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

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2:48The 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 nurses stiffened to attention as the director came in.

3:01Dominic Sandbrook: Set out the books, he said curtly. In silence, the nurses obeyed his command. Between the rose bowls, the books were duly set out. A row of nursery quartos opened invitingly, each at some gaily coloured image of beast or fish or bird. Now, bring in the children. They hurried out of the room and returned in a minute or two, each pushing a kind of tall dumbwaiter, laden on all of its four wire-netted shelves, with eight-month-old babies, all exactly alike. A Bokonofsky group, it was evident. And all, since their cast was Delta, dressed in khaki. Put them down on the floor. Now, turn them so they can see the flowers and the books.

3:37From 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,

3:45Dominic Sandbrook: Watch carefully, he said, and lifting his hand, he gave the signal. 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. And now, the director shouted, for the noise was deafening. Now we proceed to rub in the lesson with a mild electric shock. 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.

4:33So six centuries after the first Model T car rolled off Henry Ford's assembly lines.

4:39Dominic Sandbrook: 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 they're 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 Bokonofsky process. and now they're in the conditioning rooms and the babies are basically being taught to hate and fear books and flowers.

5:14Dominic Sandbrook: 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. Definitely not. And they don't want them to like flowers because then they would go on useless country walks and they wouldn't consume anything. What purpose does that serve to society? 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?

5:44No, 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.

6:20And 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, 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 in 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.

7:03Because in some ways, yes, the books are very different and the visions that they proffer are very different, but they're also pretty similar, wouldn't you say?

7:10Dominic Sandbrook: 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 Marks. 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. It's all warm and cuddly. It's very warm and cuddly, exactly. Well, actually, I think the mood is not quite as forbidding as in 1984. So when you start 1984, it's very physical straight away.

7:52Dominic Sandbrook: 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 a smell of boiled cabbage and the lift doesn't work. And he's got his ulcer or whatever it is, varicose veins. And it's very gritty. It's quite Soviet. Yeah, it's very Soviet in Finland. It's very kind of, it's a sort of cross between the Soviet Union and 1940s bombed out Austerity Britain. This book is much more sanitized, cleaner. It's less physical. It's also quite chirpy. Yeah. You know, everyone's quite chirpy because by the very nature of this society, everyone is happy.

8:25Dominic Sandbrook: That's so true. It is chirpy. And even that scene, the bloke giving the kids an electric shock, he's pretty chirpy. Yeah, they're all chirpy. And he shouts to be heard above the noise and all of that. But everything's nice. Everything looks nice. Everything's where it should be. Everything's clean, tidy. 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.

9:03Dominic Sandbrook: 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 Brave New World is better as a novel? I am not so sure, and we will come to this. Had you read this book before, Tabby? I have. 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.

9:44Even if, you know, when I reread it this time, I found it much more disturbing. But again, there's a lightness to it that is totally at odds with kind of the heavy gloom of 1984.

9:54Dominic Sandbrook: It's quite whimsical at times. 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 but Dominic indulge us with your own spontaneously conceived and very witty comparison which we definitely didn't discuss before recording this episode I like to amuse Tabby with my tremendous witticisms and I said to you Aldous Huxley felt to me like he was basically like if you put Virginia Woolf P.G.

10:45Dominic Sandbrook: Woodhouse and George Harrison in a blender in a blender this would be the result Aldous Huxley would be the result 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 it is this is great insight what we should start the podcast here it would 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. Absolutely, he does. He has the fascination with Eastern mysticism of the George Harrison.

11:24Dominic Sandbrook: 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. Sounds like such a bull. He was the great populizer. 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. To be fair, that would be entertaining. 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.

12:02Dominic Sandbrook: Arnold of Tom Brown School Days fame. Yeah, you're a big fan of his, no? Massive fan. Love Dr. Arnold, love Tom Brown School Days, love all forms of boarding school culture. And she also, following in those lofty footsteps, she also set up a school. Yeah, set up a school herself. Brilliant. Brilliant family. Anyway, they're unbelievably worthy. I think I would not have got on very well with them. No. 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.

12:38Dominic Sandbrook: Number one, when he's 14. Like Virginia Woolf, actually. Right, exactly. Actually, not dissimilar. When he's 14, his mother dies of cancer. Then his brother, who's called Trevenan, kills himself. And he was very 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? 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 either but he had 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 fell 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.

13:39The good news is that he's rejected for service in the First World War because obviously he can't see. So he goes to 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 laborer. 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.

