In Island, his last novel, Huxley transports us to a Pacific island where, for 120 years, an ideal society has flourished. Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala, and events begin to move 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. — Book promo @ goodreads.com
Island is a utopian manifesto and novel by Huxley, the author’s final work before his death in 1963. Although it has a plot, the plot largely serves to further conceptual explorations rather than setting up and resolving conventional narrative tension. Another one of his novels that ‘blends’ fiction with his philosophy ramblings.
Some of it is understandable:
“So you think our medicine’s pretty primitive?”
That’s the wrong word. It isn’t primitive. It’s fifty percent terrific and fifty percent nonexistent. Marvelous antibiotics-but absolutely no methods for increasing resistance, so that antibiotics won’t be necessary. Fantastic operations-but when it comes to teaching people the way of going through life without having to be chopped up, absolutely nothing. And it’s the same all along the line. Alpha Plus for patching you up when you’ve started to fall apart; but Delta Minus for keeping you healthy. Apart from sewerage systems and synthetic vitamins, you don’t seem to do anything at all about prevention. And yet you’ve got a proverb: prevention is better than cure.” “But cure,” said Will, “is so much more dramatic than prevention. And for the doctors it’s also a lot more profitable. “Maybe for your doctors,” said the little nurse. “Not for ours. Ours get paid for keeping people well.”
But, although we have plenty, we’ve managed to resist the temptation that the West has now succumbed to—the temptation to overconsume. 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. Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse. And while you people are over consuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.
Then there is some that is way over my pay grade:
The Yogin and the Stoic-two righteous egos who achieve their very considerable results by pretending, systematically, to be somebody else. But it is not by pretending to be somebody else, even somebody supremely good and wise, that we can pass from insulated Manichee-hood to Good Being.
Good Being is knowing who in fact we are; and in order to know who in fact we are, we must first know, moment by moment, who we think we are and what this bad habit of thought compels us to feel and do. A moment of clear and complete knowledge of what we think we are, but in fact are not, puts a stop, for the moment, to the Manichean charade. If we renew, until they become a continuity, these moments of the knowledge of what we are not, we may find ourselves, all of a sudden, knowing who in fact we are.
This edited customer review is just the beginning of one of the many one and two star reviews the book received at goodreads.com. “What is it that compels authors to end their careers preaching to the masses? This boring and tendentious piece of propaganda should never be mistaken for an act of fiction or competent literature.” — Edited customer review
I might add that the last chapter in the book can be skipped if you make it that far or perhaps your are one of those readers that would give the book five stars, there were some.
Yesterday I went to the Bisbee Breakfast Club for the last time this ‘season’, back again in the Fall. The same thing goes for the grocery gathering at Safeway.
I also got the house cleaning chores completed yesterday. Somewhat a Sisyphus trial with the wind blowing dust in as fast as I could sweep it out. A lot of strong wind the past four days, continues to blow at night but not with the 30 mph gust that we got during the day.