Essays analysing the decline of Aldous Huxley as a novelist have become a commonplace of literary criticism over the past two decades, yet he continues to be read and few writers equal his ability to make moral concepts exciting, to animate ideas and clothe them with life and vitality. In this study of the nine major novels, from Crome Yellow (1921) to Island (1962), Mr Bowering offers a positive evaluation Huxley’s achievements as a novelist of ideas, as the moralist of a scientific age, and as an ironist worthy to be compared with Swift. He shows how the conflicting claims of morality and art must be judged in relation to Huxley’s work as a whole and to this search for a way of life which would ‘fit all the facts of experience’. All the principle novels require some knowledge of Huxley’s source materials to be adequately understood and Mr Bowering is particularly informative on this score. His discussion indeed attempts to set the novels in the widest possible area of reference.
