ABSTRACT
Mr. Aldous Huxley's new novel, like its predecessors, communicates an intellectual excitement and a nervous exasperation. It is an experiment in what his Philip (a novelist within a novel, like André Gide's Edouard) calls the 'musicalisation of fiction'. The two-part oppositions of voices, imploring, blaspheming, lamenting and resigning, weave a contra puntal fabric that seems to cease in mid-air. Mr. Huxley begins by describing the heavenly pattern of Bach like any angel; his own music of humanity is of the Stravinsky kind. Certainly his effort towards capturing simultaneousness in time, though not entirely novel, is stimulating to the intelligence. In the first half of the book, at least, the two-part themes well up wavelike, one beneath the other, with a wonderful iridescence and fluidity of texture. 'Story, God bless you, Sir! I've none to tell you,' says Mr. Huxley with the Needy Knife Grinder. His London intellectuals and libertines, philosophic and other wise, disenchanted, sardonic, too deliberately satyric, go on talking; and, for all his fling at Proust, remembering. Enraged idealists all of them, wreaking their disappointed hopes in excesses of materialism, and exploiting viscera instead of hearts with a rather undergraduate kind of blague. Story? Well, there's a murder towards the end, of an incredibly casual kind. If somebody had murdered the verbose Mark Rampion, perversely put forward as the wise and normal man among his perverse neurotic friends, it would seem more natural. All of the talkers being contemptuous of love, they are consequently rather obsessed by the problem of sex. Mr. Huxley takes too many of his types from the pathology textbooks: old Mr. Quarles, Spandrell, Carling, Lucy Tantamount, that young Messalina with the manners of an illconditioned schoolgirl, are 'cases' in need of the alienist rather than the novelist. Yet the book is crowded with provocative creatures, some of
