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Island Paperback – October 20, 2009
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“Huxley’s final word about the human condition and the possibility of the good society. . . . Island is a welcome and in many ways unique addition to the select company of books—from Plato to now—that have presented, in imaginary terms, a coherent view of what society is not but might be.” — New York Times Book Review
The final novel from Aldous Huxley, Island is a provocative counterpoint to his worldwide classic Brave New World, in which a flourishing, ideal society located on a remote Pacific island attracts the envy of the outside world.
In the novel Huxley considered his most important, he transports us to the remote Pacific island of Pala, where an ideal society has flourished for 120 years. Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala, and events are set in motion when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Faranby, is shipwrecked there. What Faranby doesn't expect is how his time with the people of Pala will revolutionize all his values and—to his amazement—give him hope.
- Print length384 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateOctober 20, 2009
- Dimensions5.31 x 0.86 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100061561797
- ISBN-13978-0061561795
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Island remains important and highly enjoyable” — Washington Post Book World
“Huxley’s final word about the human condition and the possibility of the good society. . . . Island is a welcome and in many ways unique addition to the select company of books—from Plato to now—that have presented, in imaginary terms, a coherent view of what society is not but might be.” — New York Times Book Review
“A mirror for modern man. . . . Should be read and reread.” — Saturday Review
“Island’s warnings about religious fanaticism, the exercise of massive military power, the geopolitical importance of oil and the development of artificial insemination seem extraordinarily prophetic." — The Guardian
“One of the truly great philosophical novels” — The Times (London)
One of the 99 Best Modern Novels — New York Times Book Review
From the Back Cover
In his final novel, which he considered his most important, Aldous Huxley transports us to the remote Pacific island of Pala, where an ideal society has flourished for 120 years.
Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala, and events are set in motion when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Faranby, is shipwrecked there. What Faranby doesn't expect is how his time with the people of Pala will revolutionize all his values and—to his amazement—give him hope.
About the Author
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) is the author of the classic novels Brave New World, Island, Eyeless in Gaza, and The Genius and the Goddess, as well as such critically acclaimed nonfiction works as The Perennial Philosophy and The Doors of Perception. Born in Surrey, England, and educated at Oxford, he died in Los Angeles, California.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Island
By Aldous HuxleyHarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2009 Aldous HuxleyAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780061561795
Chapter One
"Attention," a voice began to call, and it was as though an oboe had suddenly become articulate. "Attention," it repeated in the same high, nasal monotone. "Attention."
Lying there like a corpse in the dead leaves, his hair matted, his face grotesquely smudged and bruised, his clothes in rags and muddy, Will Farnaby awoke with a start. Molly had called him. Time to get up. Time to get dressed. Mustn't be late at the office.
"Thank you, darling," be said and sat up. A sharp pain stabbed at his right knee and there were other kinds of pain in his back, his arms, his forehead.
"Attention," the voice insisted without the slightest change of tone. Leaning on one elbow, Will looked about him and saw with bewilderment, not the gray wallpaper and yellow curtains of his London bedroom, but a glade among trees and the long shadows and slanting lights of early morning in a forest.
"Attention"?
Why did she say, "Attention"?
"Attention. Attention," the voice insisted--how strangely, how senselessly!
"Molly?" he questioned, "Molly?"
The name seemed to open a window inside his head. Suddenly, with that horribly familiar sense of guilt at the pit of the stomach, he smelt formaldehyde, he saw the small brisk nurse hurrying ahead of him along the green corridor, heard the dry creaking of her starched clothes. "Number fifty-five," she was saying, and then halted, opened a white door. He entered and there, on a high white bed, was Molly. Molly with bandages covering half her face and the mouth hanging cavernously open. "Molly," he had called, Molly . . ." His voice had broken, and he was crying, was imploring now, "My darling!" There was no answer. Through the gaping mouth the quick shallow breaths came noisily, again, again. "My darling, my darling . . ." And then suddenly the hand he was holding came to life for a moment. Then was still again.
"It's me," he said, "it's Will."
Once more the fingers stirred. Slowly, with what was evidently an enormous effort, they closed themselves over his own, pressed them for a moment and then relaxed again into lifelessness.
"Attention," called the inhuman voice. "Attention,"
It had been an accident, be hastened to assure himself. The road was wet, the car had skidded across the white line. It was one of those things that happen all the time. The papers are full of them; he had reported them by the dozen. "Mother and three children killed in head-on crash . . ." But that was beside the point, The point was that, when she asked him if it was really the end, he had said yes; the point was that less than an hour after she had walked out from that last shameful interview into the rain, Molly was in the ambulance, dying.
He hadn't looked at her as she turned to go, hadn't dared to look at her. Another glimpse of that pale suffering face might have been too much for him. She had risen from her chair and was moving slowly across the room, moving slowly out of his life. Shouldn't he call her back, ask her forgiveness, tell her that he still loved her? Had he ever loved her?
