When Virginia Woolf wrote about the conditions required for writing she identified the need for a room of one’s own. It seems like a basic prerequisite, but she was using this simple idea to highlight the importance of independence and security as a precondition for a creative life. In some respects, Aldous Huxley’s 1962 novel, Island, approaches the possibility of a Utopian society in much the same way. The fact that Huxley’s Pala is an island, for a start, is significant. The basic preconditions of this Utopian experiment, we learn, are independence, self-determination, and a program of education that allows for individual actualisation. But these high-minded ideals are only possible in an environment where basic needs are met by a stable economy. The ensured production of food and the ability to contain viable population numbers are integral to this. These are insights which have been expressed in one way or another by others. For Maslow, the idea of self-actualisation is not possible until the basic physical needs of an individual are met. So, too, for a society. Thomas Malthus’ theory of population, named Malthusianism after him, predicted that population growth would always exceed the ability of a society to produce food, leading to inevitable cycles in which populations might be subject to boom and bust. In Island, Huxley presents us with a seemingly-enclosed world in which population is limited by birth control, and food production is therefore capable of meeting the needs of its people. The worst impulses of Western capitalism – militarism and conspicuous consumption – are made anathema to the island’s people through its philosophical education which targets the needs of individuals and promotes self-awareness.

But the society of Pala is not as isolated as it needs to be. A clue that Huxley’s Pala is something of a thought experiment rather than a manifesto lies in the island’s inability to defend itself. Pala and its people are pacifists. It soon becomes apparent that Pala’s Utopian vision is impractical in a world where other nations are not as enlightened. Pala is an island somewhere in Southeast Asia and its near neighbour, Rendang-Lobo, led by the dictator Colonel Dipa, has been undertaking secret negotiations with Pala’s next Raja, Murugan Mailendra, who will succeed to his position once he attains his majority in a few days’ time. Unlike other children living in Pala, Murugan has received a foreign education in Switzerland due to concerns about his health as a child. His mother, the Rani, is also spiritually under the influence of a cult leader, Master Koot Hoomi, and she is opposed to the spiritual and philosophical beliefs held by a majority of the islanders. Murugan’s sympathies lie with his mother, and he believes Colonel Dipa’s militaristic government offers an example for a new way forward. Murugan is fascinated by Western sales catalogues and he desires the apparent riches the West seems to offer. As Raja, he is determined he will not to be just a figurehead but a leader. He intends to change the island’s culture and impose the spiritual beliefs he holds with his mother on the people of Pala, affecting this this through an alliance with Colonel Dipa, by selling the island’s oil, and using the funds to militarise.

All this is revealed to us through the eyes of an outsider, Will Farnaby, a journalist who lands on the island after he contrives to be wrecked on the shores of Pala, otherwise known as “the forbidden island, the place no journalist had ever visited.” Will is not merely curious about Pala. He has ventured to Pala after meeting with the dictator, himself. Dipa is making territorial claims against Pala on the pretext of a shared history. His interests in Pala align with Lord Aldehyde’s, an oil baron who has employed Will as his representative to negotiate on his behalf.

Readers familiar with Thomas More’s Utopia, will understand the premise of Huxley’s novel. In Utopia More is guided by Raphael through the island of Utopia where practices that are in many ways antithetical to European society and the Catholic Church have produced an ideal and harmonious society. Huxley’s version of More’s character is Will Farnaby, who provides the willing eyes and ears for the reader, and thereby acts as the conduit through which we learn about the island, its history and the beliefs of its people.

Reading Island will be a chore for some. I have to admit, as the novel wore on, I found it a challenging read. I got a bit bored, possibly because switching off can be a natural reaction to someone who is preaching at you or being too didactic. Also, the plot was flimsy, and the nuts and bolts of its Utopian machinery were visible, making it feel contrived; it was a feeling that the fictional narrative was merely the palliative lubricant by which various philosophical, religious, ideological and sociological pedagogies are delivered. Each scene increasingly felt like the unnecessary gesture made by a doorman at the entrance of an imposing edifice.

Understanding the novel’s literary antecedents was a part of this feeling. For Utopia More created characters as vessels for that book’s philosophical annunciations. The manner of that book owes a great deal to Socratic dialogues, too. Socrates is reported to have led pupils through the use of questioning and reflection, towards insight. Will is in the same position as a Crito or Protargoras, in this respect. As an outsider, Will represents us, and we are lead through a series of lessons and philosophical discussions which explain the social, spiritual and ascetic principles upon which the islanders live their peaceful lives. The extent to which we embrace Huxley’s vision is up to us, though I do not think Huxley was being as ironic or satirical as he was thirty years prior to this novel when he wrote his most famous work, Brave New World. Will embraces the teachings of Dr Robert MacPhail, Susila and others who lead him through his intellectual and spiritual journey, and there is little evidence to suggest his criticisms are directed anywhere but outward, primarily at Western capitalism and the tenets of Christianity, particularly Calvinism, a source of so much despair and pain. For Huxley, through his fictional surrogates, the West is a place of overbreeding, overconsumption, its lifestyle is too sedentary, its model of the family too restrictive for individual growth and its model of democracy, represented by its media, facile. The West is potentially subject to the same human foibles that plagued Germany and Russia: the lure of Peter Pans – men like Hitler who have never learned self-awareness and maturity – or muscle men like Stalin, whose personality has never been tempered by humility or a sense of service.