14:16And 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 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. 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.

14:57And 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 of 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 actually clashed with the Bloomsbury Group quite a lot because he disagreed with their ethos of free love, for instance. You can see that in Brave New World, their aesthetic approach to life.

15:30And he actually wrote a book satirizing them, which a lot of them took offense to, and they had a bit of a falling out. And he's doing lots of that at this time, writing short stories, novels, most of them forgotten today. Kind of acerbic comedies, a bit like that one, the satire of the Blooms 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.

16:01Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, they sound terrible. Really? I was reading up on these books. They sound quite Mitford, I think. Yeah, exactly. Which you don't approve of. You know my views on the sort of bright young things and whatnot. I just think this sounds like Evelyn Wall or something, but without the laughs. Yeah, that's true. But Nancy Mitford has a lot of laughs. Got to give her that. 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.

16:35Dominic Sandbrook: 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 is very exciting. And he thinks this is going to be this extraordinary threat to European civilization. And a year later, he wrote to a friend, the thing which is happening in America is a re-evaluation of values, a radical alteration for the worse of established standards. And this basically gives him an idea. What would the world look like if it all turned into America? What if it became Americanized? And ultimately, this is the genesis of what will become Brave New World.

17:13Dominic Sandbrook: 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? No, no. If we just stick with Huxley himself. So he churned out dozens more books in the 30s, 40s and 50s. All different themes 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.

17:54He moves to America in 1937, which is so odd.

17:58Dominic Sandbrook: But it's the fascination. Don't you think it's the mingled fascination and repulsion kind of thing? 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 they live 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. But even more incongruous is what he's doing, right?

18:29Yeah, so weird. So 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. 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 that he 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.

19:19And 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 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 Bhagavad 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.

20:02Oh my word.

20:03Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. 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 learned a lot more. 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.

20:47He 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.

21:00Dominic Sandbrook: 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 unpack, 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 5 of The Tempest, Prospero's daughter Miranda says, Oh, Wanda, how many goodly creatures are there here?

21:34Dominic Sandbrook: 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, and she doesn't realize 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, it is 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.

22:07Dominic Sandbrook: 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, I think it's 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. 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 think, oh, it's something to do with farming maybe, or I don't know, just some random lab work.

22:41And then you hear the word fetus and you're like, oh, what is going on here? I think it's very well done.

22:47Dominic Sandbrook: I think it is well done. But the comparison with 1984, so in 1984... There's a lot more show, don't tell, I would say. 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. It'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.

23:24Dominic Sandbrook: A 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 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 aldous 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 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.

24:05In 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. 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.

24:40That's not really the point. Whereas in 1984, there's a long passage dedicated to explaining why we are where we are. Where we are, yeah. 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.

25:02Dominic Sandbrook: You mean as in overtly domineering? 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 godlike figure, not quite like Big Brother, I would say, in 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.

25:47And 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.

25:57Dominic Sandbrook: Like a model T, yeah. 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 Ford ship, Mustafa Mond, which is also kind of a clever in-joke. And he's at the top of a social hierarchy of 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.

26:33So 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. They rule by conformity, conditioning, and essentially kind of happiness, contentedness is weaponized. Your role in society is determined before you're born.

27:08And 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.

27:33Dominic Sandbrook: Exactly. So this is, so where 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 Hatterian Conditioning Center. In his essay on the book, John Sutherland, the 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.

28:11Dominic Sandbrook: They're created not by God. They're created by scientists and test tubes and incubators. And thanks to this thing called the Bokanowski 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. 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.

28:54I 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. I think so. George Orwell is like, beware, beware.

29:03Dominic Sandbrook: So these kids, they will use x-rays and they use heat conditioning and they use oxygen deprivation to affect their development. 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. 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 condition you so that you would never want to be clever and you'd rather look down on people who are. Exactly. But also, so once you're born, you have more conditioning. So hence the stuff with the flowers and the books.

29:34and 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 hypnopedia and this is actually still very popular today this is again this is something that Pavlov wrote about so for instance is when pregnant mothers will play Mozart to their stomachs so that the children grow up with a love of Mozart or they become geniuses 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.

30:10Your destiny is laid out for you. Your tastes are decided. Your views. Even the clothes you wear.

30:16Dominic Sandbrook: It's determined by the state. Yeah. And listeners might be wondering, well, what about the place for parents and family? It's an interesting part of the ideology, I think. 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. Yeah, the Holy Ghost versus the Father. 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.

