ABSTRACT
Island is about a community, soon to be swept away by the mad greed of the rest of the world, in which there has grown up a way of life based on the perennial philosophy, hallucinogenic plants, practical hypnotherapy, maithuna (coitus reservatus) and other yogas which are taught at school. A life-battered Englishman with a bad sexual history is wrecked on the island, and is converted to its way of life, but not quickly enough to prevent his helping the Oil Interests to destroy it. There is a dreadful revivalist Ranee, to show that there is still fake mysticism around, and a cynical Indian called Mr. Bahu, last of the long line of Huxleyan bons vivants1 or Scogans. But most of the characters live without complexities, whether of irony or anything else, 'making the best of the here and now,' coping intelligently with birth and sex and death, with economics and visionary experience. The novel is an extended study of such a society, made up mostly of conversations, lectures, extracts from key educational books, and reports on mushroom-visions. This kind of society has to get along without art, since nobody is unhappy enough to make any, and the book reflects this state of affairs. It is a kind of sterile hybrid, bred of a volume of sermons and She. I have never felt free to join those who profess an easy contempt for this writer; anybody who can dispose of his amount of information does us a favor by showing how little we use our heads. And if he is essentially philosophe rather than novelist, that makes his good novels remarkable as testimony to what can be done by intelligence and information in the absence of original talent. But he has obviously lost interest in fiction. Much of Island, the sermonizing in fact, has great interest, and so have his recent essays. One may look forward to many more volumes from Huxley, but it is permissible to hope that this is his last novel.
