Customer Reviews

Time Must Have a Stop

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is not for everyone. If you like and understand satirical views of Victorian society and you have a knowledge or interest in art, poetry, and theology then you'll find this book intellectually stimulating. If you don't appreciate any of these things you might find it presumptuous and at the very least boring. So I admit this book is very much intoned to a specific audience.

The book delves into discussions of just about everything under the sun. It goes through saintliness, theology, art, poetry, schooling, etiquette, and morals. The characters add further insight with their behaviors. I was particularly fond of Mrs. Thwale who perfectly embodies the female mystique and femme fatale. A lascivious woman of Victorian sensibilities and honor she flits from one man to the next, never giving herself up. The main character, probably the least well-rounded, seems to be a flawless embodiment of the stereotypical teenager who thinks he's the center of the universe.

Certain points are just terribly cruel but absolutely hilarious in that twisted satirical way. At one point the elderly Queen Mother clutches her dead dog in mourning but almost as soon as a new puppy is handed over to her she lets the dog fall off her lap and flop to the ground. I believe there is a point to be made here.

Though I admit I don't even remotely agree with the discussions of sainthood I did find it an interesting read. It proved Huxley is evermore a very complicated and perhaps conflicted character in and of himself. Though I give this book five stars I still think it bears repeating it's not for everyone.

Huxley was a man of many bizarre ideas as well as an uneven writer, but he could also be quite a deep and compelling thinker. This book is a particularly vivid example of this contradiction. I found parts of the novel almost painfully bad (one of the characters trying to communicate from the afterlife through an incompetent medium, or the epilogue that in effect abandons any pretense of being part of novel in order to become an unconfortable mix of essay and sermon). There is also the lingering problem of Huxley's uninformed and unfair attitude towards natural science. But in exchange for accepting these failures the reader gets two extraordinary character portraits: one of a monster (Mrs. Thwale) and one of a saint (Bruno the bookseller), both very convincing and immensely insightful. Add to that a penetrating study of the perils of self-absorption, a sound case for moral restraint, and the best diagnosis I have come across of why artists who express the most sublime insight about human nature can still behave like swine. It's sad and doubly ironic the Huxley himself should have been an impeachable character. Anyway, quite a worthwhile read.

Huxley explores the fickleness of mortality with his usual clever pen and knack for irony. This beautiful book examines materialism and morality through the eyes of a young man and contrasts this with the protagonist's reflections of years later.

Time Must Have a Stop (the title is from a quote from Shakespeare's Hotspur) is a pleasant read from Huxley's early period, where he was still writing comedy of manner novels about the English aristocracy. The story is of a young poet named Sebastion (destined to take the world's arrows like St. Sebastion) who must deal with a stingy father, and is motherless. He has a taste of luxury and kindness when visiting his somewhat hedonistic Uncle Eustace, but unfortunately his uncle dies in the bathroom of a heart attack after one too many heavy meals. Anyway, not only is Sebastion grieved, but he also makes the mistake of trying to sell a recent gift of his Uncle, a Degas, in order to buy some evening clothes for a party. The painting is found missing by an estate auditor and Sebastion must get it back. He appeals to a saintly but odd relative, who retrieves it. The plot winds on, the relative becomes ill because of his efforts to help Sebastion (do not want to give away too much here), and Sebastion becomes chastened as he comforts the man. The book is funny and innovative in that it describes a seance where, comically, an intermediary idiot spirit ruins all of the dead Uncle Eustace's funny little witticisms from beyond. From a psychological point of view, this is one of the better descriptions of Avoidant Personality Disorder (Sebastion). Indeed, Huxley's novels are suffused with this style of personality. Evidently, it was a style of personality either common in Huxley's circles, or perhaps a feature of Huxley himself. Nowhere better than in Huxley's novels do we find description of this personality type described half a century later by eminent psychologist Theodore Millon, as the Avoidant Personality or the "active detached" pesonality. Damon LaBarbera, Ph.D.

At the centre of this book is a marvellous attempt to describe what happens to the 'soul' after a human dies. Huxleys ideas for the novel are based on the Bardo Thodol (better known in the West as The Tibetan Book of The Dead). While you follow the dead person through various bardo states Huxley stays very much rooted in what we perceive as the everyday world, his characters dialogues entertaining us with customary Huxley wisdom and wit on everything from politics to art and literature. Another wonderful voyage with one of the pioneer synthesizers of East and West.

Huxley is not for everyone. His writing speaks for himself - Mrs Thwale is unforgettable in this book, the essence of femme fatale stripped to its basic element of self-serving cruelty; and so as usual I will be a Huxley apologist rather than recommend his work indiscriminately. If you have no experience with his writing other than Brave New World, then be prepared to find yourself disliking his dark style of writing that harshly exposes the callousness of daily human life. His writing is messy and philosophical to the extent of being preachy, but those insights come as a welcome relief after the reader is repeatedly exposed to that overwhelming intensity that Huxley maintains as he outlines debauchery and amorality. Buy it, pass in on if you don't like it; but if you can handle his work, it will stay with you in your inner thoughts for the rest of your life.

