Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett on Brave New World, Fordism, and Huxley's Ambivalent Dystopia

Dominic Sandbrook

Aldous Huxley's *Brave New World*, published in February 1932. We are in London in the far future — the year 2540, to be exact. Or, as the characters in the book call it, A.F. 632, which stands for After Ford. So, six centuries after the first Model T car rolled off Henry Ford's assembly lines.

Tabitha Syrett

Hello everybody. We are on the fifth floor of the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre, where the director is giving the students a tour. It's a brilliant scene, actually. He's showing them the fertilising room and the bottling room, these places where thousands of identical twins, already sorted into their intellectual and social classes, are being born artificially using the Bokanovsky process. And now they're in the conditioning rooms, and the babies are basically being taught to hate and fear books and flowers. Books because they don't want them reading, and they don't want them to question the value of society. They definitely don't want them listening to books podcasts.

Dominic Sandbrook

Definitely not.

Tabitha Syrett

And they don't want them to like flowers, because then they would go on useless country walks and they wouldn't consume anything.

Dominic Sandbrook

What purpose does that serve society?

Tabitha Syrett

Exactly. A love of nature keeps no factories busy, so it was decided to abolish the love of nature.

Dominic Sandbrook

Huxley's vision of the future is not necessarily all fun and games, is it?

Tabitha Syrett

No, it's not. And because it's a dystopian vision of the future, it's often bracketed with George Orwell's *1984*. They're both modern literature's great dystopian classics, and they offer a nightmarish warning about where the world is heading. In her preface to the Vintage Classics edition, Margaret Atwood said that in the latter half of the twentieth century two visionary books cast their shadows over our futures. One was Orwell's 1949 novel *1984*, which offers a horrific vision of a brutal, mind-controlling totalitarian state. The other was Huxley's *Brave New World*, which proposed a different and softer form of totalitarianism — one of conformity achieved through bottle-grown babies and hypnotic persuasion, of boundless consumption, of officially enforced promiscuity, and of soma. Even people who haven't read *Brave New World* have heard of soma: a drug that confers instant bliss with no side effects. In her own novel *The Handmaid's Tale*, Atwood draws on both. We covered that in a mini-series on The Rest Is History back in September, and we've already done *1984* on The Book Club. We're going to delve a lot more into the personal links between Huxley and Orwell later on.

Dominic Sandbrook

In both *1984* and *Brave New World*, the opening chapters introduce a disaffected employee of the state. In *1984* it's Winston Smith; in this book it's Bernard Marx. They work in a towering government office block in Bloomsbury in central London, and in both cases it's decorated with a huge slogan of the party of the state. In this case the slogan is community, identity, stability.

Tabitha Syrett

Very warm and cuddly.

Dominic Sandbrook

It's very warm and cuddly, exactly. Actually, the mood is not quite as forbidding as in *1984*. When you start *1984* it's very physical straight away, very visceral. When we did our episode we were talking about the scene when Winston goes into Victory Mansions — the smell of boiled cabbage, the lift doesn't work, he's got his varicose ulcer. It's very gritty and very textured. It's very Soviet in feeling, a sort of cross between the Soviet Union and 1940s bombed-out austerity Britain. This book is much more sanitised, cleaner. It's less physical.

Tabitha Syrett

It's also quite chirpy. Everyone's quite chirpy, because by the very nature of this society everyone is happy. Everything's nice, everything looks nice, everything's how it should be, everything's clean and tidy.

Dominic Sandbrook

That's so true, it is chirpy. Even the scene with the bloke giving the kids an electric shock — he's pretty chirpy, and he has to shout to be heard above the noise. I hadn't read *Brave New World* before doing this, to my shame. But I've always seen people saying that Orwell's book is more physical, grimmer, and probably better known — while Huxley's is a better prediction of where we're heading, because of its vision of people enslaved by consumerism, by promiscuity, by drugs. This is what's happened to us under twenty-first-century capitalism. Now, whether or not they're right is a different issue. Does it mean *Brave New World* is better as a novel? I am not so sure, and we will come to this. Had you read this book before, Tabby?

Tabitha Syrett

I had. I read it at university. I remember sort of enjoying it, but I didn't think loads about it afterwards. I definitely wasn't massively engaged with the ideas it was putting across. I find it now, as I did then, a much easier read than *1984*. Not necessarily better, but easier, because of what we've just said. It's a much brighter, more colourful society, and there's a lot less fear than there is in *1984*. Even though when I reread it this time I found it much more disturbing, there is a lightness to it that is totally at odds with the heavy gloom of *1984*. In a funny way it feels much more old-fashioned than *1984* does. Even though *1984* is very much rooted in a particular time and place, politically and economically, it feels more modern in the reading. This felt quite old-fashioned to me — I felt it belonged alongside the C.S. Lewises in terms of the way it was written.

Tabitha Syrett

That brings us to Aldous Huxley himself, because like George Orwell he's a genuinely fascinating and remarkable character. They even went to the same school. But, Dominic, indulge us with your own spontaneously conceived and very witty comparison, which we definitely didn't discuss before recording this episode.

Dominic Sandbrook

I like to amuse Tabby with my tremendous witticisms. I said to you that Aldous Huxley felt to me like if you put Virginia Woolf, P.G. Wodehouse and George Harrison in a blender, this would be the result.

Tabitha Syrett

Right. Is that my cue to laugh uproariously and congratulate you on your insight, which is what it says I should do in the notes?

Dominic Sandbrook

It is. Basically, Huxley has something of the writer of the country-house social comedy. He has something of the bohemian intellectual upper class, hence Virginia Woolf. And he has the fascination with Eastern mysticism of George Harrison. He is a product of the late-Victorian intellectual elite. His grandfather, a very famous man in his turn, Thomas Henry Huxley, was known as Darwin's bulldog, and would go around having debates with people about evolution.

Tabitha Syrett

Sounds like such a bore.

Dominic Sandbrook

No, you're quite wrong. In 1860 this was top-quality entertainment. You'd go and see Thomas Huxley savaging the Bishop of Oxford. Then Thomas Huxley's son was Leonard Huxley — a teacher, a writer, an editor of magazines — and he married the granddaughter of Dr Arnold of *Tom Brown's School Days* fame.

Tabitha Syrett

You're a big fan of his. And she also, following in those lofty footsteps, set up a school herself.

Dominic Sandbrook

Massive fan. Love Dr Arnold, love *Tom Brown's School Days*, love all forms of boarding-school culture. Brilliant family — though unbelievably worthy. I would not have got on well with them.

Aldous is their third son. He's born in Surrey in 1894. His family called him Ogie, short for ogre. He gets sent to prep school and Eton, and he has three big traumas in his life. When he's fourteen, his mother dies of cancer. Then his brother, Trevenen, kills himself — he was very close to his brother, who suffered from depression. And then at Eton he got an eye infection which meant he was virtually blind for two years.