31:03Dominic Sandbrook: And, you know, that this was all terrible and wicked and cruel. And 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. Yeah, it's not even just a taboo. 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 sick. It makes your skin crawl. Yeah, it makes your skin crawl. 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.

31:44Dominic Sandbrook: 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. 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 are being 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.

32:21Ah, 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've been a year older were playing very gravely and with all the focused attention of scientists intent on a labor of discovery, a rudimentary sexual game. And you're like, God, what? Toasty 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.

32:59Dominic Sandbrook: Our Ford, yeah. 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. Yeah. And it's motherly. The word mother and father is abhorrent. 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 Bertrand Russell. He had 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.

33:38Dominic Sandbrook: This is so 1920s. And actually, it's kind of joking about that. I don't think they beat each other to death with conch shells, though. I think that's the difference. That's a comfort. And then the other thing, the great joke that runs through it, Obviously Huxley is a Victorian. He was born at the end of the Victorian period. And the joke goes through Brave New World. 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.

34:08Dominic Sandbrook: 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 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. Orgy-porgy, orgy-porgy. they all start chanting it. That I was certainly lost by.

34:48Dominic Sandbrook: 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, 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 on the taboos of his own time.

35:27Yeah, 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.

35:40Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. 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 in so far 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 he wants to feel things and you're not really meant to want to feel things exactly you're not meant to feel things he doesn't have a backstory though unlike Winston Smith Winston's is gradually revealed to us remember the thing about his mum when Winston lost his parents and the chocolates yeah he has no personality beyond a mild strain of bitterness born of being the runt of the litter.

36:44And 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 Helmholtz Watson. He is too clever for this society. Basically, 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 who you mentioned, and this is our heroine of a kind.

37:23And 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 adweighed by the standards of the, and the dullest 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.

37:55We're just told again and again that she's pneumatic and that basically is her personality.

38:02Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, it is. Basically, she's very fleshy, good looking. No whiff of rebellion. She just has a lovely waist. She's got auburn hair and that's all we need to know. 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.

38:41Dominic Sandbrook: 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. We'll meet him ourselves after the break. Did you know that psoriatic arthritis may progress over time and could cause permanent joint damage if left untreated?

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41:03So 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 so I think both both of us would totally agree that you ought to sign up at the book club hq.com for book club notes our brand Club Notes, exactly.

41:55Now, back to Brave New World. So what happens when Bernard and Lenina arrive in New Mexico?

42:02Dominic Sandbrook: 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. It's not utopian at all. No, no, no, no. It's a lot of tribal dancing, which 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.

42:34Dominic Sandbrook: 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. 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.

43:13Because she doesn't have soma, she craves soma and so she has to fill the gap with alcohol.

43:17Dominic Sandbrook: 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 and she it kind of it seems that she's been part in some obscene ritual 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 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.

43:57Dominic Sandbrook: So marooned. And John, like Miranda in The Tempest, when he first sees his visitors, he basically is like, oh, a brave new world. Oh, isn't this brilliant? And he and his mother are going to come back with them to London. And they're very excited about what they're going to, you know, he can't wait. get to see this world that he's dreamed of, what's it going to be? It's going to be great fun. And actually, of course, it isn't. 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.

44:30And 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 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. He reminded me of Pocahontas when she came from the New World to London.

45:05And 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 important religion was at that time, how much there was to disapprove of.

45:48So John is absolutely appalled by what he discovers of life in AF 632. He's in love with Lenina, 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. 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.

46:30And you're not really meant to get attached to people. so 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 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 you feel nothing and they're eating eclairs and they're shocked

46:59Dominic Sandbrook: they're trying to eat their eclairs this is like sobbing and this is disgusting savage crying over his mother. They're appalled to see him cry. They probably wouldn't really even know what crying was. 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 onto 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?

47:31Do 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 yeah yeah 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 And we really meet Mustafa Mound in the flesh. And he's the world controller. And this is the climax of the novel.

48:03And this is a bit like that sort of scene with Big Brother in 1984. O 'Brien. 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.

48:20Dominic Sandbrook: Yes, exactly. So actually, this is a good moment to stop and to say, well, 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 would be the inevitable acceleration of American world domination.

48:55Dominic Sandbrook: and what he means by that is kind of American culture and American economic power as much as political 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 he 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'sst 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 admitted there's a lot of smog um the beach the kind of california lifestyle the sunniness and stuff but lots of british visitors go and they find that repellent 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.

