FRANK KERMODE
There are some fantastically protracted passages in which all the
characters show their mastery of the dialect, after a study comparable
in heartless dedication to their self-seeking in all other respects. The
children possess it young; their control of it is indicated at the outset
when eleven-year-old Hengist is cheeking his Grandma:
"Hengist, how often have I told you not to keep your hands in
your pockets?"
"I have not counted, Grandma," said the latter, too politely to
incur rebuke.
Miss Compton-Burnett's world is what it is, and has its occult relevance
to everybody else's. I hope the half-truth that she is an acquired ta!te
will not deter too many serious readers, because she is a rich and
idiosyncratic contributor to English fiction in a period generally
thought of as a lean one.
Thus far three senior novelists, all thinking in fiction, all in good
form; what of the fourth master? Reviewers ought to watch their
superlatives, but
Island,
it is reasonable to say, must be one of the
worst novels ever written; there are Victorian fiction-tracts with ex–
actly as much claim to serious attention, at any rate if one excludes
the excellent little scene at the beginning of Huxley's book about
corrupt lovemaking in a Charing Cross Road flat; ecstasy lit by neon
signs, green for putrefaction, pink for passion. That passage recalls
the considerable achievement of
Point Counter Point,
and reminds
us that Huxley
studied
fiction, used his intelligence to compensate his
lack of a natural bent. Yet as a novelist he was perhaps always more or
less consciously lowering himself (Wyndham Lewis's rough handling
of the opening page of
Point Counter Point
is apposite) and here he
makes the easiest and most perfunctory gestures possible, without
apology.
Island
invites, but then rejects, comparison with
Brave New
World.
The
soma
which was once anathematized as a cheap escape
from the ardors of reality
is
now essential to social health; as a result,
Huxley's energizing disgust, which could
be
good for fiction if not
for the soul, is lost. A utopia in which nearly everybody is sanely
educated, happy and intelligent-nice they are, really-is useless to
Huxley the artist.
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
