Aldous Huxley's 'Eyeless In Gaza' - at least say something interesting or entertaining. Aldous Huxley always had something interesting to say. Or something entertaining. He knew the importance of it. And his characters in the earlier novels are primed with wit and with his ideas and other people's ideas. Eyeless In Gaza, though, skips the humour and loads up with more of the interesting. But how to deliver it? And how to avoid an over-balance? Huxley speaks his ideas within conversations; reveals others in diaries and notebooks; shakes them out within a character's thoughts.
And the effect of Huxley's need? Well, it creates a rare work. Few people risk doing it. Huxley, predictably, hits and misses for the ideas need to catch if this part of the book is to work. He avoids being 'of his time and place' and sticks to layman over-arching ideas, addresses problems that are there generation after generation (No - in warfare and in business and in 'life' the ends do not justify the means; on the contrary, the means affect what end you are going to get). Huxley creates rare hit-and-miss works that set thinking, at moments, each new generation of readers.
'Eyeless In Gaza leaves off the humour in favour of the interesting'. Well yes, but the novel still has its occasional moment:
'And even if Gattick hadn't been there, it would have been difficult, almost impossible, to explain it to Mary. She would laugh at him for being romantic - romantic about Brian, about Joan, even about herself; would think him absurd and ridiculous for making tragic mountains out of a simple amorous mole-hill.
"People will insist," she used to say, "on treating the mons Veneris as though it were Mount Everest. Too silly!"'
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