Eyeless In Gaza (Vintage Classics)
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Product Description
Book Description
Huxley's 'pacifist novel', considered by many to be one of his finest, reissued in the striking new series style
Product Description
Anthony Beavis is a man inclined to recoil from life. His past is haunted by the death of his best friend Brian and by his entanglement with the cynical and manipulative Mary Amberley. Realising that his determined detachment from the world has been motivated not by intellectual honesty but by moral cowardice, Anthony attempts to find a new way to live. Eyeless in Gaza is considered by many to be Huxley's definitive work of fiction. (20031017)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
24 of 26 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Huxley seems to be the master of pretty much everything an author should be the master of. Here we have an impressive argument as to why we should all ditch belligerence and restart the peace pledge union: a convincing pacifist novel. On the other hand it's a story of a man who is at complete liberty to do whatever he chooses, finds that he lives exactly the sort of life he would be expected to and finds it very disatisfying. Bizarrely he bumps into a strange Scot who changes it all for him, and convinces him to live altruistically. It reads a bit more interestingly than that, I promise!
'Eyeless at Gaza' refers constantly to the Bible (see the title) - somewhat incongruously for one of Britain's most noted atheists. Yet it is the enduring strength of Biblical narratives, images and thinking which is one of the most revelealing aspects of this novel. Should the church be as radical as Huxley proposes we all should be, perhaps it would regain some legitimate, voluntarily yielded, authority.
Bar the disappointing ending - a ramble through New Age nonsense which is out of place with the intelligence of the rest of the novel - a truly mind-broadening and challenging novel by a sadly neglected great author.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Kierkegaard warned that in forgetting how we become ourselves we are left more an animal than human. An injunction which Anthony Beavis, the novel's protagonist, evidently pays little attention to with his early denunciation of lost time, "How I hate Proust... forever squatting in the tepid water of his remembered past". Beavis has no past, only the "old corpses of dead Etonions", now remote and unfamiliar. Eyeless in Gaza recounts Beavis' developing detachment from himself and others, and his attempt at reconciliation.
As with all early Huxley novels, the tone of Eyeless in Gaza is willfully bleak. His characters, all flawed, are an unhealthy clot of "oddly hideous hairstyles", "grotesque marriages", and "other hells". Thankfully, Huxley does have his comic moments, but often I found his sombre mood drained any empathy I may have had with his characters, along with the will to carry on reading.
Huxley's experiment with the structure of Eyeless didn't encourage my attention either. The novel simultaneously follows several sub-narratives in a non-chronological series of admissions, with the more difficult, darker revelations kept to the end. The simple sin of adultery, the obvious pain of losing ones mother, predictably loiter the first chapters. And it's only as we learn more about Beavis that he confesses the prime motives behind his personal philosophy of denial.
I found little to inspire in this book. Yes, Huxley's obviously an intelligent chap, but his message appears simplistic, his tone unnecessarily downbeat, and his choice of structure is laborious. Read Eyeless by all means, but if you could only take one book with you on that long long train ride, I wouldn't take this one, really.
As with all early Huxley novels, the tone of Eyeless in Gaza is willfully bleak. His characters, all flawed, are an unhealthy clot of "oddly hideous hairstyles", "grotesque marriages", and "other hells". Thankfully, Huxley does have his comic moments, but often I found his sombre mood drained any empathy I may have had with his characters, along with the will to carry on reading.
Huxley's experiment with the structure of Eyeless didn't encourage my attention either. The novel simultaneously follows several sub-narratives in a non-chronological series of admissions, with the more difficult, darker revelations kept to the end. The simple sin of adultery, the obvious pain of losing ones mother, predictably loiter the first chapters. And it's only as we learn more about Beavis that he confesses the prime motives behind his personal philosophy of denial.
I found little to inspire in this book. Yes, Huxley's obviously an intelligent chap, but his message appears simplistic, his tone unnecessarily downbeat, and his choice of structure is laborious. Read Eyeless by all means, but if you could only take one book with you on that long long train ride, I wouldn't take this one, really.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I struggled when I first picked up this novel. The only Huxley I had read before was 'A Brave New World', and I was expecting/hoping for something similar, and so the beginning of the novel disappointed me. The novel is written with a jigsaw-puzzle structure, so that the storyline jumps from era to era somewhat joltingly at first, which can be disorienting until you get a grip on each storyline. Once you pass the halfway point, however, it all begins to flow very smoothly. Unlike one other reviewer, I didn't find the death of a character "thrown in", but rather inevitable, as I found the change in tone towards the ending. The novel is interesting in its historical perspective, however the message it carries is, like 'A Brave New World' pretty much timeless (and of course, greatly ignored). Although the story starts off as a rather society-based drama, Huxley does imbue it with philosophy, as well as a certain feeling of hopelessness and inevitability brilliantly built up using the jigsaw structure; the message is definitely present from the beginning, it just takes a while to become obvious.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
The way he articulates his thinking is beautiful
There is an old saying the arabs used to say that words have an almost sword-like effect and it is exactly this feeling that Eyeless in Gaza imbued in me when i was reading it. Read more
Published on 9 April 2002
Disappointing again
Once again I finish a Huxley book and feel as if I've been forced to sit through a political broadcast on behalf of the middleclass wannabe intellectual party. Read more
Published on 3 May 2000
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