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.

Moksha and the Perennial Philosophy

The moksha-medicine that Palanese society uses sacramentally is the novel’s most directly autobiographical element. Huxley had taken mescaline for the first time in 1953, an experience he described in The Doors of Perception (1954), and LSD in subsequent years. What distinguished his approach to these experiences from the countercultural uses that followed was his insistence on context: the same chemical compound, he argued, could produce terror or transcendence depending on the preparation, the setting, and the intention of the person taking it. Pala’s moksha ceremonies are his vision of how such experiences could be institutionalised in a way that made them genuinely life-enhancing rather than merely pleasurable.

This is the novel’s most radical claim — more radical, in some ways, than the political or economic alternatives Pala represents. It is the claim that direct experience of what Huxley called the Mind at Large, unfiltered by the reducing valve of ordinary consciousness, could be integrated into social life as a source of psychological health and ethical orientation. Whether this argument has aged well is a question the decades since have made more rather than less complex.

Will Farnaby’s Conversion

Will’s gradual conversion to the Palanese vision is handled with more nuance than the novel’s didactic reputation suggests. He arrives sceptical and compromised — sent to the island by an oil company with commercial interests, carrying the weight of a past he has used cynicism to avoid — and his resistance to what he finds is psychologically convincing. Each conversation, each encounter with Palanese practice, erodes his defences by confronting them with something they cannot dismiss as naive. The novel requires that its observer be credible, and Huxley works harder at Will’s credibility than at any of the Palanese characters, precisely because the novel’s argument depends on the quality of the witness.

Huxley died on November 22, 1963 — the same day as John F. Kennedy and C.S. Lewis — having asked his wife Laura to administer LSD as he lay dying. Island was the last novel he lived to see published. That context gives the book a valedictory quality that is hard to ignore: it is not just a utopia but a summation, the lifetime’s philosophical inquiry brought to a point.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Huxley’s final novel is both a genuine vision of human possibility and a formal oddity — a utopia that works precisely because it never pretends the obstacles to such a world don’t exist.

The Utopia Answering Brave New World

Island (1962), Huxley’s last novel, is the deliberate utopian counterweight to Brave New World. The cynical journalist Will Farnaby is shipwrecked on Pala, an island society that has fused Mahayana Buddhism with Western science to live sanely: mynah birds are trained to cry “Attention! Here and now,” children are raised by mutual-adoption clubs, and the moksha-medicine is used for genuine sacramental insight rather than mass sedation. The book is more tract than drama, but it distils a lifetime of Huxley’s thinking about how a society might choose wakefulness over distraction — and ends, pointedly, with that fragile experiment under threat.