Two book reviews, two Doors appropriations. Unfortunately, this time the source in question (Aldous Huxley, ‘The Doors of Perception’) isn’t nearly as interesting as the previous one (Yamamoto Tsunetomo, ‘Hagakure’).
‘Brave New World’ starts out ambitiously enough, suggests an extremely interesting idea, and then takes it absolutely nowhere you don’t expect it to go.
As with ‘Equilibrium’ (although this isn’t anywhere NEAR as bad) the aspirations far exceed the accomplishment, although ‘Brave New World’ does at least maintain a constant level of moderate interest, a fervent hope that perhaps, eventually, it will regain/fulfill the promise of the opening/hype.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t, and the ending is as much symbolic of my relief of escaping Huxley’s ‘World’ as it is the very real relief of the “Savage”.
The name references are obvious, the progression is obvious, the explanations and counter-arguments are obvious…basically, this has the ambition of ‘1984’ with the verbal and conceptual simplicity of ‘Animal Farm’, only with much less subtlety and charm.
Sadly, any two-paragraph review of the plot is about as interesting as the entire book itself, and wastes far less of your time. If he did in fact plagiarize this, he didn’t do it very well.
The kind of “work of art” people sneer at when others have the audacity to label it a “classic”.
Grade: C