Tabitha Syrett

He was certainly blind in one eye. People disagree about this, but one thing I read said Huxley had told him he was basically totally blind in one eye and the other one wasn't great either. Very much in keeping with the British stiff upper lip of the time, he said: I don't give a damn. But you would give a damn, wouldn't you? And it seems to me — because if you watch him on YouTube, which I did, I fell down a bit of a tunnel — he looks blind. One of his eyes is totally clouded over.

Dominic Sandbrook

The bad news for a very intelligent boy from a very impressive family is that this means he can't become a doctor, which is what he'd hoped to be. The good news is that he's rejected for service in the First World War, because obviously he can't see. So he goes to Balliol College, Oxford, and gets a first in English. I'm so struck by this — it's an epoch of very impressive, prolific young intellectuals. He writes poetry, stories, all sorts of novels, travel books, biographies.

Tabitha Syrett

But he also needs to make money, so he does all sorts of very interesting jobs. He works as a farm labourer. He works for *House & Garden*. He even works for *Vogue* — two things you wouldn't think to put together. And then he spends a year teaching French at his old school, Eton. One of the boys he teaches is a teenager called Eric Blair — George Orwell. Orwell never wrote about Huxley or Eton, but another boy, Steven Runciman, who wrote these massive tomes about the Crusades, said Huxley was a useless teacher who couldn't see anything, was very nervous, and had no authority. That fits with the image of him: a willowy young man, slightly caught up in his own ideas and his own work, not those of the boys he was teaching.

Then in 1919 he marries a Belgian refugee called Maria. During this time he's hanging out with the Bloomsbury Group, and he becomes friends with the philosopher Bertrand Russell, whose writing had a massive influence on *Brave New World* — people said it was basically a copycat of Russell's writing, which I think is a bit unfair. And the writer D.H. Lawrence, who I'm a big fan of. But he actually clashed with the Bloomsbury Group quite a lot, because he disagreed with their ethos of free love, and their aesthetic approach to life. You can see that in *Brave New World*. He wrote a book satirising them, which a lot of them took offence to, and they had a bit of a falling out.

Dominic Sandbrook

Comedies of manners. Posh socialites going around house parties, talking about alternative lifestyles. Terrifying. It's a window into my own life there. People at the time thought it was very free-thinking and witty and original.

Tabitha Syrett

A crucial moment: in 1926 he goes to America for the first time, and he is really overwhelmed by it. This is America in the roaring twenties, the Jazz Age. Ford motor cars, skyscrapers, cocktail bars. Like a lot of British visitors at this point, after the First World War, Britain feels quite tired and America is very exciting. He thinks this is going to be an extraordinary threat to European civilisation. A year later he wrote to a friend: 'The thing which is happening in America is a reevaluation of values, a radical alteration for the worse of established standards.'

Dominic Sandbrook

And this basically gives him an idea. What would the world look like if it all turned into America? What if it became Americanised? Ultimately this is the genesis of what will become *Brave New World*. There are lots of other influences too, which we'll come to. But he writes *Brave New World* in four months in the summer of 1931, staying in France. This is the book that ends up defining his reputation forever.

Tabitha Syrett

It's not the only thing he did. He turned out dozens more books in the thirties, forties and fifties — novels, travel books, books about religion, politics, philosophy. He's considered a great mind at this time, not a great novelist. And it's really odd, given the antipathy he has to American consumerism and capitalism, that he moves to America in 1937.

Dominic Sandbrook

Do you think it's the mingled fascination and repulsion?

Tabitha Syrett

Exactly. Particularly for someone who's grown up in a very traditional aristocratic English family, this must just seem like a fantasy world — not necessarily in a good way. He moves to New Mexico and then to Southern California, and he lives in Santa Monica and then Hollywood, hanging out with people like Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo, which seems so incongruous given what he was like: a stick-in-the-mud of an English gentleman. He does a bit of script work — a version of *Pride and Prejudice*, then *Jane Eyre*, and then Walt Disney gets him to do a script for *Alice in Wonderland*, which is never used. In a way that's quite fitting, because he's a man who loves a trip, and *Alice in Wonderland* is quite trippy.

The writer Christopher Isherwood visited him in California and said he looked like a bird, benevolent and quick, but interested in his surroundings; that when he talked his beautifully sensitive features seemed literally to shine with enthusiasm; that he was interested in so many subjects he could talk to anybody — anybody, that is, who was also interested. Children and teenagers, scientists, ranchers, actresses, priests and professors.

In later life he is notable for three great enthusiasms, very unorthodox for the time but very forward-looking. One is pacifism — philosophical, not religious, which is why he couldn't legally register as a conscientious objector in the US. Then, increasingly, Eastern spirituality. He becomes a massive fan of the Bhagavad Gita, always going on about meditation, love, the visionary wisdom of India.

Dominic Sandbrook

So in many ways he and I are birds of a feather.

Tabitha Syrett

Exactly — when you're not talking about love, wearing a caftan and open-toed shoes, I don't know what you're doing. But he's also taking a lot of psychedelic drugs. Mescaline in 1953, which is when he writes *The Doors of Perception* about what he sees and experiences on that trip. Then he becomes an enthusiast for LSD, and said of another trip that it was much more intense and he learned a lot more.

Then he tragically fell ill with cancer in the early 1960s, and lost the ability to speak. For a man who loved ideas and loved talking, that's tragic. On his deathbed he asked his wife to inject him with LSD, and he died on the 22nd of November 1963. He dies on the same day as C.S. Lewis, but both of these great literary deaths are outshone by another much more famous death — the assassination of JFK, six hours before Huxley dies.

Dominic Sandbrook

It's an amazing life, really. But he would be forgotten today if it weren't for *Brave New World*.

Dominic Sandbrook

There are loads of influences to unpack, but let's plunge into it as the first readers did in 1932. The first thing they would have seen is the title. It's a brilliant title, and of course it comes from Shakespeare — *The Tempest*. In Act 5, Prospero's daughter Miranda says: 'O wonder, how many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in it.' Even in *The Tempest* this is an ironic joke. Miranda is talking about a load of people who've turned up on her desert island, and she doesn't realise these are actually very bad people — the people who betrayed and exiled her father in the first place. Prospero very wryly says, ''Tis new to thee,' and everybody laughs. Huxley's title is very well chosen, because Shakespeare is woven right through the book. Shakespeare has been banned in this world, but Shakespeare will find a way back in, as we will see.

Then we're into the Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. This is a device I think is quite neat, though some critics say it's a bit clunky: the Director is giving a load of students a tour, and because he's giving them a tour he can explain exactly how the world works.

Tabitha Syrett

I think it's really well done, and I thought that when I was rereading it this time, because there's a long period at the very beginning when you think, oh, it's something to do with farming maybe, or just some random lab work — and then you hear the word foetus and you're like, what is going on here?

Dominic Sandbrook

I think it is well done, but the comparison with *1984*—

Tabitha Syrett

There's a lot more show, don't tell, I would say.