This is the story of a callow boy, destined for an elite education, who passes some time with a faded, decadent uncle. They sit around talking, he is introduced to sex, and fears for his financial missteps. The most memorable scene is a heart attack, with its sudden fear of death. The philosophical discussions, for me personally, are utterly flat and lifeless, a waste of time unless you have never read any philosophy or even non-fiction. As such, this is a badly failed "idea novel" with little action and lots of shallow sentiment, the characters being mere vehicles for obscure ideas. I do not mean to argue that ideas are not worthy to be pursued, but this novel is not the place to do it. It is a boring read, for high brow afficianados who feel they are "up to" it intellectually.

Not recommended.

It is sometimes forgotten that the author of Brave New World, Brave New World Revisited, The Perennial Philosophy and Doors of Perception continued writing fiction long after Brave New World. Huxley believed this was one of his best novels and I believe he was right. The book is arresting from the beginning when a young lad with a poetic temperament finds himself locked in a struggle between a callous Socialist father, for whom politics is everything and yet refuses to so much as get his son the dinner jacket that he needs so badly, and another more spiritual man who guides and reminds the boy that man does not live by politics alone.

Huxley was a fascinating character and man of many contradictions. Having just about finished Nicholas Murray's biography of him, I was almost amused to see how Huxley, while rejecting the miracles of Jesus Christ on allegedly empirical grounds, was nevertheless not only an connoisseur of psychadelic drugs, but also a frequenter of seances, Fourth Dimensions, and all sorts of other occult phenomena right up until his LSD-tripped-out death in 1963. Huxley was also a eugenicist, a friend and admirer of the devil worshiper Alister Crowley (also known as both Frater Perdurabo and The Great Beast, who called his 'Black Mysticism' Diabolatry and Diabolism in his book Magic in Theory in Practice). Huxley also took to 'Dianetics' founder L. Ron Hubbard of "Church of Scientology" fame and many (and I mean many!) other sordid or faddish types.

All of this seemed in stark contrast not only to reason (ghosts, yes! Resurrection, no!) but (by all accounts) this shy and certainly cerebral and very genteel man of letters (some very brilliant novels and essays; the author Thomas Mann, however, did once observe that the more eclectically "religious" Huxley became, the more Sado-Masochistic sex and gore of various kinds appeared in some of his books!)

Still, despite his contradictions, a quest for spiritual fulfillment of sorts remained an integral part of his life, at least of a more eclectic kind where, tending to monism, he overlooked the many contradictions in various religious systems, instead to focus on the original charism of various "enlightened" ones, as he saw it, though these also often contradicted one another. Huxley however was not about to pursue the problems to resolution and chose to prefer a vague mysticism over discursive thought and the law of contradiction. He seemed to prefer the search to any possession of the Promised Land.

In his novels, this one included, Huxley worked out these tensions within himself along very interesting lines. It is a must read even after all these years. (I think old Aldous would not have liked the Kindle reader at all. There is nothing like a real honest to goodness book where there are few concerns for privacy and tracking and where libraries are heaven itself)

As pointed out in the lively preface, this is a novel of ideas, a novel of manners, a critique of human history and a voyage into the realm of the unknown. Because it attempts so much, it's not perfect. But when it's good, it dazzles.

The hero is 17-year-old Sebastian Barack who looks like a Della Robbia angel and writes mythological poetry. His mother died young and his father is utterly absorbed in idealistic political causes. The father's refusal to buy Sebastian decent evening clothes for a party leads the young man into one moral dilemma after another.

Another central character is Sebastian's rich, self-indulgent, affable and effete Uncle Eustace, whose conversation is a fountain of wit. The chapters where Eustace appears are pure reading pleasure. And when he dies, his experiences as a disembodied spirit in the void are equally engaging. This tour de force has been compared to the descriptions of the afterlife in The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Sebastian's other important influence is a saintly bookseller who helps him approach "the divine Ground of all being."

Written during World War II and published in 1944, the book is a fascinating window into English society in the `20s.

Spiritualism, a great enthusiasm of the period, also figures in Huxley's narrative. For some interesting background on the short-lived Society for Psychical Research, I'd suggest reading Ghost Hunters by Deborah Blum. It helped me appreciate the séance scene in Time Must Have a Stop.

One thing that critics and fans alike agree on is that all of Huxley's later work has as its focus the kind of mystical, moral, personal transformation that goes back to the ancient Greeks. Huxley was convinced that love and goodness are the answer to life, and that self-knowledge and moral commitment to love are the only things that make life meaningful and the only hope for humanity. Many modern critics, being postmodern nihilists, hate this line of thinking and have been known to express this in no uncertain terms.

For those people who are convinced that love, goodness, and God (the transpersonal Eastern, Buddhist mystical God as opposed to the personal God of Western fundamentalists) are the answer to life's questions, Huxley's later works are an unequaled treasure. They are ten times as intelligent, subtle, and thought-provoking as the work of virtually any "New Age" author, and ten times as enjoyable as thouroughly realized works of art.

The characters are drawn with Huxley's characteristic satirical sensibility. The vision of the afterlife is a very original and unique aspect of this particular work. There are a few flaws in this particular work in that the poetry is rather bad and the epilogue, though by far the most inspiring part of the book, does seem to be somewhat "pasted on" to the end of the book, instead of worked in seamlessly to the storyline.

For those willing to allow themselves to be inspired by visions of goodness or saintliness, as people have been inspired by the accounts of Jesus, the Buddha, and many others throughout history, the best aspect of the novel by far is the depiction of Bruno Rotini. There may not be such a description in existence that was ever written with a better sense of aesthetic brilliance.