0572 | Antic Hay | Aldous Huxley

Not the most memorable novel I’ll ever read. Apart from pneumatic trousers (a chindogu candidate if ever there was one), little remains a couple of months on as I write this review.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve read so, so many other novels that attempt to spoof the era after WW1 that it just kind of got lost in the haze. Why is it that so very many writers have to describe that era using witty, ascerbic satire rather than writing about it in any way seriously? Was that stance itself actually a tribute to the age?

Gumbril, who the book opens with and mostly focusses on, is probably the most memorable of the caricatures, and his pursuit of the “Complete Man” fantasy was at times amusing and wry.

But, although it was a good novel, it was only mildly amusing and not a patch on Decline and Fall, for example. Despite being written after his opening Crome Yellow, I prefer the earlier work although I can’t really put my finger on why.

FIRST	Gumbril, Theodore Gumbril Junior, B.A. Oxon., sat in his oaken stall on the north side of the School Chapel and wondered, as he listened through the uneasy silence of half a thousand schoolboys to the First Lesson, pondered as he looked up at the vast window opposite, all blue and jaundiced and bloody with nineteenth-century glass, speculated in his rapid and rambling way about the existence and nature of God.
LAST	This might reveal the ending. If you want to see the quote, click show ‘And now,’ said Mrs Viveash, straightening herself up, and giving her self a little shake, ‘now we’ll drive to Hampstead and have a look at Piers Cotton.’
RATING	Key: Legacy | Plot / toPic | Characterisation / faCts | Readability | Achievement | Style Read more about how I come up with my ratings.