Dominic Sandbrook

Yes. *1984* is show, don't tell, whereas this is a lot of tell. *1984* is very physical and visceral, so when we go into Victory Mansions it feels like high emotional stakes. This all feels very bloodless. It's a tour of a laboratory, and that can only be so interesting. It's a lot of exposition but there's no feeling. Part of that is because we're not really introduced to an interesting character. A couple of chapters go by and there's basically no real named character at all. In *1984* we're in Winston Smith's head right away, we really believe in Winston, we believe in him as somebody with a backstory. We think he exists. But we don't meet a single named character who really matters in the first few pages of *Brave New World* — which suggested to me, when I was reading it, that Huxley is much more interested in the world than he is in the story. And that turns out to be correct, I think.

Tabitha Syrett

The other thing with Winston Smith is that because we are in his head the whole time, you automatically connect to a certain perspective, and you're rooting for this — tinged with rebellion, or seditiousness, or questioning. He's questioning his world. In this there isn't really a hint of that until halfway through, and all the characters we first encounter are very jolly, very at ease and very at peace with their world. So why would we question it either? It's a flat terrain. There are no bumps, hillocks, and there's nothing three-dimensional, which means you're automatically only skimming the surface to start with.

Tabitha Syrett

Back to the world. The year is A.F. 632, so we're in the middle of the twenty-sixth century. In the past there was a terrible world war and economic collapse. This ties back to Margaret Atwood's *Handmaid's Tale*, because we get only a very small sprinkling of what happened in the past. That's not really the point — whereas in *1984* there's a long passage dedicated to explaining why we are where we are. The economic collapse is followed by the foundation of the world state, and this dominates every aspect of life, but it is not domineering.

Dominic Sandbrook

You mean it's not *overtly* domineering?

Tabitha Syrett

It's not overtly domineering, because it starts at birth and it quietly, casually guides you every step of the way. But it doesn't punish you.

Dominic Sandbrook

Because you wouldn't think to rebel. It's a world devoted to the cult of the US industrialist Henry Ford, a titanic figure in the 1920s because his factories led the way in mass-produced assembly-line cars. Ford here is a god-like figure — not quite like Big Brother, more divine than that. Where we would say 'Oh God' or 'My God', they say 'Oh Ford' or 'Our Ford' or 'Ford's Day'. It's taken the place of religion as well: the top bar of the cross has been chopped off, so it becomes a T.

Tabitha Syrett

Like a Model T.

Dominic Sandbrook

A Model T, exactly. But Ford has also become conflated with Sigmund Freud, for reasons we'll get into. The world is divided into ten zones run by world controllers. The Western European zone, based in London, is ruled by His Fordship Mustapha Mond, which is also a clever in-joke. He's at the top of a social hierarchy of strict castes. You have Alpha Plus, the clever, brilliant intellectuals, all the way down to Epsilon Minus semi-morons.

Tabitha Syrett

So the state's motto is community, identity, stability. It's a totalitarian collective dystopia, and all individuality is totally suppressed. We saw that in the opening reading — all the newborn babies dressed in the same khaki, in the same uniform right from the very beginning. But unlike Big Brother, the controllers don't need to rely on any sort of secret police. There's no terror, there's no violence. They rule by conformity, by conditioning, and essentially happiness and contentedness are weaponised. Your role in society is determined before you're born. People often say it's uncertainty that unsettles humans — the potential for deviation, the potential for having to question your future. People in this society don't have that, because you're conditioned not to question anything from birth. And assuming you follow the preordained path laid out for you by your caste and your conditioning, you're treated pretty well by the state. You have a fairly lovely time.

Dominic Sandbrook

Exactly. Where Orwell's prophecy is really about politics, this is partly about science. Written in the 1930s, it's an age when people are fascinated by eugenics, and people today have seen it as a prophecy of our world of genetic engineering. The very first chapters do feel like a scientific panorama. In his essay on the book, the great critic John Sutherland says it's a bit like a twisted version of the Book of Genesis. We get our sense of how the world began and how human beings begin: they're created not by God, but by scientists in test tubes and incubators. Thanks to the Bokanovsky process you can clone tens of thousands of identical twins to carry out their allotted tasks in society. Of the female embryos, two-thirds are given male hormones and turned into what are called freemartins — women who can't have children, although as the Director says, they do have the slightest tendency to grow beards. There's a sense always that Huxley is not really very frightened by his dystopia, that he's having a little bit of a joke.

Tabitha Syrett

I felt that the whole way through. That's why there's absolutely no jeopardy — he's kind of just having a laugh the whole time. George Orwell is like: beware, beware.

Dominic Sandbrook

These kids — they use X-rays, heat conditioning and oxygen deprivation to affect their development.

Tabitha Syrett

Which is quite unnerving. They give or take away oxygen depending on how clever they want that baby to be.

Dominic Sandbrook

But crucially, they will make you love your condition. In other words, you won't feel bitter that you're not very clever. They will condition you so that you would never want to be clever, and you'd rather look down on people who are.

Tabitha Syrett

Exactly. And once you're born you have more conditioning — hence the stuff with the flowers and the books. This is all inspired by the ideas of the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov; lots of people have heard of Pavlov's dog. You're even conditioned when you're asleep — this is called hypnopaedia, and it's actually still very popular today, when pregnant mothers play Mozart to their stomachs so that the children grow up with a love of classical music. Because of this, human beings are reduced to being totally passive creatures. Everything is predetermined. Your destiny is laid out for you, your tastes are decided, your views, even the clothes you wear.

Dominic Sandbrook

Listeners might be wondering about the place of parents and family.

Tabitha Syrett

There's absolutely no place at all. They don't occur whatsoever. And this takes us to the conflation of Ford and Freud — Our Ford and Our Freud. The people of this world believe that sometimes Our Ford used to call himself Our Freud whenever he spoke of psychological matters.

Dominic Sandbrook

The Holy Ghost versus the Father. And when he appears in the guise of Freud, he reveals the truth about the horrors of the old world — the world of fathers and mothers, of perversion, of sadism, of chastity, which is another form of perversion. To the people growing up in the year A.F. 632, the idea of having a mother and father at all is not just immoral, it is actually physically repulsive. The word is obscene. The idea of any love, attachment, family relationship, they regard with absolute horror.

Tabitha Syrett

It's not even just a taboo. It's the way we look upon paedophilia or something — something that makes your skin crawl.

Dominic Sandbrook

Exactly. And as a result, because they've severed completely the link between sex and procreation, sex itself is just a matter of leisure. You can sleep with different people all the time, there's no consequence, and there's absolutely no emotional content to it. It's purely a form of physical entertainment. And as a result they're very happy for children to mess around sexually, which is quite a disturbing detail in the early chapters.

