Synopses & Reviews
In Island, his last novel, Huxley transports us to a Pacific island where, for 120 years, an ideal society has flourished. Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala and events begin to move when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Faranby, is shipwrecked there. What Faranby doesn't expect is how his time with the people of Pala will revolutionize all his values and -- to his amazement -- give him hope.
Review
“A mirror for modern man. . . . Should be read and reread.” Saturday Review
Synopsis
"Huxley's final word about the human condition and the possibility of the good society. . . . Island is a welcome and in many ways unique addition to the select company of books--from Plato to now--that have presented, in imaginary terms, a coherent view of what society is not but might be." -- New York Times Book Review
The final novel from Aldous Huxley, Island is a provocative counterpoint to his worldwide classic Brave New World, in which a flourishing, ideal society located on a remote Pacific island attracts the envy of the outside world.
In the novel Huxley considered his most important, he transports us to the remote Pacific island of Pala, where an ideal society has flourished for 120 years. Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala, and events are set in motion when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Faranby, is shipwrecked there. What Faranby doesn't expect is how his time with the people of Pala will revolutionize all his values and--to his amazement--give him hope.
About the Author
The longer fiction of Aldous Huxley has been in the mainstream of the "Novel of Ideas" since the publication in England in 1921 (America 1922) of Crome Yellow, his first novel. Huxley is one of the most skillful and most successful social satirists of the twentieth century. His novels go far in defining the character of modern man, while his later work reflects an interest in mysticism and the effect of the consciousness-expanding drugs.
Born in England in 1894, Mr. Huxley took to writing when his eyesight temporarily failed. From 1934 until his death in 1963, Aldous Huxley lived in California.