Not Too Many Answers

When I first read Island, thirty-something years ago, I think I was looking for some kind of answers, and was disappointed not to find them. After all, this was a Utopia, and the whole point of a Utopia is to tell you what the perfect society might be like. But Huxley's novel doesn't exactly do that. Pala, his island, is doomed from the beginning and the lessons you learn there are rather slippery. You certainly get glimpses of a better way of approaching life, but it's all terribly vulnerable and more than a little equivocal.

There's an awful lot about danger, and an equal amount about dying. And what it has to say about education is so odd it's difficult to equate with the reality of schools and what they have to offer. It certainly seemed that way to me back in the 1970's. But reading Island today - over the last three days actually - I've been struck by how extraordinarily prescient a novel it is, or rather was. The satire it offers of the values of the consumer society outside Pala, which finally, inevitably consumes the island, is depressingly accurate. The vision (much abused word, but in this case it stands) it offers of a genuinely holistic (similarly abused, similarly stands) way of living is startlingly relevant to our times.

Of course, not everything Huxley thinks is likely to benefit us will work. He is understandably naïve about what consuming mind-altering substances is likely to do to people, though it must be said that the central character's trip, a wonderful set piece, is hardly a good one in the simple sense of the term. And there's a similar naivete regarding sexual freedom amongst young people. It would have been interesting to see if the failure of the hippy dream of the 60's, surely fuelled in part by Huxley's dafter ideas, would have changed his mind on these aspects of his thinking.

But the great thing about the novel lies in the questions it generates regarding the ways in which we conduct our lives in the here-and-now of where we really are. These are often painful questions, but necessary ones.