Brave New World

On rereading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, his dystopian novel first published in 1932, I found some fascinating contemporary echoes. Obviously Huxley was writing at the height of the Great Depression of the 1930s when it looked like capitalism was on the verge of collapse. But a society in which happiness is compulsory looks like one that New Labour yearns for today. In Huxley’s dystopia everyone is given soma, a happiness drug, and the phrase “everybody’s happy now” is repeated 150 times every night for 12 years as people sleep. If Tony Blair reads the novel he might get some nasty ideas.