ABSTRACT
Mr. Huxley's gift horse gives the uncritical rider such a blood-curdling ride through the Californian Yahoo country that the critic hesitates, and hesitates, before forcing the beast's jaws apart. Let us say that it is a firstclass pseudo-scientific shocker-something like M. P. Shiels' Purple Cloud-and let us then hasten away. There is a clearly recognised literary field in which people produce stories about mad scientists who do rum things, but literary critics have no business with what goes on there-that is the affair of the Watch Committees, the Chief Constables, and such robust moralists as the late Lord Brentford, and Mr. George Orwell. Let us therefore . . . but it is Mr. Huxley himself who makes the claim to be talking seriously about matters of importance and who thus forfeits the shocker writer's immunity. He begins his excursions into the possibilities of what may be called post-atomic sex on the highest possible plane: 'It was the day of Gandhi's assassination . . .', line two refers discreetly to Jesus, and the rest of the page is as thickly studded with 'good' names as a well-conducted gossip column. One nods to Ptolemy, Beddoes, Byron, Keats, Shelley before passing on to page two where one immediately encounters Martin Luther speakingas one might expect-German. It is plain that this is serious business, and no shocker, and that we are getting on to serious topics, guilt, ethics, moral responsibility, and all that. 'It was the day of Gandhi's assassination . . . but across the desk in his office, across the lunch table in the Commissary, Bob Briggs was concerned to talk only about himself. . . .' The familiar Huxley approach to the familiar Huxley
theme: one settles back expectantly . . . but something comes over Mr. Huxley when Bob Briggs is on the scene.
