Huxley's last novel is a hopeful counterpart to Brave New World. Will Farnaby, a cynical journalist, is shipwrecked on Pala, a fictional island in the East where a small society has blended Eastern wisdom with Western science. Its people practise humane approaches to education, family life, work and the mind, while outside powers take an interest in the island's oil. Through Farnaby's guided discovery, the book explores how a community might encourage happiness without losing freedom. It is a novel of ideas, more discussion than plot, and offers Huxley's mature thoughts on a good society.
Quotes
Both of us victims of the same twentieth-century plague. Not the Black Death, this time; the Grey Life.
Don't try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We're all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat — and the boat is perpetually sinking.
[H]istory is — the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma.
Armaments, universal debt and planned obsolescence — those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and money-lenders 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.