Brave New World (and briefly of Animal Farm)

The Finnish title for Brave New World by Aldous Huxley bothers me. Not because Uljas uusi maailma is a mistranslation but because the identical word order in Finnish sounds clumsy to me. You have to emphasize the end of uljas to avoid muddling the consonant to the following word. Uusi uljas maailma instead rolls off the tongue more naturally and I've seen others accidentally calling the book by that name too. But even if the translator thought so as well, they probably wanted to keep the title matching to an earlier translation of William Shakespeare's Tempest: "How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, / That has such people in't."

The novel had a foreword as expected from a classic but it was unusually by the author himself. As such it's less of a praise and much more critical. I got the impression it was written years after the book's first publication, maybe at the time Huxley was working on Brave New World Revisited.

Huxley wrote that had he rewritten Brave New World at that time, he would've fixed its problems, giving it artistic and philosophical completeness. But he also noted the futility of such an effort, to try to patch up an imperfect piece of art. By altering it, he would have mostly likely changed it too much.

I didn't find Brave New World as good of a read as Orwell's 1984. It uses more complicated sentence structures and difficult words, such as scientific terms. Its protagonists aren't likable either. The story didn't feel as timeless or as likely a scenario as 1984. It's clearly science fiction.

How people are being mass produced; engineered and conditioned for the caste system starting from cellular level is as an idea way out there. It's hard to imagine things would ever lead to that point.

However, soma -- the drug used by about everyone in the novel -- is a more plausible way for controlling people. It induces happiness and even seems to lack negative side effects -- other than making people depend on it. Every time they feel confronted by reality's unpleasantness, they can take soma to escape. It was clearly the inspiration for the Joy drug in We Happy Few.

I found really odd the method the novel questions its society -- or at least one of the methods. This criticism is provided by John who was born and raised outside the world state in a savage reservation after her mother got left behind during a holiday trip there. Linda taught him to speak and read English although only two books were available: a manual for engineering people -- and the complete works of Shakespeare.

John often expresses himself by quoting different plays which felt farcical to me. It felt so out of place.  Later he leaves the reservation and then ends up arguing with one of the free-thinking high-ups about the state's way of living -- again, by quoting Shakespeare.

I've never liked Shakespeare's works -- or rather, tried to read them. Perhaps it's the old language, funny spellings, but even as Finnish translations I doubt I could enjoy any of them. I always start skipping even short quotes as if they were unnecessary fluff. I in fact start doing that whenever there's a song or similar in any novel, like in The Lord of the Rings -- I jump straight past them. I do find rhyming poems pleasing, though.

But quoting Shakespeare definitely didn't work for me. I personally wouldn't put Brave New World on a must-read list with 1984.

Next I will probably check out Fahrenheit 451 to complete the trio of maybe the most famous dystopian novels. I have a feeling I've gone in a good-to-worse order with them though.

I also happened to read Animal Farm by George Orwell but don't have all that much to say about it. It turned out to be a very short book, a novella rather, barely breaking 100 pages. Even then it felt prolonged. Its satiric lesson on the Soviet Union can be understood from the start; it's like a predictable children's fairy tale.

Animal Farm's wikipedia article has a quote from George Soule, criticizing the novella back in the day in New Republic magazine, that pretty much sums up my opinion:"The allegory turned out to be a creaking machine for saying in a clumsy way things that have been said better directly".