:21Speaker 00

  By the twenties, he was easily one of the most famous men in the world. I mean, he was the equivalent of Elon Musk or something.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good comparison.

• 58:28Speaker 00

  So when Huxley sailed to America for the first time, in the ship's library, they had a copy of Henry Ford's autobiography, My Life and Work. And Huxley read it on the voyage. And in Brave New World, it's like their bible, it's their sacred text or something. And just before Huxley started writing this book, Henry Ford had moved into Britain. So he bought this huge tract of land in Dagenham, east of London. This became the big Ford factory, still exists actually, in suburban Essex, east London. And they had housing estates, they had schools, they had leisure facilities. It's basically like, people at the time said, this is the town of the future. They called it Fordopolis.

• 59:13Speaker 00

  This is what it'll be like, you know, we live in company towns with, everyone will go to the same communal kind of, I don't know, cinema or the pub or the kind of bowling alley or whatever.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  It's like the Cadbury, the little Cadburyville or whatever it was.

• 59:25Speaker 00

  On a, on a, on a, on a much, much bigger scale.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was a little bit like a Marie Antoinette with the petty folly, what was it called?

• 59:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, the petty triunal.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Petty, yeah, exactly, where it was like, we're going to live in like Disney cottages and have our milk delivered to us every day.

• 59:40Speaker 00

  That's what Bournville is.

• 59:40Speaker 01

  But we're all, exactly, but this isn't that, this wasn't that.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  Not at all, not at all. And so basically, London in Brave New World is Fordopolis on a massive scale. It's about, this is Huxley's nightmare, that the world will become one giant Ford plant. Assembly line people making assembly line things. And this will go on forever, like history will stop and there will be nothing but this.

• 1:00:06Speaker 01

  And also the fear that that turns you into unthinking drones. You can't, you live out the emotions expected of you and then that's it. So it's a bit like, he was worried that people would stop reading, they'd stop engaging with ideas.

• 1:00:17Speaker 00

  And it's hard to challenge this because basically Bernard Marx, you know, our supposed hero at the beginning of the book, he's not really a challenge to this, he's no threat at all.

• 1:00:25Speaker 01

  He's just, he's depressed about how the fact that he's low down in the system, it's not the system he's questioning, it's his place in it.

• 1:00:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, and he's just a bit bored and disaffected and he doesn't really know where he fits. But, yeah, the state actually, as we discover, they're fine with that. If you're a dissident, they'll ship you off to the Falkland Islands or to Samoa or something. And there you can live with other distance and they're not going to kill you, they're not going to put you in prison or anything like that, they can deal with you.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  They're not going to put rats on your face.

• 1:00:54Speaker 00

  No, no, they're not going to put rats on your face. However, John, I guess the savage, because he's come from the savage reservation and his mindset is so different. He kind of is a bit, they don't really know what to make of him, do they?

• 1:01:07Speaker 01

  No, he, he's much more of a threat though, because he hasn't been conditioned into acquiescence, which obviously Bernard has. So, you know, for instance, he, he's got this love of Shakespeare and Helmholtz, Bernard's friend, loves to write. But there are parts of Shakespeare that Helmholtz just can't understand. He's like in Romeo and Juliet, he doesn't get the romance because he can't understand it. Because he hasn't been allowed to understand anything other than that which he has been taught to know. And in many ways, John is a very familiar cultural figure, so the savage, raised in a lost world, who comes out and comes into contact with modern civilization. The most obvious example of this is of course Tarzan. And his debut is in Edgar Rice Burroughs' novel in 1912. And then in the Hollywood films in the 1930s.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  And he is the naive innocent in a world that he doesn't really understand.

• 1:01:57Speaker 00

  John is, yeah.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly, he's like Candide in Voltaire's Candide.

• 1:02:02Speaker 00

  Indeed, yeah.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he travels, he travels the world in the mid 18th century and slowly loses all of his optimism and his illusions, thanks to what he sees. You know, he, he loses his innocence the more that he sees and understands. It's a bit like he steps out of some primordial Garden of Eden.