For the hundredth time the articulate oboe called him to attention.
Yes, had he ever really loved her?
"Good-bye, Will," came her remembered whisper as she turned back on the threshold. And then it was she who had said it -- in a whisper, from the depths of her heart. "I still love you, Will -- in spite of everything."
A moment later the door of the flat closed behind her almost without a sound. The little dry click of the latch, and she was gone.
He had jumped up, had run to the front door and opened it, had listened to the retreating footsteps on the stairs. Like a ghost at cockcrow, a faint familiar perfume lingered vanishingly on the air. He closed the door again, walked into his gray-and-yellow bedroom and looked out the window. A few seconds passed, then he saw her crossing the pavement and getting into the car. He heard the shrill grinding of the starter, once, twice, and after that the drumming of the motor. Should he open the window? "Wait, Molly, wait," he heard himself shouting in imagination. The window remained unopened; the car began to move, turned the comer and the street was empty. It was too late. Too late, thank God! said a gross derisive voice. Yes, thank God! And yet the guilt was there at the pit of his stomach. The guilt, the gnawing of his remorse -- but through the remorse he could feel a horrible rejoicing. Somebody low and lewd and brutal, somebody alien and odious who was yet himself was gleefully thinking that now there was nothing to prevent him from having what he wanted. And what he wanted was a different perfume, was the warmth and resilience of a younger body. "Attention," said the oboe. Yes, attention. Attention to Babs's musky bedroom, with its strawberry-pink alcove and the two windows that looked onto the Charing Cross Road and were looked into, all night long, by the winking glare of the big sky sign for Porter's Gin on the opposite side of the street. Gin in royal crimson -- and for ten seconds the alcove was the Sacred Heart, for ten miraculous seconds the flushed face so close to his own glowed like a seraph's, transfigured as though by an inner fire of love. Then came the yet profounder transfiguration of darkness. One, two, three, four ... Ah God, make it go on forever! But punctually at the count of ten the electric clock would turn on another revelation -- but of death, of the Essential Horror; for the lights, this time, were green, and for ten hideous seconds Babs's rosy alcove became a womb of mud and, on the bed, Babs herself was corpse-colored, a cadaver galvanized into posthumous epilepsy.
Continues...
Excerpted from Islandby Aldous Huxley Copyright © 2009 by Aldous Huxley. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper Perennial Modern Classics; 1st edition (October 20, 2009)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 384 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0061561797
- ISBN-13 : 978-0061561795
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.86 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #7,106 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #86 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #281 in Classic Literature & Fiction
- #880 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) is the author of the classic novels Island, Eyeless in Gaza, and The Genius and the Goddess, as well as such critically acclaimed nonfiction works as The Devils of Loudun, The Doors of Perception, and The Perennial Philosophy. Born in Surrey, England, and educated at Oxford, he died in Los Angeles.
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As fate would have it, the good doctor was blessed with an open mind, and so the distinctly Western influences he brought to Pala were benign - in fact helpful. Between his New Age science and the King's Tantrik Buddhism, the island maintained a stunning balance between the Eastern and the Western. Everything clicked. Utopia.
On the island, education is biological, spiritual, and deeply psychological. Teachers start with ecology, and gradually "bridge" to every other area of thought - even metaphysics. Although children are given all the time in the world to use their imagination, Pala's teachers "never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very first that all living is relationship. Show them the relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village, in the village and the country around it. Rub it in."
Religion on Pala was pantheistic and pagan in nature. Lots of references to Buddhism, Taoism, chanting, and inner spirituality. In fact, the book itself is a sort of spiritual tour de force, wherein Huxley promulgates another beautiful version of his Mind with a capital M theory.
Industrialization of the island never really occurred as such. Instead, Palanesians embrace selective industrialization (no motor scooters, no Sears and Roebuck) and import certain technologies to meet daily needs - like massive refrigeration units to keep crops from rotting between seasons, and a small degree of electricity to support scientific research and whatnot.
Pala's sociological structure is strange strange Huxleyan strange. A mixture of social parenting, fertility control, and religious ceremonies involving "moksha-medicine" - "the reality revealer, the truth-and-beauty pill" - "four hundred milligrams of revelation" - the best way to keep the islanders from biting into the "Tree of Consumer Goods." (Why chase the Western god of innovation when you can chase the dragon?)
As one of the natives, Dr. Robert, points out, "We don't give ourselves coronaries by guzzling six times as much saturated fat as we need. We don't hypnotize ourselves into believing that two television sets will make us twice as happy as one television set. And finally we don't spend a quarter of the gross national product preparing for World War III or even World War's baby brother, Local War MMMCCCXXXIII." Instead the conduct more research on maksha, hone educational techniques, and make lots and lots war oldest enemy, love.
