I shall begin with review with a dilemma: should you take help from another source to read through and understand better the book you’re reading, or should you stick just to the book and your understanding of it, and nothing else in between? ‘SparkNotes’ is an online book summary and notes site that was founded by a few Harvard students which has thorough and deep summary/notes on almost every popular classic fiction. I’ve mentioned this site before as well in my reviews, but I do so now because its role in my reading of classical fiction has become a kind of threat.
I’m someone who avoids knowing even the basic of info about the books I purchase or read because I want the reading experience to be both new/surprising and subjective. Therefore, I also avoid reading reviews of the books before I’ve written mine, just to make sure I or my views about the book haven’t been influenced by any outside source.
However, there’ve been books where I’ve found it hard to continue reading it; and because I’m half-way through it or I know that if I discontinue it, I wouldn’t be reading it again, or because I’m curious how it ends, I don’t want to discontinue the book. But since I also can’t push myself to read it to the end, I turn to internet to help me move forward. SparkNotes not only have helped me finish some of the classical fictions, but have also helped me understand them way deeper than I could’ve done myself. Huxley’s famous dystopian novel is one of such examples.
This novel is set sometime in the future (the future for the 1930s world, that is) where an organization called the ‘World State’ controls the civilization of people, from their machine-produced hundreds of identical births to their education, status, beliefs and values, and their whole lives basically. The neglected world of ‘The Outside’, where humans called ‘savages’ live, is a horror for the inhabitants of the World State; for they still have feelings, thoughts, families and relations, and everything human. The reason behind World State’s dominance is that they’ve kept their civilization stable through controlling everything that destabilizes a society, like emotions, thinking, relations, pain, and so on. Yet John, a human savage that later enters the World State, finds everything there pathetic and hard to belief, despite its deceiving ‘perfection’.
I didn’t like this novel from the very start, but I pushed myself as I usually do (‘just keep reading’) to get a grip of it eventually. And I did, and I didn’t. The scientific language used in some chapters of this novel, along with some dystopian features of it, is both off-putting and confusing. I turned to SparkNotes and covered some of the chapters from there which helped me understand what was really going on. From there, the latter parts of this book I absolutely devoured!
It was towards the end that I understood, through some brilliant dialogues between John and one of World State’s managers, what this novel was about and what it wanted to say. Although set in a very distinct and unforeseen world, this dystopian novel, like others, ironically tells us more about our own world, than some made-up one that has nothing to do with us.
With significant help achieved and an honest intent towards getting it, for now I do agree that getting outside help in understanding a book is okay, but permitted only when you’re stuck. Otherwise, reading and finishing a book on your own is the precondition of earning your opinion.
Ratings: 4/5 **** August 25, 2021_