• 1:02:18Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:02:18Speaker 01

  Very imperfect here.

• 1:02:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, which is basically why, I mean, John wasn't in, John's life beforehand wasn't brilliant, but he's horrified by what he sees in London, the sort of the London of the world state. The only thing is though, that I thought when John was introduced into the book, I thought, okay, finally we've got to our hero. But I found him really unlikable as a character and I found him unsatisfactory. I just thought he was a bit prigish and a bit annoying.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Oh, I totally agree. He's infuriating and he is actually, I think, a walking warning against a conscious self righteousness, a different form of zealotry. And I think that Huxley's attitude to the savage reservation is similarly ambiguous. It definitely is not one of admiration. So, put it in New Mexico is another in-joke, so he's very good friends with D H Lawrence, the English writer. And he stuck by Lawrence when Lawrence was essentially cancelled for his ideas and the books that he was writing and the private life and his private life. And everyone else dropped him. And Lawrence has moved to Taos in New Mexico in the early 1920s. And for Europeans, he was by far the, the most famous person living in New Mexico at that time.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  And Lawrence is famously progressive about sex, so he is the writer of Lady Chatterley's Lover, which was banned. And he loved all the tribal stuff, free love, primal sexual energy, karma sutra, let's be authentic.

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  Lawrence like holds the world record for using the word loins in novels, surely.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, burning loins, exactly. I think telling, it's telling, Dominic, that you've written, let's all be authentic, free, true, blah, blah, blah, blah. That's a massive insight into your attitude to this, isn't it? You've given yourself away enormously.

• 1:03:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, I do find D H Lawrence a bit, I think he insists, he totally insists upon himself.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  I like his books though, but he's, he's like, his ideas are kind of that of sort of early 19, mid 1960s hippies or something.

• 1:04:10Speaker 00

  Well, they definitely appeal to it, you're not wrong. And I think when we do like Sons and Lovers or Women in Love.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  I love Sons and Lovers.

• 1:04:16Speaker 00

  We can go through some of the passages in that where it's like the burning of his loins, but come on, every page.

• 1:04:24Speaker 01

  But in Brave New World, the savage reservation is horrible, it's really grim. Everybody's off their face on mezcal, they're always self-flagellating, they have these mad tribal dances. It's really dirty, there are fleas everywhere. And the joke about John is that he's the opposite of Lawrence, so he's living in this place in New Mexico. But he's a massive prig, he's very buttoned up, he's very puritanical, it's a great joke.

• 1:04:52Speaker 00

  Exactly, and so then we have the confrontation between him and Mustafa Mond. And I think, so this is so interesting. So John is like super over earnest, he's very puritanical, he hates this world. But Mustafa Mond, the world controller, who we've been built up to believe is the great villain who's controlling this. He's actually very calm, he's worldly, he's wry. His name is more of Huxley's jokes. So Mustafa, the most famous Mustafa in the late 1920s and 1930s by far, Mustafa Kemal, Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. A modernizer, a secularist, a reformer who has dragged his country into the sort of shiny new world of the 20th century.

• 1:05:34Speaker 00

  And then Mond, Sir Alfred Mond was the first chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries, I C I. And Huxley had been to their huge new plant outside Middlesbrough. Just before writing the book, he thought Mond was brilliant. He said, Billingham, the plant was the triumphant embodiment of the spirit of planning. An ordered universe in the midst of the larger world of planless incoherence. So actually, so many readers, I think, get this wrong.

• 1:06:04Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 1:06:05Speaker 00

  They think, you know, oh, Mustafa Mond is the villain, this world is terrible. Huxley is very ambiguous about this world. Mustafa Mond is the most, and I think the one character in the book that you would actually want to have like a drink with or something.

• 1:06:18Speaker 01

  I actually agree.

• 1:06:19Speaker 00

  He's quite funny, he's quite wry and self-aware. The reason he got to be world controller was that he was free-thinking and sceptical and questioned this world. And so the bosses said, oh, you know, you've basically got a choice, you can go and live on an island with other dissidents or do you want to run it? And he was like, well, I'll run it.

