Island, by Aldous Huxley

I've just finished reading Aldous Huxley's last novel, Island, which he published in 1962, shortly before his death. There are books you cannot put down because they are so good, and then there are books you just want to get finished because you started them. This was the latter. I found it stilted, predictable and shallow, with no real story or plot. It is basically just a vehicle for Huxley to promote his weird ideas on societal organisation, drug-taking, and spiritualism.

The plot is a simple one ­– a western journalist gets stranded on a 'closed' island in the Indian Ocean, which he finds to have evolved into a utopian society as a result of the use of drugs, meditation and free love. So far, so good. But the book is thoroughly unrealistic – for example, in this 'closed' society the people are all bilingual in their native language and public-school English! They are familiar to the point of obsession with Western society, Western Philosophy and Christianity. In fact, everything about the 'closed' society is remarkably similar to the 1930's ideal of the English middle class, and entirely dissimilar to any known Asian society. The book continues with a series of artificial situations in which the protagonist is shown how the society arranges its education, health system, agriculture, child-rearing, and so on. It reads like a catalogue of utopian naivety, lightened only by the sheer silliness of Huxley's attempts to impose the Home Counties on south-east Asia, with added Hindu mysticism and narcotics.

Thank heavens I've finished this book, because now I can move on and read something better.