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"Go Set a Watchman" by Harper Lee Originally written in the mid-1950s, Go Set a Watchman was the novel Harper Lee first submitted to her publishers before To Kill a Mockingbird. Assumed to have been lost, the manuscript was discovered in late 2014. Learn more | See related books
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Product Details
Paperback: 288 pages
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics; Reprint edition (October 17, 2006)
Curious, that it's probably the latter half of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World that gives the book such intellectual immortality and literary distinction. At least the first third, in fact, struck me as being disjointed, random, and almost reckless and willynilly in what, at the onset, seems almost pointless in its contrived weirdness.
While at first struggling to make it through to the real meat and potatoes of Huxley's magnum opus, I was even reminded of having once known an extremely frustrated friend from a previous job, who was a college student at the time, who was being forced (okay, "assigned" - your word for societal conditioning here, as you please, of course) to read Brave New World, and with the turn of almost every page, while slogging methodically through every colorful (though usually bizarre) catchphrase that the author uses to more fully illustrate his version of a totally pacifistic, impotent and pacified (drugged, stoned, rendered mute AND moot) futuristic human populace, the odd recollection of my tortured young student friend just kept coming back to me, time and time again.
"Viviparous." My young friend kept repeating whenever possible, at work. "Do you know what it means?" His instructor was MAKING him read the damn book, he lamented, and just getting through the first few chapters was giving him something suspiciously close to a nervous breakdown. And I must confess, at the time, I was quite mystified, not so much by the word "viviparous" itself (because like all avid readers, I positively love to learn new vocabulary), but the fact that his assigned reading was vexing his struggling, scholastic mind with such profound, torturous ardor.Read more ›
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I don't usually read post-apocalyptic, dystopian, pessimistic or "literary" books, and this is all four. It's very well done, though, and a classic, and I'm glad I read it.
The post-apocalyptic: a terrible war full of anthrax terrorist bombs has been fought, and in order to recover... The dystopian: the world has been heavily regulated. Humans are now grown in bottles, and raised in conditioning centres, where they are relentlessly conditioned to be mindlessly happy and contribute to a stable society. The pessimistic: in such a world, there's no place for "high art" or pure science, only for science as a tool, and meaningless entertainment. "You've got to choose between happiness and what people used to call high art... Every discovery in science is potentially subversive... truth's a menace, science is a public danger." The author sees no third way between the squalid primitivism of the "savage reservation" and a sterile, totalitarian modernism. John, the character who is caught between these worlds - having grown up on the reservation, the son of two people from the modernist world, but, unlike almost anyone else alive, with access to an old copy of Shakespeare - is unable to adapt to the modernist world when he is taken there.
Although several of the characters have names alluding to Communism - the female lead's name is Lenina, for example - that seems to be mainly to invoke totalitarianism. In 1931, when the book was written, the Nazis were not yet in power in Germany, and Russia had the only modernist totalitarian government. However, the society depicted in the book is based more on the consumerist modernism of America.Read more ›
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Like most other reviewers, I was required as a student to read this book (probably in high school) but could only recall one or two minor episodes and decided to give it another go as an adult. BNW is far from horrible--a few scenes are even charming--but I don't quite agree with most of the five-star reviewers here and don't think this book would endure much longer if it were dropped from public school curricula.
First of all, let's admit that all the books selected for students to read in our schools are chosen mainly for brevity. Many of our "great books" are simply novella-length works that have no dirty words. In this case, what we're looking at is a short novel--Brave New World--in which all the characters are very shallow--each of them (okay, we can argue about the savage, but I'd suggest he's only a supporting player) does only one thing and has only one single, character-defining mood. This makes BNW more of a pantomime or fable than it is a genuine novel. Further, none of these characters undergoes any changes. Granted, the external circumstances will change for a few of them, as soon as the novel is over (in fact I'd really like to know what happens next)--but none of the characters undergoes a realization or awakening. Do they? They all just get moved from one societal pigeonhole to another. And the climax of the novel is a philosophical discussion, but that discussion might just as well have been presented in chapter one, since all that's needed to generate it is to get a certain pair of these characters together in the same room at the same time. The plot of BNW is just a conveyer belt to brings these two characters together. And again, neither one of them is changed by their confrontation (even if one leaves it better informed).Read more ›
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