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  So, and like for instance, he's read the whole of Shakespeare. So when John quotes Shakespeare at him, he says, oh, yeah, of course. But I mean, I'm one of the very few people that is allowed to read it because having ideas got me here, ironically.

• 1:06:50Speaker 00

  So he's very cynical, you could say, he's almost like those sort of people running the Soviet Union who actually were reading all the Western books that they banned in the 1970s.

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, he's cynical of human nature because he knows how to manipulate it.

• 1:07:04Speaker 00

  Exactly, so in other words, you know, the comparison was made so many times in 1984. When Winston and O'Brien have their big chat at the end of 1984. And O'Brien is like, we're going to be the boot stamping on the human face forever, here's some rats, all of that. It's really chilling. And I think the Mustafa Munt-John conversation also for me, it reminded me of a scene, this scene in The Brothers Karamazov, where the Grand Inquisitor is meeting Jesus. And Jesus has come back from, you know, Jesus has come back to earth. And the Grand Inquisitor says to him, well, actually, you know, yes, I can, you know, he's very cynical. And he's like, well, we're going to kill you because basically people are better off being not free and not having the right to choose. They're better off

• 1:07:47Speaker 00

  under the despotism of the church. So, you know, we're going to basically crucify you again, or whatever. And in both 1984 and The Brothers Karamazov, the confrontation is very kind of high energy, high stakes, dark, kind of chilling, haunts you, all of this. But in Brave New World, it's all very throwaway. And it's all very sort of jokey and ambiguous. And, and I think, I mean, I agree with the critic David Bradshaw, who says, the reason for this is that Huxley cannot never decide, does he like his world? Or does he not like it? Because actually, all through his, this time, Huxley is sort of saying, state planning is a really good idea. He quite likes, you know, the idea of telling people what to do. He, he likes the idea of everything being controlled and

• 1:08:29Speaker 00

  stable and settled. And he fears chaos. So actually, I think his sympathies here are as much with Mustafa Munt as they are with John the Savage.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  I mean, you even, you just need to look at a comparison between Linda, who's been living in a, I suppose, kind of primal utopia, or Leonina, who's been living in this ordered, you know, perfect dystopia. And you know which one you find more attractive, you know which one you'd rather be living with. But also, there's all the stuff about science. So people often see Brave New World as a warning against the horrors of eugenics. You know, it's a nightmarish, it's a nightmarish vision of society, created artificially in a lab. But Huxley was very interested in eugenics. I mean, I think we find that shocking today. And he did turn against it later in his life. But in the 1920s and

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  30s, loads of intellectuals were into it. So before Brave New World was published, he gave a talk on BBC Radio and said, we might need to use eugenics to stop the rapid deterioration of the whole Western European stock. I think also, I suppose, we hadn't had the threat of the Nazis yet, and what they came to represent for eugenics. But before then, it was pretty standard. And he was on that way. And he, and he was with that.

• 1:09:46Speaker 00

  And that's why we get to that crucial confrontation between Munt and John, the the absolute core of the book. And they're arguing about what they want, what was the, what's the, what's the root of a good society? And, and Munt says, look, you know, people are happy. And if they're not happy, we give them the soma. And they, which he calls Christianity without tears. And John says, but I don't want that. I, I want God, I want poetry, I want danger, I want, yeah, I want freedom, I want sin. And then Munt has this, I mean, Huxley gives him a brilliant comeback. Munt says, fair enough, that's what you want. You want the right to grow ugly, and old, and impotent, the right to have syphilis and cancer, the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy, the

• 1:10:29Speaker 00

  right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow, the right to catch typhoid, the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  But I think that on the one hand, when you first, when you first have John say it, I wanted all, I wanted of every kind, in a way, I think there's something admirable about that, you know, taking the highs and lows of life makes it so much richer, the shortness of it, the brevity, whatever it may be. But then, as John progresses towards the end of the novel, he becomes so monstrous himself that you don't know who to back anymore. Because he flagellates himself the whole time. He doesn't want sin. He's terrified of sin. He sort of, he starves himself. He sees Leonina, and he's attracted to her. So he attacks her.