Tabitha Syrett

It is. But it's another form of conditioning — another happiness drug. Children are encouraged to get stuck into what is called erotic play. On this tour, the third part of it is children playing outside naked in the sunshine. And then, I quote: 'In a little grassy bay between tall clumps of Mediterranean heather, two children, a little boy of about seven and a little girl who might have been a year older, were playing very gravely and with all the focused attention of scientists intent on a labour of discovery, a rudimentary sexual game.' And you're like — God, what? It totally takes you by surprise. The Director says, 'Charming, charming.' And then a little boy is taken away because he doesn't want to join in, and the staff think this is weird and abnormal. It leads into a conversation about how people in the ancient past, before the coming of Our Ford, were such freaks that they treated erotic play as immoral, and did ghastly, disgusting things like get married and have a relationship with someone who gave birth to you. Mother and father are the ultimate swear words.

Dominic Sandbrook

There are a couple of jokes going on here. So much of *Brave New World* is meant to be a big intellectual in-joke. You mentioned Bertrand Russell — he had helped to set up a school called Beacon Hill, a progressive school with sex education where the kids were dancing naked. This is so 1920s, and he's kind of joking about that. I don't know that they beat each other to death with conch shells, though. I think that's the difference.

Then the other great joke that runs through it: Huxley is a Victorian, born at the end of the Victorian period, and the joke is that whenever people try to behave in a Victorian way, they're regarded as immoral. There's a bit where the heroine, in so far as the book has a heroine, who's called Lenina, is talking to her friend Fanny about the Director, and they say, oh, the Director, he's such a stickler for morality, always so well behaved. And Lenina says, 'Yes, he patted me on the behind this afternoon.' And Fanny says, 'There, you see? That shows what he stands for — the strictest conventionality.' Because free love is seen as moral, and any form of self-restraint is seen as deviant. In this world the top fun you can have is a dance or singing session that escalates into what they call an orgy-porgy.

Tabitha Syrett

Orgy-porgy. They all start chanting it. I was slightly lost by that.

Dominic Sandbrook

And if you then went and didn't enjoy yourself, if you were unhappy, you would make yourself happy by taking soma. I think there's an element of an in-joke about the drug too. The twenties is an age of big backlash against drugs. People have been anxious from the 1880s, increasingly anxious about intoxication. It's the age of prohibition in America, an age when a lot of drugs are being outlawed. So the idea that people are giving out drugs for free and making themselves happy is Huxley poking fun at the taboos of his own time.

Tabitha Syrett

And it serves to keep society happy and therefore passive, because the minute people start to have different thoughts or start to question things, you take your lovely soma and you drift off on a little cloud of contentment.

Dominic Sandbrook

So that's the world. What about the story? I think it's really telling that we haven't mentioned any characters yet, because this book is definitely not about characters or story. They're secondary to the ideas. In so far as we do have characters, we have Bernard Marx — tellingly named. He's an Alpha Plus sleep specialist, and his conditioning, we're constantly told, has gone wrong, because he's too short for his caste. He doesn't fit in. He's a loner. He doesn't really like promiscuous sex or communal fun. He has a crush on someone — you're not meant to have crushes on people, you just sleep with people for the hell of it. He also doesn't really like taking soma, which is totally weird.

Tabitha Syrett

He wants to feel things, and you're not really meant to want to feel things.

Dominic Sandbrook

He doesn't have a backstory, though, unlike Winston Smith, whose backstory is gradually revealed to us. He has no personality beyond a mild strain of bitterness born of being the runt of the litter. We know so little about him. He's just a vehicle.

Tabitha Syrett

But he has this other, more interesting dissident friend, Helmholtz Watson. He is too clever for this society. He's lusting after some strain of original thought, and he's stifled by the world, and he loves writing. He writes the state propaganda, but he writes heretical poems instead, about being lonely, and he basically thinks that this is a world that doesn't have enough sadness to write well — which is also a bit of an in-joke.

Dominic Sandbrook

And then we have one other vaguely interesting character, our heroine of a kind, Lenina Crowne. She's a Beta vaccination technician. She fits in very well into this world and it doesn't really occur to her to question most of it. But there is one thing slightly unusual: she has an inexplicable fondness for Bernard, despite him being a small man in this world. She also has an affair with someone for a month, when you're not meant to do that — you're meant to continue to sleep with lots of different people, and people think that's a bit odd. She has no personality, really. We're just told again and again that she's pneumatic, and that basically is her personality.

Tabitha Syrett

Basically, she's very fleshy, good-looking. No whiff of rebellion. She just has a lovely waist. She's got auburn hair, and that's all we need to know.

Dominic Sandbrook

About a third of the way through the book we get to the great turning point. Bernard wangles a pass to take Lenina on holiday, and he chooses one of the few places on Earth not under the control of the world state. There are a series of reservations where indigenous life can continue, and this is the Savage Reservation in New Mexico, where the descendants of the Pueblo Indians live basically untouched by the modern world. When Bernard and Lenina get there they're in for a massive shock, because they're going to meet a character who will challenge their assumptions and their principles in a way they cannot possibly imagine.

Tabitha Syrett

They've got to the Savage Reservation, which is cut off by electric fences from the world state, and they're really shocked and surprised by what they see, because here life goes on. Huxley does not present the world of the Savage Reservation as a bundle of laughs.

Dominic Sandbrook

It's not utopian at all.

Tabitha Syrett

No, no. It's a lot of tribal dancing, which some people may think sounds brilliant, but it's a lot of ritual flagellation. There's a lot of alcoholism, a lot of sexual jealousy, violence, all of this kind of thing. And they meet two characters who completely blow their minds. One is a woman called Linda, who's actually from their world. She was a Beta Minus from the Fertilising Room, and she was the Director's girlfriend very briefly. He brought her to the Savage Reservation more than twenty years ago, but she got lost in a thunderstorm and got left behind. And so she's been there ever since. Because she was from the world state, she believed in free love, so she slept with all the men on the Savage Reservation, and their wives all hated her. She became a massive hate figure. She became ostracised, and she's completely addicted to booze and mescal.

Dominic Sandbrook

Because she doesn't have soma, she craves soma, and so she has to fill the gap with alcohol. And then, here's the thing. When she came to the Savage Reservation she was actually pregnant by the Director, though she didn't realise it. And she had the child there, which was a traumatic event for her, because she didn't even know what childbirth was. It seemed to her like she'd been part of some obscene ritual.

Tabitha Syrett

She doesn't even have a word for mother. I mean, she knows it, but she's repulsed by the fact that she is one.

Dominic Sandbrook

Exactly. And she had this son, who she called John. John is basically in this story what Miranda is in Shakespeare's *The Tempest* — the offspring of the person who got marooned on the desert island. And John, like Miranda, when he first sees his visitors, is like: oh, a brave new world, isn't this brilliant? He and his mother are going to come back with them to London, and he can't wait to see this world that he's dreamed of. And actually, of course, it isn't great fun at all.

