Island by Aldous Huxley

After spending most of October reading the His Dark Materials series, I wanted to get back to work on my Classics Club list. I decided to pick up Island by Aldous Huxley, based mostly on the amazing cover design of the edition I owned. I didn't know anything about the plot of the novel when I chose it, but I thought it might be something like the first Huxley book I read in high school, Brave New World. As it turned out, I couldn't have been more wrong.

The plot of Island follows a man named Will Farnaby. At the start of the novel, he is shipwrecked on a remote island named Pala. Outsiders aren't usually allowed to visit Pala, but as he injured his leg in the accident, the friendly natives offer to let him stay while they nurse him back to health. As he heals, he gets a chance to learn all about the culture and philosophy of the island, and his life is forever changed by what he discovers.

The island of Pala is a utopian society, and is governed by philosophies that include mindfulness, community spirit, and limited contact with modern industry. They practice fertility control to keep their population manageable, and use a whole mind-body approach to public health and education. Equal weight is given to physical, mental, emotional, and sexual aspects of wellness, with efficient processes in place to identify and rehabilitate anyone in need of medical or psychological interventions. Many of their rituals and ways of thinking are based on Buddhism, with meditation and "living in the now" forming the main parts of their beliefs.

Family life in Pala is centered around "mutual adoption clubs," or MACs, made up of around twenty family units each. Each family adopts everyone else's family to form one large network of support. Children can move freely between many different sets of parents as needed, which promotes a general atmosphere of familial harmony. Both their economic and political systems are structured to limit the amount of wealth or power any one person can accumulate, which keeps most citizens more or less equal within their society. Everyone's differences are valued and people approach all problems with logic and calmness. It's a true paradise.

As Will learns more and more about this island, he is able to work through some troubling issues from his personal life and comes to adopt many of the Palanese beliefs. Island is about both his growth as a person, and about how a restructuring of what we choose to pay attention to and care for in society might bring us one step closer to an ideal world.

This was quite an odd book, to say the least. There wasn't much actual story to it; it was more like a series of conversations exploring Huxley's suggestions for society. While some of his ideas are pretty wild (like using hypnosis to eliminate all pain or communal use of hallucinogenic drugs), many of them make a lot of sense. The general tone throughout the novel was one of hope and peacefulness. Gone was the pessimism of Brave New World. The citizens in Island were a content and joyful group, and they put up with Will's initial sarcasm and endless questions very patiently. Their persistent belief in their way of life eventually change his mind about a lot of things, their persuasive explanations will undoubtedly work on a lot of readers too.

I didn't dislike my reading experience, but I did find it to be on the dry and boring side. A world without problems doesn't exactly make for a thrilling read, and I did find myself nodding off occasionally in some of the more dense sections. There is a small bit of conflict present in a plotline involving two members of Palanese royalty that have been poisoned by the consumerism and religious institutions of modern societies, but their inclusion is quite brief and feels like more of an annoyance than anything else. Their influence becomes much more important in the final pages of the novel, but a few paragraphs of action didn't change the fact that most of the novel lacked any form of conflict.

Speaking of the final pages of the novel, unfortunately, they were the low point of my reading experience. Most of the last chapter of Island is a description of an extended hallucination sequence after Will tries the mushrooms that the Palanese frequently use. Will experiences several personal revelations during this experience, but it was difficult to follow and dull. In general, I really dislike drug or alcohol-induced hallucinations in novels, so this may have been more of a personal preference issue rather than a problem with the story. Also, the last page or so of the story was disturbingly dark, in a way that felt strange and abrupt. It was a shame to end on a down note, since I had mostly enjoyed exploring the weirdness of everything that had come before, but the last part of the novel was a disappointment for me.

Island was my first utopian novel and it was a very unique reading experience. I liked diving into the strange and idyllic world that Huxley envisioned. It was not the most engaging reading experience I have ever had, but it was different enough to keep me mildly entertained. If the novel were much longer, I think my attention would have run short with it, but as it was, I made it through before I got too frustrated. I don't know if I would ever really recommend it to anyone aside from true Aldous Huxley fans, but if you are interested in him and his ideas, then Island is worth picking up. 

Challenge Tally
Classics Club (#100 on my list): 56/100 


Total Books Read in 2019: 69