• 1:11:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, he's basically gone mad, hasn't he?

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, you never really know which side you ought to be on, because you don't really know which side Huxley's on, I suppose.

• 1:11:14Speaker 00

  But you know what? Basically, the, the controller's argument, Munt's argument, is directly the opposite of the thing we were talking about in our Cersei episode. So in Cersei, Madeleine Miller's book, the final choice that Cersei makes is she chooses mortality over immortality, because she says, the suffering, the brevity, the pain is what gives life its richness and makes it worth living. And when you and I were talking about that, we were like, yeah, she's right. Brilliant. Yeah, that is. But now, what I think, would I rather be John, like whipping myself and living in filth?

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:45Speaker 00

  Or would I rather be going to the orgies and off my face on soma? I think actually, that's not such a bad life.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  But I think that, I think the point is that you're meant to be finding some kind of balance between the two. Extremity of both sides are wrong.

• 1:11:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, fair enough. Fair. So anyway, we should talk about whether we, which sides we're on at the end.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. Are we on the side of orgies, or on the side of self-fagulation?

• 1:12:08Speaker 00

  Surely you can do both, no? I mean, the combination of those two things is the dream. Anyway.

• 1:12:14Speaker 01

  Mercury waters these.

• 1:12:17Speaker 00

  People, lots of highbrow critics loved the book. They loved all the stuff mocking jazz and leisure and Hollywood and stuff. There was one funny review in The New Republic in America. It said basically, the world's, the world's falling apart, Japan has attacked China, there's fascism, Nazism is about to emerge in, in Germany, the world's in the Great Depression. Aldous Huxley's written a book saying the big problem is that everyone's too happy.

• 1:12:42Speaker 00

  So in a second, we'll talk about Huxley's very poor behaviour with George Orwell. I think Orwell undoubtedly read Huxley's book. Orwell was much more influenced actually by a book, Samra Junior is one of his favourite books, We, by Evgeny Zamyatin. And Orwell said, and other people have said, oh, Huxley must have ripped off Zamyatin as well. But actually, Huxley claimed he'd never read it.

• 1:13:03Speaker 01

  He claimed he'd never read it. It's like the Suzanne Collins scandal all over again. He claimed he'd never read it. But a lot of people said that that was a lie, that he had. But then Huxley did slightly disgrace himself, because when Orwell published 1984, Huxley wrote him a really condescending, patronizing letter, saying essentially, well done, you did well, but mine is better. Because he said, within the next generation, I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco hypnosis are more efficient as instruments of government in cubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  of 1984 is destined to modulate into the nightmare of having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World. It is poor, I have to say. But I also kind of agree with what he's saying. I think his point was always that if you have a regime like that, that Orwell describes in 1984, it's going to snap at some point. It can't continue. It's got to be held so taut all the time, that eventually, and I suppose he admits that in his vision of the Proles. Whereas because Huxley's is governed by happiness, there is a fluidity and a languor to that, that means it can continue forever unquestioned.

• 1:14:20Speaker 00

  Exactly. Then it's more insidious. Lots of people have said, oh, Huxley's vision, ultimately, it's a sort of classic highbrow critic thing to say, well, Orwell's is all very obvious, isn't it? It is very much of the Cold War, whereas Huxley's is more prophetic. So there's a critic, you know, James Marriott, who wrote, a podcast critic of the Times.

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  I do. I'm a big fan of James Marriott.

• 1:14:39Speaker 00

  So he loves this bloke called Neil Postman, who wrote a book called Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1985. And this bloke Postman said, TV, technology, all of that, we are in Huxley's world. That basically Orwell said that everything, that, you know, we'd be beaten, and we'd be, books would be banned, and all of this. Huxley was much more accurate. Huxley imagined a world where you wouldn't have to ban books, because no one would want to read them.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  No one would read them.