Tabitha Syrett

The second half of the book is really John's story. If there is a protagonist in this book, it's probably John, and we only meet him halfway through. The first thing is that he tells Bernard all of his recollections of growing up, and it's so grim and miserable, because it's the side effects of a mother brought up in this dystopian society raising a boy who has a mentality more akin to our own, and the confusion that comes with that. I think that's so well done.

Dominic Sandbrook

People call him the Savage, or Mr Savage. He's a celebrity when he returns, and that's basically how he functions in this story. He's a classic noble savage from eighteenth-century literature. He reminded me of Pocahontas when she came from the new world to London. He's innocent and idealistic, the product of nature, unspoiled by civilisation. But there is one huge cultural influence on him, and that's Shakespeare, because a volume of Shakespeare was left in the savage camp by someone else. All he knows of the world and human nature comes from Shakespeare. He's always quoting *The Tempest* and *Hamlet*; his understanding of love comes from *Romeo and Juliet*. So his morality and his cultural touchstones are basically those of a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century English person — think about how important religion was at that time, how much there was to disapprove of.

Tabitha Syrett

So John is absolutely appalled by what he discovers of life in A.F. 632. He's in love with Lenina, but because of the Shakespeare that has been his conditioning, he can't get his head around her promiscuity and her sensuality, and he's disgusted by it. Just as people in A.F. 632 are appalled by him and Linda — especially Linda, because they find her disgusting. And the thing is, Huxley writes her as disgusting: fat, dirty, smelly, stinking of booze.

There's this great scene when it all comes to a head, and Linda is dying in hospital. John thinks of her as his mother, and so loves her and is attached to her, and you're not really meant to get attached to people. So there's universal horror at the fact that he insists on coming to her bedside. People don't watch people die — who cares? You no longer serve society, you're done. No one understands it. They don't get why he's sad. They think he's gone mad. And then small children are brought in on a tour to get used to the idea of death. It's more conditioning: you watch it and you feel nothing. And they're eating éclairs.

Dominic Sandbrook

They're trying to eat their éclairs. This is quite something.

Tabitha Syrett

And this disgusting savage is crying over his mother. They're appalled to see him cry. They probably wouldn't even know what crying was. Then he gets in a massive row with the staff, who say, you're getting in the way of their conditioning, you're going to put two months onto their conditioning. And then he lashes out and causes a riot, because he's so repulsed by these little twins and their confusion and their questions about Linda. So he hurls everyone's soma out of the window, which starts a riot. And he shouts: 'But do you like being slaves? Do you like being babies? Yes, babies — mewling and puking. Don't you want to be free and men? Don't you even understand what manhood and freedom are? I'll teach you. I'll make you be free whether you want it or not.' You can see there's almost a bit of Shakespearean *Julius Caesar* in there — and there you get a hint of the zealotry that will later consume his character.

Dominic Sandbrook

Finally, John, Bernard and Bernard's mate Helmholtz are brought in to see Mustapha Mond. This is when we really meet the world controller in the flesh, and this is the climax of the novel. It's a bit like the scene with O'Brien in *1984*, where you discuss what it all means and the ideology behind the world. You look behind the curtain. It's a bit like when they go to the Wizard of Oz.

This is a good moment to stop and ask: what does it mean? What is Huxley trying to say? We said the genesis was when Huxley went to America in 1926. Huxley was primed to look down on America, because that was what intellectual bohemian people in Europe did — a tradition deeply rooted in British writing, as Charles Dickens did in *Martin Chuzzlewit*. Huxley had said to his brother at the end of the First World War that the worst thing about it would be the inevitable acceleration of American world domination — meaning American culture and economic power as much as political. So a lot of *Brave New World* is explicable as Huxley's disgust, his contempt for what he sees as everything wrong with modern American consumer culture. Especially LA. I like LA, by the way. Huxley didn't. He called it a joy city and he didn't mean it kindly. He said to a friend, it's the nearest thing to Utopia yet seen on our planet — after twenty-four hours of it you begin to pine for the slums of Dostoevsky's St Petersburg.

Tabitha Syrett

I didn't find it repellent, but I slightly understand something of what Huxley is saying. I find it a little bit without feeling and without depth. There aren't sedimentary layers of history, and there's nothing old. So I know what is meant by Dostoevsky's St Petersburg. Similarly, I think Huxley clearly does have a love-hate relationship with it, because yes, he despises its shallowness, but as we said earlier, he finds it intoxicating and fascinating. There's a reason he ends up living around there.

Dominic Sandbrook

In lots of ways the London of *Brave New World* is essentially California in 1926. They use dollars, they live in skyscrapers, there's an obsession with looking young and beautiful all the time — hence they're so disgusted by Linda. They chew sex-hormone chewing gum, they wear clothes with zippers, and Huxley said the zipper was America's national crest. Everything happens quickly and easily and everything looks nice. The music is clearly jazz — the Westminster Abbey Cabaret's electric sky signs advertising Calvin Stokes and his sixteen saxophonists.

And there's an even more obvious target, and this is Hollywood. Huxley had visited America precisely at the point when silent movies were being overtaken by the talkies — *The Jazz Singer* in 1927. *Brave New World* takes this a step further with the feelies. Lenina takes John to see *Three Weeks in a Helicopter*, all super-singing, synthetic-talking, coloured, stereoscopic feely with synchronised scent-organ accompaniment. It's meant to be overwhelming and to totally take you away from the real world. It's a bit like taking soma.

Tabitha Syrett

It's almost like a kind of VR. You'll feel it, you'll smell it. It's completely immersive. It's playing with the idea of escapism in the extreme. But the film they see is very dodgy, isn't it?

Dominic Sandbrook

Really dodgy. It's like *Birth of a Nation* or something — a really simplistic racist plot. It's a black man whose conditioning is accidentally reversed, so he kidnaps and rapes a blonde woman. Then she is rescued by three handsome young Alphas and thanks them by having sex with them. John is repulsed by this. Lenina is swept away on a tidal wave of romance and eroticism. And I think this is another joke, because there was a film franchise in the 1920s that had this plot effectively — the Rudolph Valentino films, *The Sheik* and *The Son of the Sheik*. Hugely popular silent films about a woman being kidnapped and ravished by princes in the Arabian desert. So when people read this, they'd have seen the joke.

Actually, if you read *Brave New World* with that in mind, so much of the so-called prophetic, forward-thinking critique of consumer culture is actually your standard 1920s intellectual slightly sneering at mass culture. It was so common for the Bloomsbury Group and their descendants to look at mass entertainment in the twenties and say: it's for morons, it's so shallow. This is a difference with George Orwell. In *1984*, Orwell says if there's hope, it lies in the proles. He kind of likes ordinary people, the songs they sing, their everyday culture. In Huxley's world the masses are absolute morons who are brainwashed. There are things he doesn't like — obstacle golf, or the game they play called centrifugal bumble-puppy.

Tabitha Syrett

They're mindless and slightly infantile, aren't they? But everything's shiny.

Dominic Sandbrook

The 1920s and 30s is a huge age for the expansion of leisure in Britain — dance halls, cinemas, football matches. Huxley is one of those people who looks on these things and says, this is just popcorn for morons.

