Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley

One may perhaps assume, from the fact that I am going through a particular phase for science fiction and fantasy at the present time as I have just begun to blog novels, that it's what I've mainly tended to read. That isn't really true, although I've read a fair amount of said genres. I shall go through other phases, and indeed have done in the past. Like most people, I have my comfort authors as I have my comfort songs. One of those is Aldous Huxley.

Yet the Huxley is not the Huxley of Brave New World or The Doors of Perception: it is the younger Huxley, he of the novels of ideas of the Twenties and Thirties, which are suich fascinating records of the lives and the thinking of that fascinating period between the wars- war-scarred, Bohemian in a way, at least for a certain class of people, and replete with new ideas- of Freud, of Modernism, of the motor car- and new anxieties- of technology, of another war, of class conflict.

This, Huxley's first novel, which I've just reread after many years, is a shocking hundred years old and feels instantly modern. This may be far more comedic than its successor novels, but it perfectly captures the tenor of the time, where youn twentysomethings (such as Huxley himself) could be no less pretentious in their angsts and solipsisms than you or I were, or perhaps in your case are, at that age.

The pretentious Denis, the Freudian Anne, the determined introvert Henry Wimbush, the authorial mouthpiece (complete with predictions of the main concept of Brave New World...) Mr Scogan are all splendid comic creations, expressing the ennui and humanity of people who have abandoned God but not, despite their Freudianism, able to escape the extraordinary sexual repression of their society. This may be a novel in which literally nothing happens, but it is no less fun, and no less instructive, for that.