49:56There 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. And also I'm terribly pretentious. So there's that. But similarly, I think 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. And in lots of ways, the London of Brave New World is essentially California in 1926. They use dollars. They live in skyscrapers. There's this obsession with looking young and beautiful all the time.

50:39Hence, 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 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 16 saxophonists. Yeah. 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 precisely the point when silent movies are being overtaken by the talkies. So there's the jazz singer in 1927.

51:19And then Brave New World, I think quite cleverly, takes this a step further with the feelies. And Lenina takes John, who she has a crush on, to see three weeks in a helicopter, an all-super-singing, synthetic, talking-coloured, stereoscopic feelie with synchronised 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.

51:45Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, it's almost like a kind of VR type thing. You'll feel it, you'll smell it. It's completely immersive. It's playing with the idea of escapism, I guess, in the extreme. Yeah, completely. But the film they see, it's kind of very dodgy, isn't it? Really dodgy. It's like Birth of a Nation or something. It's a 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.

52:24Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, she thinks it's brilliant. And I think this is another joke because basically there was a film franchise in the 1920s that had this plot effectively. It was the Rudolph Valentino films, The Sheikh and Son of the Sheikh. 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 1920s intellectual slightly sort of sneering at mass culture 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 20s and to say it's for morons, it's so shallow.

53:19Yeah, it's a form of snobbery, actually.

53:21Dominic Sandbrook: It is, I think, a little bit. So I think this is a difference for George Orwell. So Orwell in 1984, remember he says like, if there's hope, it lies in the proles. He kind of likes ordinary people and their songs they sing and 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. They're mindless and slightly infantile, aren't they? But everything's shiny. But the 1920s and 30s is a huge age for the expansion of leisure, like in Britain.

53:59Dominic Sandbrook: 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. But what would Orwell have made of something like LA or that sort of booming American culture? 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. When Orwell speaks about liking the proles or whatever, I think he kind of means a doughty Englishman. He does. Who sits in a country pub or whatever.

54:32Dominic Sandbrook: It's a side of him. But I know what you mean. I do think that occasionally Huxley slips over into sneering a tiny bit. A little bit. I think a little bit. A little bit. Anyway, but it's not just American consumerism that he's satirizing here. There's loads more going on. So in May 1931, 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 20th century. You're a big fan of his work, I think. And he's another enthusiast for utopias and dystopias.

55:09And he's always imagining possible futures. And this is H.G. Wells. And in 1923, he wrote a book called Men Like Gods. And it imagined a man from Sydenham called Mr. Barnstaple, who was accidentally transported into the far future, 3 ,000 years ahead. The future there, 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.

55:49Dominic Sandbrook: Exactly. 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 Oldest Huxley tells another 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. So I actually had a look at this book.

56:22Dominic Sandbrook: I found a copy of it online. Did you? Men Like Gods. It looks rubbish. no oh how come well it's forgotten i think forgotten for a reason it's a terrible name mr barnstable is a really boring character 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 there's no story it's no tension um anyway so clearly what happened is all the tuxy sat down in 1931 and he thought to himself well i've been to america i've been to la it was awful um hg wells has written this terrible book. I'm going to spoof H.G. Wells' book and combine it with the parody of LA, and that's what Brave New World is going to be.

57:00Dominic Sandbrook: But he's also drawing very deeply on the anxieties specifically of the early 1930s. 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 and 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. And then there was the Russian revolution and whatnot.

57:30Dominic Sandbrook: And in 1931, 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 labor 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 20s and 30s.

58:08Dominic Sandbrook: They're like, there should be a national plan by very clever people like him. So they plan everything out so nothing like this can ever happen again. A philosopher utopia or something. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so you've got that idea on the one hand. And then the other idea, which 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 1908 and then that similar technique is rolled out in factors worldwide this 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 in an entirely new age basically in the future i mean they weren't wrong 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 wages that they've earned.

59:17Dominic Sandbrook: And the man behind Ford is Henry Ford. By the 20s, he was easily one of the most famous men in the world. I mean, he was the equivalent of Elon Musk or something. Yeah, that's a good comparison. 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 um east in sort of suburban you know essex east london and they had a housing estates they had a sort of They had schools, they had leisure facilities.

