ABSTRACT
Battered, seasick, and bored, the passengers suddenly wake up; through the portholes the outline of a green hill passes by, a bell clangs and the ship's rhythm is altered. Land! Land at last. Life will be interesting and amusing once more. The sight of a new large novel, Eyeless in Gaza, by Aldous Huxley was for me, a passenger with a weak stomach, like the sight of land. Here was a world in which one would know one's way about, in which the characters would feel and think and talk like educated people with open minds. Sure to be delightful company, though perhaps rather like Gryll Grange. Peacock. Yes, Mr. Huxley has often been compared with Peacock and quite rightly. Gumbril might have been a guest at Nightmare Abbey and Myra Viveash might have been caught in Mr. Aquarius's net. Happy to be ashore, with a good appetite, it was a shock at first to find the streets of the town blocked with notices: No Thoroughfare, and one's happy stroll constantly interrupted. The dust-cover gives warning: 'instead of a chronological
sequence, a counter-point of four narratives at different epochs of the hero's life.' . . . At first the No Thoroughfare notices annoy and the reader regrets having to pop about after the counterpoint, but practice reconciles; it is not as difficult as one might expect to keep the sequences clear in one's head, and one is thankful for anything, anything that will take one away from 1934. That indeed, and no nonsense about counterpoint, seems to me the reason and justification of the method. Had the chapters been arranged in chronological sequence, nobody could have ever finished the book, just as no one can read the last chapters of War and Peace. Mr. Huxley's happy device enables his hero's philosophical reflections to be broken up and scattered through the book. Even so, there are moments when one rebels.