• 1:15:04Speaker 00

  A basically, a world in which, instead of being oppressed and held down, we'd be seduced by the feelies and by rumble pumpy, or whatever it's called. What's it called? Bumble puppy? You know, that basically, everything, we'd be, we'd have too much leisure, too much fun, and that that would enslave us. Anyway. Which of the visions of the future do you find more accurate and more chilling? 1984, Orwell, or Huxley's Brave New World?

• 1:15:29Speaker 01

  I'm going to go with Brave New World. And I fear the point I'm about to make is terribly banal. But I think all the eugen, not the eugenics stuff, none of that, not the science stuff, I think soma, though. I'm going on the basis of the ease of life these days, and the fact that everything now, thanks to phones and social media, is the press of a button away. Everything is so easy. You know, we don't even have to read. We are conditioned by the ads that are constantly being sent to us in the form of cookies, or whatever it may be. You know, it's so easy to slip into a thoughtless state when we are scrolling endlessly, myself included. I'm totally susceptible to all this stuff. And I suppose it would sort of be, why would you read a book when there are so many easier

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  things to do with your time? That curiosity isn't necessarily encouraged when life, in the West anyway, is as easy as it is, you know? And also, when things move around so quickly, ideas have to be really significant. The news has to be really significant to catch our attention for more than, I don't know, five days.

• 1:16:30Speaker 00

  So you're thinking we're living in Huxley's world, something more like Huxley's world?

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  Something more like it. I mean, Huxley said once that, someone said, oh, where, how do you think your vision of the world looks when you wrote Brave New World versus now? And he said, I think it's come, come along much more quickly. I don't think it's as extreme, as extreme as that. But I kind of do think we are subjected to our own inventions now. Whereas I think that 1984 is much more a vision of a kind of post-war Soviet reality.

• 1:16:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, which it clearly is.

• 1:17:00Speaker 01

  What about you?

• 1:17:01Speaker 00

  I think all that's too bleak, though. I mean, in.

• 1:17:04Speaker 01

  God, I'm surprised. You have such a bleak.

• 1:17:07Speaker 00

  I have a bit of human nature.

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  View of human nature.

• 1:17:09Speaker 00

  But not of the world. Like, I think the world's quite nice.

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  I think that's a reflection on human nature. I think that if we're offered the easy option, we'll generally take it.

• 1:17:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, but lots of people don't. Lots of people listen to books podcasts, and they read books and stuff.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  It's true, lots of people don't. But less people read books and listen to book, whatever, obviously not listen to book podcasts. But less people read books now than they used to, because. When they used to read loads of books, there was less other stuff to do.

• 1:17:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, there wasn't as much other stuff to do, but I mean, that's fine. People can do what they want.

• 1:17:35Speaker 01

  I agree. I think people can do what they want, absolutely. And you can't, you actually can't be a snob about this. You can't be an intellectual snob about it or criticize what the majority of the people are doing. I include myself in this for sure, but I still think it happens.

• 1:17:49Speaker 00

  I mean, this is one of my issues with the novel. I think there is too much snobbery in the novel. And I think his way of thinking about people playing their obstacle golf and stuff. I think play as much golf as you like, if that's what you want to play. So let's talk about the book itself. I mean, I do think Orwell's vision is more of its time than Huxley's. Huxley's has more, although Orwell has all this brilliant stuff about rewriting history and rewriting the classics and people being cancelled that does, that has lasted very well. And I think if you live in, you know, an authoritarian regime, surely Orwell's vision has gone more, speaks to you more.

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  I also just think as well that you shouldn't look down on a comfortable, I don't know, well nourished society. That's always a good thing.

• 1:18:30Speaker 00

  Agreed. So let's, now I've suggested the ranking. I battled heroically to resist the temptation to rank it out of pneumatic blondes at orgy porges. So instead, to show my commitment to self restraint, we're ranking it in lovely green Malthusian contraceptive belts, which is what they wear.