Tabitha Syrett

But what would Orwell have made of something like LA, or that booming American culture?

Dominic Sandbrook

He was very anti-American himself, actually. Orwell has the instinctive suspicion of America of a British intellectual, definitely.

Tabitha Syrett

When Orwell speaks about liking the proles, I think he means a dowdy Englishman in a country pub or whatever. It's slightly different. But I do think that occasionally Huxley slips over into sneering a tiny bit.

Dominic Sandbrook

It's not just American consumerism he's satirising. In May 1931, when Huxley started writing, he told a friend it was a novel about the future, 'on the horror of the Wellsian Utopia and the revolt against it'. So who's he targeting? One of the great British writers of the early twentieth century, another enthusiast for utopias and dystopias, always imagining possible futures: H.G. Wells. In 1923 Wells wrote a book called *Men Like Gods*, imagining a man from Sydenham called Mr Barnstaple accidentally transported three thousand years into the future. He discovers the future is actually brilliant — no religion, no politics, everybody free, honest and happy. Then he comes home determined to make it a reality, committed to a revolution that will not stop until old earth is one city and utopia set up therein.

Tabitha Syrett

Like the kingdom of heaven on earth.

Dominic Sandbrook

Exactly. So this is Huxley's main target. He wants to parody the idea that we're moving towards some rose-tinted progressive paradise — but sans religion. Huxley told a friend: 'I've been having a little fun pulling the leg of H.G. Wells, but then got caught up in the excitement of my own ideas.'

Tabitha Syrett

I actually had a look at this book. I found a copy of it online. *Men Like Gods*. It looks rubbish.

Dominic Sandbrook

How come?

Tabitha Syrett

It's forgotten, and I think forgotten for a reason. Mr Barnstaple is a really boring character. It's a ridiculous idea that he's catapulted to the future and it's brilliant and then he comes back. There's no story. There's no tension.

Dominic Sandbrook

So clearly what happened is that Huxley sat down in 1931 and thought: I've been to America, I've been to LA, it was awful. H.G. Wells has written this terrible book. I'm going to spoof Wells's book and combine it with a parody of LA, and that's what *Brave New World* is going to be.

But he's also drawing very deeply on the anxieties specifically of the early 1930s. In the Everyman Classics edition there's a brilliant essay by David Bradshaw, the great literary scholar, and he says the central ideas running through the book are stability and control. Stability is one of the words of the motto; control — there are world controllers. The reason people are interested in this at the time is that the world fell apart in the First World War, and then there was the Russian Revolution. And in 1931, when Huxley wrote the book, the world had fallen apart again, because the Great Depression had happened. In Britain there was a massive political crisis — the Labour government fell apart, huge spending cuts, massive unemployment. Huxley was planning to go to America that summer to do research for his book and he postponed it because the world was falling apart. So the idea of getting back to some form of stability is very much on his mind. He's always been interested in state planning, and in the idea — so common among intellectuals in the twenties and thirties — that there should be a national plan drawn up by very clever people like him, so that nothing like this can ever happen again.

Dominic Sandbrook

Then the other idea: Henry Ford, Our Ford, is the presiding genius, the deity of this society. This is Fordism, and the idea runs right through *Brave New World*. Fordism is mass production using assembly lines — the factories that built the Model T from 1908, and then that technique rolled out worldwide. Lots of people at the time said Fordism was the wave of the future, that it had catapulted us into an entirely new age. And they weren't wrong: in the future, workers will stand on assembly lines, make thousands and thousands of identical products, and then go home and watch television by themselves in the houses they've bought with the wages they've earned. By the twenties, Henry Ford was easily one of the most famous men in the world. He was the equivalent of Elon Musk or something.

Tabitha Syrett

That's a good comparison.

Dominic Sandbrook

When Huxley sailed to America for the first time, the ship's library had a copy of Henry Ford's autobiography, *My Life and Work*, and Huxley read it on the voyage. In *Brave New World* it's like their Bible, their sacred text. And just before Huxley started writing, Ford had moved into Britain — he bought a huge tract of land in Dagenham, east of London, which became the big Ford factory. It still exists. There were housing estates, schools, leisure facilities. People at the time said, this is the town of the future. They called it Fordopolis.

Tabitha Syrett

It's like Cadbury's Bournville.

Dominic Sandbrook

Bournville, but on a much, much bigger scale.

Tabitha Syrett

It was a little bit like Marie Antoinette with the Petit Trianon, where it was like: we're going to live in Disney cottages and have our milk delivered every day.

Dominic Sandbrook

But this isn't that. Not at all. London in *Brave New World* is Fordopolis on a massive scale. This is Huxley's nightmare: that the world will become one giant Ford plant. Assembly-line people making assembly-line things. And this will go on forever. History will stop, and there'll be nothing but this.

Tabitha Syrett

And also the fear that that turns you into unthinking drones. You live out the motions expected of you, and then that's it. He was worried that people would stop reading, that they'd stop engaging with ideas.

Dominic Sandbrook

And it's hard to challenge this, because Bernard Marx, our supposed hero at the beginning of the book, is not really a challenge to it. He's no threat at all.

Tabitha Syrett

No. He's just depressed about the fact that he's low down in the system. It's not the system he's questioning, it's his place in it.

Dominic Sandbrook

He's a bit bored and disaffected and doesn't really know where he fits. But the state is fine with that. If you're a dissident, they'll ship you off to the Falkland Islands or to Samoa, and there you can live with other dissidents. They're not going to kill you. They're not going to put you in prison.

Tabitha Syrett

They're not going to put rats on your face?

Dominic Sandbrook

No, they're not going to put rats on your face. However, John the Savage is much more of a threat, because he hasn't been conditioned into acquiescence, which Bernard has.

Tabitha Syrett

For instance, he's got this love of Shakespeare, and Helmholtz loves to write, but there are parts of Shakespeare that Helmholtz just can't understand. In *Romeo and Juliet* he doesn't get the romance, because he hasn't been allowed to understand anything other than that which he has been taught to know.

Dominic Sandbrook

And in many ways John is a very familiar cultural figure — the savage raised in a lost world who comes into contact with modern civilisation. The most obvious example is Tarzan, whose debut is in Edgar Rice Burroughs's novel in 1912 and then in the Hollywood films of the 1930s. He is the naive innocent in a world he doesn't really understand. He's like Candide in Voltaire's *Candide*, who travels the world in the mid-eighteenth century and slowly loses all his optimism and his illusions thanks to what he sees. It's like he steps out of some primordial Garden of Eden.

Tabitha Syrett

Very imperfect here, though. John's life before wasn't brilliant, but he's horrified by what he sees in London. The only thing is, when John was introduced into the book I thought, okay, finally we've got our hero. But I found him really unlikeable as a character. I just thought he was a bit priggish and a bit annoying.