1:00:07Dominic Sandbrook: It's basically like people at the time said, this is the town of the future. They call it Fordopolis. 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. It's like the Cadbury, the little Cadburyville or whatever it was. On a Bourneville, but on a much, much bigger scale. On a mass scale, yeah. It was a little bit like a Marie Antoinette with the Petit Folli, what was it called? Yeah, the Petit Trianon. Yeah, exactly. Where it was like, we're going to live in like Disney cottages and have our milk delivered to us every day.

1:00:40That's what Bourneville is. Exactly. But this wasn't that.

1:00:44Dominic Sandbrook: Not at all. Not at all. And so basically, London in Brave New World is Fordopolis on a massive scale. This is Hux's nightmare, that the world will become one giant Ford plant. Assembly line people making assembly line things. And this will go on forever. History will stop. and there'll be nothing but this. And also the fear that that turns you into unthinking drones. You live out the motions 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. And it's hard to challenge this, because basically Bernard Marx, our supposed hero at the beginning of the book, he's not really a challenge to this.

1:01:24Dominic Sandbrook: He's no threat at all. 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. Yeah, and he's just a bit bored and disaffected and he doesn't really know where he fits but 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 dissidents 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 They're not going to put rats on your face 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.

1:02:04Dominic Sandbrook: He kind of is a bit, they don't really know what to make of him, do they? No. 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'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.

1:02:34So 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. And he is the naive, innocent in a world that he doesn't really understand.

1:02:57Dominic Sandbrook: John is, yeah. Yeah, exactly. He's like Candide in Voltaire's Candide. Candide, yeah. Yeah, and 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 loses his innocence the more that he sees and understands. It's a bit like he steps out of some primordial garden of Eden. Exactly. Very imperfect here. Yeah, which is basically what... I mean, John's life beforehand wasn't brilliant, but he's horrified by what he sees in London, 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.

1:03:35Dominic Sandbrook: But I found him really unlikable as a character. And I found him unsatisfying. I just thought he was a bit priggish and a bit annoying. 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 putting 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 in the private life and his private life and everyone else dropped him.

1:04:18And 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 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 Kama Sutra let's be authentic Lawrence like it holds the world record for using the word

1:04:44Dominic Sandbrook: loins in a in novels yeah burning loins exactly I think telling it's telling Dominic that you've and 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. Yeah, well, I do find D.S. Lawrence a bit, I think he totally insists upon himself. I like his books, though. But his ideas are kind of that of sort of early, mid-1960s hippies or something. Well, they definitely appeal to it. You're not wrong. And I think when we do like Sons and Lovers or Women in Love. I love Sons and Lovers. We can go through some of the passages in that where it's like they're burning his loins.

1:05:21Dominic Sandbrook: Come on, every page. 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're having 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. 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.

1:06:02Dominic Sandbrook: 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's dragged his country into the sort of a shiny new world of the 20th century and then Mond Sir Alfred Mond was the first chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries ICI and Huxley had been to their huge new plant outside Middlesbrough.

1:06:47Dominic Sandbrook: 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. I agree. 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, I think, the one character in the book that you would actually want to have a drink with or something. I actually agree. He's quite funny. He's quite wry and self-aware.

1:07:23Dominic Sandbrook: 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've basically got a choice. You can go and live on an island with other dissidents. Oh, do you want to run it? And he was like, well, I'll run it. 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. 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.

1:07:59Yeah, yeah. He's cynical of human nature because he knows how to manipulate it.

1:08:05Dominic Sandbrook: Exactly. So in other words, you know, the comparison we've 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 Mond-John conversation also, for me, it reminded me of a scene in The Brothers Karamazov, where the Grand Inquisitor is meeting Jesus. And 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.

1:08:47Dominic Sandbrook: They're better off 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 I think, I mean, I agree with the critic David Bradshaw, who says the reason for this is that Huxley can never decide, does he like his world or does he not like it? Because actually all through this time, Huxley is sort of saying state planning is a really good idea.

1:09:22Dominic Sandbrook: He quite likes, you know, the idea of telling people what to do. He likes the idea of everything being controlled and stable and settled. and he fears chaos. So actually, I think his sympathies here are as much with Mestafa Mond as they are with John the Savage. 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 Lenina, 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.

1:09:58So people often see Brave New World as a warning against the horrors of eugenics. You know, 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 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.

1:10:40But before then, it was pretty standard. And he was on that way. And he was with that.

