Recently watched...

...a film version of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Chilling. This was the first really grown-up book that I ever read to review: we were in the VI form and studying English Literature and exploring the whole concept of book reviews and how to write one. I remember reading Huxley and also George Orwell's 1984 and writing a review comparing the two. I found Huxley more chilling because, as I remember writing then "we seem a lot nearer to Huxley's world of artificially-created life, and "feelies" now than when he wrote this book back in the 1930s". And if that was true in 1969, golly, it's much more true now. And there are whole aspects of the book that I had forgotten and which ring horribly accurately in modern Britain: the cult of physical pleasure, the utter obsession with sexual activity as recreational ("erotic play" sessions for children, endless sexual "engagements" among the adults), the absence of anything approaching a lifelong binding selfless love. And the things I remembered from that first reading back in my schooldays - the banks of embryos, the 3-dimensional "feely" TV/films which could be "felt" as well as watched. Huxley's book was what propelled me into activity with groups defending marriage and family life and, in particular, opposing abortion and related evils...