• 1:18:49Speaker 01

  I think you missed a trick. I think we should have been ranking it in adorable viscose velveteen shorts.

• 1:18:54Speaker 00

  Oh, that's much better. The velveteen shorts is the winner, clearly, clearly. So who's going first? You can go first. All right, I'll go first. I'm giving it out of 10, a shocking five. And I'm giving it five for this reason.

• 1:19:10Speaker 00

  I don't like novels of ideas, really, by and large.

• 1:19:13Speaker 01

  I think that's totally fair.

• 1:19:15Speaker 00

  A novel that's just a vehicle for ideas, just write the ideas down in an essay. Don't disguise it as a novel. I think the ideas in Brave New World are mildly interesting, but no more than that. I enjoyed reading the history of it more than I enjoyed reading the book. I think it appeals to people who don't like the modern world, who don't like mass culture, who don't have technology, people who sort of are a little bit foggyish. Oh, the world's going to hell in a handcart. I don't really agree with any of those things, you know, as you know, Tabby, I quite like them. I like video games. I like the modern world. I like all that sort of stuff.

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. And when people, I actually do agree when people are like, well, you know, look at the world we're living in today. It's like, we've literally never had it so good.

• 1:19:53Speaker 00

  Now, as for the novel, as a novel, the characters are so thin, they might as well not exist. The story is utterly insipid to my mind. I mean, there's no story, basically.

• 1:20:04Speaker 00

  There is no tension. There is no drama. I couldn't give a damn about Bernard and Lelina and the other people. As a novel, as a novel, as a story, I think it's rubbish. So I think the five out of 10 is generous. And that's because of its longevity, it's important, the ideas behind it, the history behind it, which are all very interesting. I think people should read it because it's part of the canon, but actually as a reading experience, it's just so dull. Anyway, enough. Tabby, what do you think? You're going to give it, give it 12 and shame me.

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  No, I'm not. I'm not. I'm going to give it six adorable viscose velveteen shorts out of 10. I just found it an easier, cheerier read than 1984. I do think it's a more convincing vision of the future. I was genuinely intrigued to see what became of John, where he'd end up. I lost interest, to be honest, as the book went on. And I think those two opening chapters are really well done, but it's not a thrilling read. It's not, you're not, it's not a massive page turner. As you say, I think the story is a bit thin. I think all the characters are a bit thin. And I'm not a massive fan of books of ideas either, but I am going to give it an extra point for those opening chapters.

• 1:21:15Speaker 00

  So what have we got coming up? We've got one of your absolute favourites next week, no?

• 1:21:20Speaker 01

  I wonder if it will still be. That's the question. So yeah, we've got For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway. We've got Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. We've got Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Goldfinger by Ian Fleming, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and White Knights by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I like, I like to think that that's a nice eclectic lineup.

• 1:21:52Speaker 00

  It's a very eclectic lineup. And that is a rebuke to people who say that people are only interested in playing, what is it? Bumble, rumble or whatever.

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  Fumblebonk.

• 1:22:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, whatever it's called. So those are the books to read on the way to your next orgy porgy.

• 1:22:09Speaker 00

  All right. Bye, everybody.

• 1:22:10Speaker 01

  Bye.

• 1:22:19Speaker 03

  From the studio that brought you WandaVision.

• 1:22:22Speaker 04

  I was an Avenger, but I'm not a hero anymore.

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  The Vision returns for the final chapter of the groundbreaking trilogy.

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  That family wasn't real.

• 1:22:33Speaker 05

  You sure about that? I had a father called Vision. How is this possible?

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  Don't miss the two-episode premiere of Marvel Television's Vision Quest. Nothing bonds a family together quite like Mortal Jeopardy. Now streaming, only on Disney+.

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• 1:23:20Speaker 07

  Where some see heroes and others see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. A fad to some, the future of money to others. We see crypto's trillion-dollar swings. The end of jobs, or the end of human struggle. We see the endless funds fueling the AI hype. While others follow the noise, we follow the money.

• 1:23:48Speaker 07

  Learn more at Bloomberg.com.