Dominic Sandbrook

I totally agree. He's infuriating, and he is actually a walking warning against self-righteousness, a different form of zealotry. And Huxley's attitude to the Savage Reservation is similarly ambiguous. It definitely is not one of admiration. Putting it in New Mexico is another in-joke. He was very good friends with D.H. Lawrence, and he stuck by Lawrence when Lawrence was essentially cancelled for his ideas and his private life, when everyone else dropped him. Lawrence had moved to Taos in New Mexico in the early 1920s, and for Europeans he was by far the most famous person living in New Mexico at that time. Lawrence is famously progressive about sex — he's the writer of *Lady Chatterley's Lover*, which was banned. And he loved all the tribal stuff, free love, primal sexual energy, let's be authentic.

Tabitha Syrett

Lawrence holds the world record for using the word loins in novels. And it's telling, Dominic, that you've written 'Let's all be authentic, free, true, blah blah blah.' That's a massive insight into your attitude to this, isn't it? You've given yourself away.

Dominic Sandbrook

Well, I do find D.H. Lawrence insists upon himself. His ideas are those of mid-1960s hippies.

Tabitha Syrett

I like his books though.

Dominic Sandbrook

But in *Brave New World* the Savage Reservation is horrible. It's really grim. Everybody's off their face on mescal. They're always self-flagellating. There are mad tribal dances. It's really dirty. There are fleas everywhere. And the joke about John is that he's the opposite of Lawrence. He's living in this place in New Mexico, but he's very buttoned-up, very puritanical. It's a great joke.

Tabitha Syrett

And so then we have the confrontation between him and Mustapha Mond. John is super over-earnest. He's very puritanical. He hates this world. But Mustapha Mond, the world controller, who we've been built up to believe is the great villain, is actually very calm. He's worldly. He's wry.

Dominic Sandbrook

His name is more of Huxley's jokes. Mustapha — the most famous Mustafa in the late 1920s and early 1930s by far, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey, a moderniser, a secularist, a reformer who dragged his country into the shiny new world of the twentieth century. And Mond — Sir Alfred Mond was the first chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries, ICI. Huxley had been to their huge new plant outside Middlesbrough just before writing the book. He thought Mond was brilliant. He said Billingham, the plant, was 'the triumphant embodiment of the spirit of planning, an ordered universe in the midst of the larger world of planless incoherence'. So many readers get this wrong. They think Mustapha Mond is the villain, that this world is terrible. Huxley is very ambiguous about this world. Mustapha Mond is the one character in the book that you would actually want to have a drink with. He's quite funny. He's quite wry and self-aware. The reason he got to be world controller was that he was free-thinking and sceptical and questioned this world. So the bosses said, you've got a choice: you can go and live on an island with other dissidents, or do you want to run it? And he said, well, I'll run it.

Tabitha Syrett

And for instance, he's read the whole of Shakespeare. So when John quotes Shakespeare at him, he says, oh, yes, of course — but I'm one of the very few people that is allowed to read it, because having ideas got me here, ironically.

Dominic Sandbrook

He's almost like those people running the Soviet Union who actually were reading all the Western books they banned in the 1970s.

Tabitha Syrett

He's cynical of human nature because he knows how to manipulate it.

Dominic Sandbrook

Exactly. In the comparison we've made so many times to *1984*, when Winston and O'Brien have their big chat at the end and O'Brien says, we're going to be the boot stamping on the human face forever, here's some rats — it's really chilling. The Mustapha Mond and John conversation reminds me of the scene in *The Brothers Karamazov* where the Grand Inquisitor meets Jesus, who has come back to earth, and the Grand Inquisitor says: yes, but we're going to kill you, because people are better off not being free and not having the right to choose. They're better off under the despotism of the church. In both *1984* and *The Brothers Karamazov* the confrontation is high energy, high stakes, dark, chilling, haunting. But in *Brave New World* it's all very throwaway, very jokey and ambiguous. I agree with the critic David Bradshaw, who says the reason is that Huxley can never decide whether he likes his world or not. All through this time Huxley is saying state planning is a really good idea. He quite likes the idea of telling people what to do. He likes the idea of everything being controlled and stable and settled, and he fears chaos. So his sympathies here are as much with Mustapha Mond as they are with John the Savage.

Tabitha Syrett

You just need to look at a comparison between Linda, who's been living in a primal utopia, and Lenina, who's been living in this ordered dystopia. You know which one you find more attractive. You know which one you'd rather be living with.

But there's also all the stuff about science. People often see *Brave New World* as a warning against the horrors of eugenics — a nightmarish vision of society created artificially in a lab. But Huxley was very interested in eugenics. I think we find that shocking today. He did turn against it later in his life, but in the 1920s and 30s loads of intellectuals were into it. Before *Brave New World* was published he gave a talk on BBC radio and said, 'We might need to use eugenics to stop the rapid deterioration of the whole Western European stock.' We hadn't had the threat of the Nazis yet, and what they came to represent for eugenics. Before then it was pretty standard.

Dominic Sandbrook

And that's why we get to that crucial confrontation between Mond and John, at the absolute core of the book. They're arguing about what the root of a good society is. Mond says: look, people are happy, and if they're not happy we give them the soma — what he calls Christianity without tears. And John says: but I don't want that. I want God. I want poetry. I want danger. I want freedom. I want sin. And then Huxley gives Mond a brilliant comeback. Mond says: 'Fair enough. That's what you want. You want the right to grow ugly and old and impotent, the right to have syphilis and cancer, the right to have too little to eat, the right to be lousy, the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow, the right to catch typhoid, the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.'

Tabitha Syrett

When you first have John say it, there's something admirable about it — taking the highs and lows of life makes it so much richer, the shortness of it, the brevity. But then, as John progresses towards the end of the novel, he becomes so monstrous himself that you don't know who to back any more, because he flagellates himself the whole time. He doesn't want sin. He's terrified of sin. He starves himself. He sees Lenina and he's attracted to her, so he attacks her.

Dominic Sandbrook

He's basically gone mad, hasn't he?

Tabitha Syrett

You never really know which side you ought to be on, because you don't really know which side Huxley's on in this book.

Dominic Sandbrook

Mond's argument is directly the opposite of the thing we were talking about in our *Circe* episode. In Madeline Miller's book, the final choice Circe makes is to choose mortality over immortality, because she says the suffering, the brevity, the pain is what gives life its richness and makes it worth living. When you and I were talking about that, we were like: yeah, she's right, brilliant. But now, when I think — would I rather be John, whipping myself and living in filth, or would I rather be going to the orgies and off my face on soma? I think actually that's not such a bad life.

Tabitha Syrett

I think the point is that you're meant to be finding some kind of balance between the two. Extremity on both sides is wrong.

Dominic Sandbrook

At the time, lots of highbrow critics loved the book. They loved all the stuff mocking jazz and leisure and Hollywood. There was one funny review in the *New Republic* in America that said, basically: the world's falling apart, Japan has attacked China, fascism is rising, Nazism is about to emerge in Germany, the world's in the Great Depression — and Aldous Huxley's written a book saying the big problem is that everyone's too happy.