1:10:46Dominic Sandbrook: And that's why we get to that crucial confrontation between Mond and John, the absolute core of the book. And they're arguing about what they want. What's the root of a good society? and Mond says, look, you know, people are happy. And if they're not happy, we give them the Soma, which he calls Christianity without tears. And John says, but I don't want that. I want God. I want poetry. I want danger. Yeah, I want freedom. I want sin. And then Mond has this, I mean, Huxley gives him a brilliant comeback. Mond 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 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.

1:11:38But I think that on the one hand, 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. 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 starves himself. He sees Leonina and he's attracted to her, so he attacks her.

1:12:09Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, he's basically gone mad, hasn't he? 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. But you know what? Basically, the controller's argument, Mon's argument, is directly the opposite of the thing we were talking about in our Circe episode. So in Circe, Madeline Miller's book, the final choice that Circe 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.

1:12:40Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, that is. But now when I think, would I rather be John like whipping myself and living in filth? Yeah. 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. But 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 yeah fair enough fair so anyway um we should talk about whether we which sides we're on at the end yeah are we on the side of orgies or on the inside of self-fagellation surely you can do both no i mean the combination of those two things is the dream anyway um

1:13:17Dominic Sandbrook: people lots of highbrow critics love the book uh 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 falling apart. Japan has attacked China. There's fascism. Nazism is about to emerge 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. So in a second, we'll talk about Huxley's very poor behavior with George Orwell. I think Orwell undoubtedly read Huxley's book. Orwell was much more influenced actually by a book, Sam Rock Jr.

1:13:53Dominic Sandbrook: 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. 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, patronising 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 clubs 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.

1:14:43In other words, I feel that the nightmare 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 1984, it's going to snap at some point. You can't continue. It's got to be held so taught 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.

1:15:21Dominic Sandbrook: Exactly, that 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's 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. I do. I'm a big fan of James Marriott. So he loves this book 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 we'd be beaten and books would be banned and all of this.

1:15:58Dominic Sandbrook: 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. 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. That basically everything, 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? 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 eugenics, not the eugenics stuff, none of that, not the science stuff.

1:16:38I 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 It's 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 things to do with your time that curiosity isn't necessarily encouraged when life in the West anyway is as easy as it is.

1:17:19And 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.

1:17:30Dominic Sandbrook: So you're thinking we're living in Huxley's world, something more like Huxley's world something more like I mean Huxley said once that someone said oh 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 along much more quickly I don't think it's 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 yeah which it clearly is what about you? I think all that's too bleak though I mean God I'm surprised you have such a bleak view of human nature but not of the world like I think the world's quite nice I think that's a reflection on human nature I think that if we're offered the easy option we'll generally take it yeah but lots of people don't lots of people listen to books podcasts and they read books and stuff it's true lots of people don't but less people read books and listen to books 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.

1:18:32Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, there wasn't as much other stuff to do, but I mean, that's fine. People can do what they want. 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 criticise what the majority of the people are doing. I include myself in this for sure, but I still think it happens. 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.

1:18:58Dominic Sandbrook: 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 has lasted very well. And I think if you live in an authoritarian regime, surely Orwell's vision speaks to you more. 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. 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.

1:19:43Dominic Sandbrook: So instead, to show my commitment to self-restraint, we're ranking it in lovely green Malthusian contraceptive belts, which is what they wear. I think you missed a trick. I think we should have been ranking it in adorable viscose velveteen shorts. 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. I don't like novels of ideas, really, by and large. I think that's totally fair. A novel that's just a vehicle for ideas. Just write the ideas down in an essay.

1:20:18Dominic Sandbrook: 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 know technology people who sort of are a little bit fogey-ish 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 video games I like the modern world I like all that sort of stuff yeah and when people I actually do agree when people are like well you know look at the world we're living into here it's like we've literally never had it so good 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 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 5 out of 10 is generous and that's because of its longevity its importance the ideas behind it the history behind it, which are all very interesting.

1:21:26Dominic Sandbrook: 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 12 and shame me. No, I'm not. I'm not. I'm going to give it six adorable viscose velveteen shorts out of 10. Okay. 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.

1:22:03It'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 an extra point for those opening chapters.

1:22:15Dominic Sandbrook: So what have we got coming up? we've got one of your absolute favourites next week. 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 Brett 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 to think that that's a nice eclectic lineup. 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.

1:23:00Bumble Bonk.

1:23:01Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, whatever it's called. So those are the books to read on the way to your next orgy-borgy. All right. All right. Bye, everybody. Bye.

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