Island

Brave New World turned the other way

Huxley wrote Island thirty years after Brave New World, and the two books answer each other. The Kirkus reviewer in 1962 put it simply. The earlier book was defined by a drug called soma, which makes people forget. Island is defined by a hallucinogen, the moksha-medicine, which makes people more aware.

Some of Pala's arrangements sound like the World State of Brave New World, but they serve a different purpose. The Kirkus review lists birth control, artificial insemination and a reformed Mahayana Buddhism, the branch of Buddhism found across much of East Asia. Children grow up with many adults to care for them, not only their parents.

The Kirkus reviewer called the book something of a treatise with a story attached, though also good, clean metaphysical fun. The New York Times Book Review, quoted by the publisher, called it Huxley's final word about the human condition and the chance of a good society. Anthony Burgess praised its learning and its honest attempt to answer the big human questions.

A last novel, written while things fell apart

Huxley was working on Island by July 1956, when he and his second wife, Laura Archera, moved into a house on Deronda Drive in Los Angeles. He finished it in June 1961. The last weeks of the work brought a disaster. In May 1961 a fire destroyed the Huxleys' home in the Hollywood hills, with his manuscripts inside.

His health was failing too. In 1960 a dentist in Kansas removed a small growth from his mouth but did not remove all of it, and it became cancer of the tongue. Huxley refused surgery, because it would have damaged his speech. Dunaway writes that his illness only made him finish Island with more fervour, though he found a utopia far harder to write than a dystopia.

Harper published the novel on 28 March 1962, and Chatto & Windus published it in London the same year. Huxley died in Los Angeles on 22 November 1963. In the 1960s Island found a young audience. Dunaway counts sixteen printings bought by those readers.

Island in Paris

Island has no Paris setting, and Huxley did not write it in France. Its French life began with Plon, the Paris house that had published his Point Counter Point as Contrepoint in 1930. Plon brought out Île in 1963, translated by Mathilde Treger. The book appeared in Feux croisés, the same series of foreign fiction that had carried Contrepoint.

The translation has stayed in print. Presses Pocket in Paris published a paperback in 1979. Plon reissued Île in 2013, with the translation revised by Hélène Cohen.