Now, Huxley's very poor behaviour with George Orwell. Orwell undoubtedly read Huxley's book. Orwell was actually much more influenced by one of his favourite books, Yevgeny Zamyatin's *We*. Orwell and other people said Huxley must have ripped off Zamyatin as well, but Huxley claimed he'd never read it.

Tabitha Syrett

He claimed he'd never read it, but a lot of people said that was a lie. And then Huxley did slightly disgrace himself, because when Orwell published *1984*, Huxley wrote him a really condescending, patronising letter, saying essentially: well done, you did well, but mine is better. He said, 'Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient as instruments of government than clubs and prisons. And that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of 1984 is destined to modulate into the nightmare of having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World.'

It is poor, I have to say. But I also kind of agree with what he's saying. His point was always that if you have a regime like the one Orwell describes, it's going to snap at some point. It can't continue. It's got to be held so taut all the time that eventually — and I suppose he admits that in his vision of the proles. Whereas because this is governed by happiness, there is a fluidity and a languor to it that means it can continue forever, unquestioned.

Dominic Sandbrook

Exactly. It's more insidious. Lots of people have said Huxley's vision — it's a classic highbrow critic thing to say — well, Orwell's is all very obvious, isn't it, it's very much of the Cold War, whereas Huxley's is more prophetic. There was a critic here, James Marriott, a critic at the *Times*.

Tabitha Syrett

I'm a big fan of James Marriott.

Dominic Sandbrook

He loves this bloke called Neil Postman, who wrote a book called *Amusing Ourselves to Death* in 1985. Postman said: TV, technology, all of that — we are in Huxley's world. Orwell said books would be banned and we'd be beaten. Huxley was much more accurate: Huxley imagined a world where you wouldn't have to ban books, because no one would want to read them. Instead of being oppressed and held down, we'd be seduced by the feelies and by bumble-puppy. We'd have too much leisure, too much fun, and that would enslave us.

So — which of the visions of the future do you find more accurate and more chilling? Orwell's *1984*, or Huxley's *Brave New World*?

Tabitha Syrett

I'm going to go with *Brave New World*. And I fear the point I'm about to make is terribly banal. Not the eugenics stuff, none of that, and not all the science stuff. I'm going on the basis of the ease of life these days, and the fact that everything now, thanks to phones and social media, is the press of a button away. Everything is so easy. We don't even have to read. We are conditioned by the ads that are constantly being sent to us in the form of cookies, or whatever it may be. It's so easy to slip into a thoughtless state when we are scrolling endlessly, myself included. I'm totally susceptible to all this stuff. Why would you read a book when there are so many easier things to do with your time? Curiosity isn't necessarily encouraged when life in the West is as easy as it is. And when things move around so quickly, ideas have to be really significant, the news has to be really significant, to catch our attention for more than five days.

Dominic Sandbrook

So you think we're living in something more like Huxley's world?

Tabitha Syrett

Something more like it. Huxley said once, when someone asked how he thought his vision of the world looked when he wrote *Brave New World* versus now, that he thought it had come along much more quickly. I don't think it's as extreme as that, but I do think we are subjected to our own inventions now. Whereas *1984* is much more a vision of a post-war Soviet reality. What about you?

Dominic Sandbrook

I think all that's too bleak.

Tabitha Syrett

God, I'm surprised you have such a bleak—

Dominic Sandbrook

I have a bleak view of human nature. But not of the world. I think the world is quite nice.

Tabitha Syrett

It's a reflection on human nature. I think that if we're offered the easy option, we'll generally take it.

Dominic Sandbrook

Yes, but lots of people don't. Lots of people listen to books podcasts, and they read books.

Tabitha Syrett

It's true. But fewer people read books now than they used to, because when they used to read loads of books there was less other stuff to do.

Dominic Sandbrook

There wasn't as much other stuff to do, but that's fine. People can do what they want.

Tabitha Syrett

I think people can do what they want, absolutely. And you actually can't be an intellectual snob about it, or criticise what the majority of people are doing. I include myself in this.

Dominic Sandbrook

This is one of my issues with the novel. I think there is too much snobbery in it — his way of thinking about people playing their obstacle golf. Play as much golf as you like, if that's what you want to play.

I do think Orwell's vision is more of its time than Huxley's. Although Orwell has all this brilliant stuff about rewriting history and rewriting the classics and people being cancelled, which has lasted very well. And if you live in an authoritarian regime, surely Orwell's vision speaks to you more.

Tabitha Syrett

I also just think you shouldn't look down on a comfortable, well-nourished society. That's always a good thing.

Dominic Sandbrook

Agreed. So, the ranking. I battled heroically to resist the temptation to rank it in pneumatic blondes or orgy-porgies. So instead, to show my commitment to self-restraint, we're ranking it in lovely green Malthusian contraceptive belts, which is what they wear.

Tabitha Syrett

I think you missed a trick. I think we should have been ranking it in adorable viscose velveteen shorts.

Dominic Sandbrook

Oh, that's much better. The velveteen shorts is the winner, clearly. I'll go first. I'm giving it, out of ten, a shocking five. And I'm giving it five for this reason: I don't like novels of ideas, really, by and large. A novel that's just a vehicle for ideas — just write the ideas down in an essay. Don't disguise it as a novel. The ideas in *Brave New World* are mildly interesting, but no more than that. I enjoyed reading the history of it more than I enjoyed reading the book. I think it appeals to people who don't like the modern world, who don't like mass culture, who don't like technology, people who are a little bit foggy-ish — oh, the world's going to hell in a handbasket. I don't really agree with any of those things. As you know, Tabby, I like video games. I like the modern world.

Tabitha Syrett

And I actually do agree with people who say, well, look at the world we're living in today — we've literally never had it so good.

Dominic Sandbrook

Now, as for the novel as a novel: the characters are so thin they might as well not exist. The story is utterly insipid, to my mind. There's no story, basically. There is no tension. There is no drama. I couldn't give a damn about Bernard and Lenina and the other people. As a novel, as a story, I think it's rubbish. So the five out of ten is generous. And that's because of its longevity, its importance, the ideas behind it, the history behind it, which are all very interesting. I think people should read it because it's part of the canon, but actually, as a reading experience, it's just so dull. Tabby, what do you think?

Tabitha Syrett

I'm going to give it six adorable viscose velveteen shorts out of ten. I just found it an easier, cheerier read than *1984*. I do think it's a more convincing vision of the future. I was genuinely intrigued to see what became of John, where he'd end up. I lost interest, to be honest, as the book went on. And I think those two opening chapters are really well done. But it's not a thrilling read. It's not a massive page-turner. As you say, I think the story is a bit thin, and all the characters are a bit thin. And I'm not a massive fan of books of ideas either. But I am going to give it an extra point for those opening chapters.