D's Book Club - Brave New World, Part II

The further I get in this book the deeper down the rabbit hole I go. This book is way fucked up. It’s full of sayings and chants – the newest Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun, kiss the girls and make them One. Boys with one with girls at peace; Orgy-porgy gives release. That’s just a wee bit of sexual innuendo, don’t you think? A gramme is better than a damn. Just push that drug use.

There are a couple of things in the future that are still that same - Native Americans are still called savages and kept on reservations. Peep shows are still around (however they are now more appropriately called the Feelies).

In a nutshell
Brave New World is a satirical look on a hedonistic future where promiscuity and drug use are encouraged. The story follows Bernard Marx, a high caste loner touting the physical looks of a lower caste member. Marx’s physical ‘deformities’ cause him to be ridiculed by his peers and subordinates. Marx doesn’t quite follow the regulated lifestyle of sex and soma, causing himself to be further ostracized from the others. He manages to talk the lovely Lenina into taking a holiday to a savage reservation in North America. When requesting approval for the trip from his superior, Bernard finds the Director had also taken a romantic getaway to the Savage Reservation years earlier, only to lose his mate in the desert. During Bernard and Lenina’s trip to the old world, they stumble upon the Director’s long lost love, Linda. Linda has grown old and decrepit but more surprising than this is the fact that Linda bore a child, John the Savage, and had become the nastiest of things, a mother. Bernie packed up the clan and took them back to civilization (Civilization is sanitation, you know). Upon their return, Bernie humiliated the Director by reuniting him with his lost love, Linda, and introducing him to his son, causing the Director to resign. Marx is greeted with an obscene of amount of popularity, something he had never had bestowed upon him before. Linda passes which sends the Savage over the cuckoo’s nest. Finally, unable to assimilate to the new culture the Savage had been thrust into, John does what so many of us do when we feel like we do not fit in, he kills himself.

What I have learned:
I still concur with my initial assessment of this should not be high school reading.
Although this is a work of fiction, there are no space ships.


Join me next time when I take you back to the rabbit hole, slit your throat and push you in – D’s Book Club presents A Clockwork Orange.

Side Note: I’m scared as hell to read A Clockwork Orange. The boy was at my house last week and said the book is way more fucked up than the movie. Then I was talking to my boy JC (no silly, not Jesus Christ) and he too said the book is far more disturbing. He had to put it down and did not want to read the rest of it. That coming from JC (still not Jesus Christ, sorry) should be enough to ward me off, but I am a manly man yearning for words.