Thanks to MAC
Island. By Aldous Huxley. (Chatto and Windus, - 18s.) 'Bur if theology and theosophy, then why not theography and theometry, why not theognomy, theotrophy, theotomy, theogamy? Why not theophysics and theochemistry?' So meditates Gumbril in Antic Hay, just before the invention of the Patent Smallclothes, and so Huxley has constantly meditated. His major subject was always the split between mind and body, and he has ransacked life, literature and zoology for horrifying and delicious instances of it. But side by side with this there went a favourite project, that by some ecumenical science or system of sciences the split could be closed. Huxley's science was always Victorian and utilitarian in flavour. He saw science as the study of labour-saving, and his cherished aim was to find a mechanical short-cut to spiritual advan- tages. But then the science in his earlier writings was more than half jeu d'esprit. He adumbrated the 'ultimate science' in much the same spirit as Gumbril the inflatable trousers. It was all part of a high-spirited and debonair satirical poise: Huxley was never in the least a misan- thrope, and the quest for the ultimate science went with delight in and alarmed affection for the atavistic human muddle.
It is when he wants us to take his science literally that his writing goes wrong, and his new novel is a case in point. Island presents, without satire, his ideal society. The scheme of the book is simple. Will Farnaby, a writer manqué already half corrupt, intrudes into the `forbidden' island of Pala with a .commission to ,negotiate oil-rights. He finds there an English- speaking community, founded in the last cen- tury by a Cockney-speaking Raja and a Scottish doctor, in which the best of East and West are combined. The ultimate science is in full swing; `Pharmacology, sociology, physiology, not to mention pure and applied autology, neuro- theology, metachemistry, mycomisticism.' Family authority has been diluted by MAC (the Mutual Adoption Club). Potential criminals are detected by• somatotyping. The bad old-world mental habits of symbolism and fantasy have been re- placed by the reality of mystical experience, available to all through the `moksha-medicine.' Happiness, the escape from selfhood, and birth- control are open to everyone through maithuna, the yoga of love (otherwise known as coitus reservatus). Farnaby, whose hideous Yahoo laugh and compulsive cynicism at first puzzle and distress the islanders, suffers a change of heart under their instruction; but by the time the novel ends other Farnabys are preparing to destroy this Utopia in the name of the consumer- society and bogus religion.
The move away from satire turns out, sadly, to be a move away from humaneness. In Brave New World, though the Wellsian Huxley is obviously delighted with the vistas of bokanovskification and neo-Pavlovian condition- ing, these remain a gleeful but admonitory fiction, and sympathy is still with the atavistic Savage. In Island, since the ends of this sup- posedly libertarian Utopia are ones he approves of, Huxley ceases to scruple about the means of enforcing them, and loses all sympathy with non-conformity. As children his islanders are
systematically indoctrinated and brainwashed, as adults they are kept happy and politically quiescent by the sex-yoga (so much like the soma of Brave New World). And, revealingly, when the islanders propound their views, they use the very salesman's language of the Western society they condemn. 'Thanks to MAC,' they are fond of exclaiming; they explain that they give their children an 'up-to-date version of 'sop's Fables. Not the old anthropomorphic fictions, but true ecological fables with built-in, cosmic morals.'
Huxley makes the worst of the islanders' case, because he doesn't at heart believe in it himself. He makes them priggish and arch, sententious, censorious and smug. They are some of the most disagreeable Utopians I have met. The only one I felt any sympathy with was the old Raja, who could not be cured of buttering the family lingam; it was of black basalt, it had been in the family 800 years; and though the Raja knew this to be intellectual weakness, for all island opinion was against symbols and ritual as obstacles to 'pure experimental mysticism,' he could not desist from the habit of pouring melted butter over it from 'an extremely ornate silver sauceboat.' An excellent old man. And what a butterer of lingams we have lost in Huxley himself !
P. N. FURBANK
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