For Huxley, the crux of the Palanese Utopia lies with the ability of the individual to achieve a kind of gnostic insight into who they are, an idea based upon the Buddhist idea of presence, in which the individual is aware of their place in the world, is fully engaged in the present moment, and sees things as they truly are without clinging to the past or the future. By implication, this means also means a life without the encumbrance of Western consumer culture and religious dogmas that emphasise punishment over enlightenment. To paint in broad brushstrokes, Huxley’s ideal existence is one of personal and spiritual insight, supported by science. Will is told that when the island culture was initialy reformed by the Old Raja and Dr Andrew MacPhail, that the island’s Buddhist population readily accepted the scientific gift of pain relief because they were committed to the ideal of ending sorrow. Likewise, they saw the raw economic need for birth control as concomitant with their beliefs. This nexus between the spiritual and the scientific culminates in the use of moksha-medicine, a local drug advocated by the Palanese people as a fast-track to heightened spiritual, intellectual and individual awareness.

Aldous Huxley experimented with psychedelic drugs, himself, for the first time in in 1953. He took mescaline, an experience he describes in his book The Doors of Perception, which he published the following year. He would continue to experiment with psychedelic drugs for the rest of his life. For those familiar with Brave New World, there may be a feeling of irony in this. The citizens of Brave New World take Soma, a drug supplied by the state, which prevents its citizens feeling depressed or questioning their lives. While capable of inducing feelings of euphoria, the drug is essentially an instrument of oppression: used to maintain the status quo by ensuring a complaisant and compliant citizenry. But for the inhabitants of Pala, moksha-medicine is capable of revealing spiritual and personal insights that would only otherwise be achieved through many years of ascetic discipline and learning. It’s important to understand Huxley’s personal position on the use of psychedelic drugs at this time in his life. An assumption that Huxley’s portrayal of Soma in Brave New World is indicative for our reading of Island could cause confusion, or suggest that Huxley is being ironic when he advocates the drug’s efficacy. I don’t think he is.

Pala is not a dystopian world, though the external elements that threaten it represent the dystopian world of Western capitalism and other militaristic nations like Russia and China, as well as the avaricious greed and violence of unenlightened humanity. But I wondered whether we should be at least be a little critical of this perfect world, even if Huxley may have wished us to embrace its rationalism entirely, as does Will Farnaby. After all, those familiar with the last book of Gulliver’s Travels may remember the super-rational race of horses, the Houyhnhnms, who appear far more appealing than the degraded race of humans, the Yahoos, who shit on them from trees. Their effect on Gulliver is to make him somewhat misanthropic: he even fashions sails for his raft from the skins of his fellow humanoids. This level of insight isn’t as apparent in Island, at least in the matter of his Utopia. Huxley satirised the promise of industrialism and science in Brave New World, but he was wise enough to understand that John Savage, the natural-born man from the reservation who spouts lines from Shakespeare like it is Holy scripture and rails against the frivolities of the World State, risks madness, like Gulliver.

There are moments in Island that seem to gloss over the reality that any ideology in a pure form risks deforming our humanity. That science created the Atom Bomb and helped usher in the Cold War is not lost in the narrative, but the pure faith in the enlightenment moksha-medicine offers, and the other means by which the island community seeks to maintain its perfect state is lost, if not on Huxley, then on his characters. For people like Dr Robert MacPhail the Second World War, the Atom Bomb and the Cold War are the insane historical outcomes of societies based upon overconsumption, overpopulation and a failure to promote the whole individual. In answer to the question “What are Palanese boys and girls for?” Mr Menon, the Under-Secretary of Education tells Will that Pala’s children are educated to be “turned into full-blown human beings”. In America, however, he states that they are “for mass consumption”: in Russia, “for strengthening the national state”: in China, “for cannon fodder, industry fodder, agricultural fodder, road-building fodder.” As readers we hear in the voices of Huxley’s islanders Huxley’s own didactic voice. The islanders are entirely confident in the truth of their own position, but the practical tenets of their beliefs sometimes skirt blithely near the borders of totalitarian practices they might otherwise abhor, nevertheless. The rationalism of Palanese society advocates birth control and pain relief, as well as a fusing of scientific and spiritual insight. But it also advocates the use of drugs to overcome delinquency, and a program of artificial insemination is practised on the island to promote a superior genetic pool and a long-term increase in IQ. That the practise not only recalls Huxley’s own satirical treatment of eugenics in Brave New World, but that it also resembles, at least philosophically, the eugenics programs toyed with in Hitler’s Germany after Huxley’s earlier novel, is reason for pause. And there are other moments for reflection, too. The Mutual Adoption Clubs run by the islanders which allow children to be raised in multiple households seems like a reasonable approach to giving children a wider experiential and emotional upbringing. But Susila’s assertion that the traditional concept of the family in the world outside Pala has few redeeming qualities and that the idea of family is little more than a jail – that “parent jailers” do more harm than good – is a rhetorical overreach in the service of issues that warrant consideration. Vijaya’s description of the Pavlovian methods used to emotionally condition children feels vaguely like the conditioning practised on foetuses in the World State. There is an uncertain line between advocacy and satire that spans the thirty-year gap between Brave New World and Island.

What redeems the novel from being too proselytising is its flimsy plot set around the value of the nation’s oil and Colonel Dipa’s intention of taking the island back to exploit it. By this we understand that perfect societies do not exist because they cannot exist alone. Huxley’s novel is a thought bubble, of what might be ideal in the abstract, and a reflection upon our own society and Huxley’s historical moment. It may be the society of 1962 that Huxley addresses, yet many of the issues he raises remain relevant. Consumption, militarism, our forms of punishment and control; these and other issues addressed by Huxley are still relevant today. However, the novel is far less appealing than his best-known work, and modern readers may question whether its style makes it an unappealing read.