Like any good utopia, a number of critical issues must be addressed head-on. The reality issue is one. On this note, Huxley scores a perfect ten. The book is very realistic; so much so, in point of fact, that he drags the reader to the bottomless depths of "Pure and Applied Pointlessness" and the "Essential Horror" (the omnipresence of death, the precarious of all existence) before building and bridging into Pala's social philosophy of "Pure and Applied Mahayana" Buddhism and "Pure and Applied Science" - a religious and practical science of optimism and wellbeing.
It is only after diving and climbing out of these incredible depths solitude and despair that one learns to see again. "Liberate your selves from everything you know and look with complete innocence at this infinitely improbable thing before you. Look at it as though you'd never seen anything of the kind before, as though it had no name and belonged to no recognizable class. Look at it alertly but passively, receptively, without labeling or judging or comparing. And when you look it, inhale its mystery, breathe in the spirit of sense, the smell of the wisdom of the Other Shore."
Nor does Huxley reconfigure human nature with a literary sleight of hand, making everyone good little boys and girls. Every society has the possibility of creating a Hitler, a Tito or a Stalin, and so does Pala. But it doesn't. The Palanesians employ therapy "on all fronts at once" with an eye toward prevention over treatment. With detection, prevention, and four hundred milligrams of revelation, all problems are curable. Not the mention the love - which this island has in spades.
All told, Huxley has given us a wonder utopia and, perhaps more importantly, a thoroughgoing critique of Western Civilization. A must read for anybody who wants to discover their inner "suchness" and reach the Other Shore, where all is illuminated. "Sunsets and death; death and therefore kisses; kisses and consequently birth and then death for yet another generation of sunset watchers."
This is what I take Island to really mean: as a metaphor for the person as individual. We each are islands in the vast ocean of life; we should take very good care of ourselves and intentionally preserve and enhance our freedom, morality, spirituality and our autonomy lest we be consumed and overrun, a la Pala, by an uncaring, spirituality bankrupt and pillaging world without. Some reviews have suggested Pala as Huxley's depiction of a utopia counterposed against Brave New World. That is all well and good but, in the end, the utopia of Pala doesn't make it either. I believe Huxley was too cynical and suspicious of modern life to ever suspect a utopia could long survive en masse. What he did promote, in various forms of expression, was a profound concern for individual freedom in a world populated by tyranny, totalitarian forces in varous shapes and mass market commercialism collectively sucking all the vitality and beauty out of human existence.
Huxley was a great humanist and proponent of extending human freedom and potential wherever possible and combating any force arrayed against that effort. He early on experimented with drugs as a means, I believe, of expanding human experience and expression. In many respects he was the precursor to Timothy Leary and the LSD movement, the hippie generation, the New Agers, the green movement in general and other groups concerned with the human condition arrayed against tyranny, dogmatism and capitalism run amok. Island is the literary culmination of his lifelong work and is a profound, astute and deeply mystical book. Easily one of the best I have ever read.
It is little noted that Huxley, prior to his serious writing career and Brave New World, once taught French to English schoolboys. One of his students was none other than Eric Blair, aka George Orwell, the future author of 1984. It is one of the great ironies of modern life that one English classroom could have housed at one time the two great geniuses of the twentieth century, in terms of political satire, whose combined dystopias portrayed a future world so nightmarish and inhumane that it jolted humankind into thought and action, providing inestible service. Did Huxley inspire Orwell in his thought at that early stage or with Brave New World later? Who knows, nonetheless Huxley was a magnificent thinker and profoundly influential figure of the twentieth century. His Island, equal to Brave New World in my opinion, fittingly crowns his eventful life prior to his death a year later.
Other reviewers have more than adequately summarized the plot. For me, the talking birds say it all.
Top reviews from other countries
Huxley's portrayal of Pala, the idyllic island society, is nothing short of mesmerizing. The characters come to life with depth and complexity, making you empathize with their struggles and aspirations. Will Farnaby's journey of self-discovery on the island is a profound exploration of human nature and the search for meaning in a world dominated by materialism.
The themes explored in Island are as relevant today as they were when the book was first published. Huxley's visionary ideas on spirituality, sustainable living, and the pursuit of happiness are both thought-provoking and inspiring.
The writing itself is a testament to Huxley's brilliance. His prose is elegant and thoughtfully crafted, making every page a joy to read. Island is a book that will linger in your mind long after you've turned the final page.
In a world filled with noise and distractions, Island serves as a beacon of wisdom and enlightenment. It's a must-read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the human condition and a vision of a more harmonious world.
In short, Island by Aldous Huxley is a literary masterpiece that deserves a place on every bookshelf. It's a book that challenges, enlightens, and leaves you with a profound sense of wonder. Highly recommended!