Island

Island Review

Island arrived in 1962, the last year of Huxley’s life, and it reads as a lifetime’s thinking brought to a single point. Where Brave New World had imagined a world in which pleasure had been weaponised into a tool of control, Island asks the follow-up question: what would it actually look like if the same technologies — pharmacology, education, social organisation — were used with genuine human flourishing as the goal? The answer is Pala, a fictional island in the Indian Ocean that has spent a century building precisely that.

The novel’s observer is Will Farnaby, a journalist with a broken past and a cynical disposition, who washes up on Pala after a shipwreck and is slowly, reluctantly won over by what he finds. He is the right kind of protagonist for this kind of book: sceptical enough to be a fair witness, damaged enough to need what Pala offers, and intelligent enough to ask the right questions. The Palanese answer almost everything he asks, which is both the novel’s central method and its central risk — Huxley knows he is writing a philosophical treatise in thin novelistic clothing, and he does not entirely pretend otherwise.

What saves it is the quality of the thinking. The Palanese society is not a vague dream of niceness but a specific, argued, institutionally detailed alternative: a maithuna-based sexuality that separates pleasure from reproduction, an education system that trains attention and emotional intelligence alongside intellectual skills, a democracy of mutual aid rather than competitive accumulation, and a sacramental use of the moksha-medicine — a psychedelic compound — that provides, for those who take it, a direct encounter with the ground of being. Huxley had taken mescaline and LSD in the decade before writing the novel, and his account of what such experiences might mean, properly integrated into a life, is the most thoughtful in any novel of the period.

The ending is dark: Pala is invaded and the experiment extinguished by the oil interests and political forces that have been circling throughout the novel. Some readers find this too convenient — a way of having the utopian vision without having to answer whether it could survive contact with the world. But Huxley’s point is perhaps simpler: it is not that such a society is impossible, but that it is fragile, and that the forces opposing it are powerful and real. The mynah birds saying “Attention!” and “Here and now, boys!” throughout the novel are not just whimsy; they are the novel’s entire argument in two phrases.