Huxley is someone that people love to read.
Huxley is also someone people love to hate.
Huxley is someone important.
What might appear to be a clever dig or wordplay, is actually logic. The most well-known people are the ones the commoners, (and I have no qualms calling myself that) love to hate. It is a common phenomenon.
Look around you, I bet you will see five people who with active vehemence deconstruct a book that they wouldn’t even read.
’’Point counter point’’ falls in that sort of a genre. Almost everyone who reads Huxley has read ’’A Brave New World’’.
Almost everyone who has read Huxley knows he has written another book called Point...Point.
It makes good coffee table conversation.
My attempt at writing this review is nothing short of an audacity. But it’s an effort nonetheless, since I believe that every book is like an experience. An experience that only grows when you share it.
I was introduced to Huxley while in high school, a small excerpt from ’’Jesting Pilate’’ was what we were supposed to read. Needless to say, like any other pleasure seeker I went around looking for more stuff to read. Like any other person I picked up ’’A Brave New World’’. Numerous people have claimed it changed their lives. I found it disturbing, gripping and slightly uncanny, simply because his world of 632 A F (After Ford) was conceptualised much before the Nazi totalitarian state. When what people desired was sanity, here was a book that did exactly the opposite. A conditioning that was drug induced, rather than the use of the militia. Brave, certainly.
But I digress. On second thoughts, I don’t. It’s always better to give a basic premise of what the reader should or should not expect from the experience. Whatever, a review is aimed not to pre-condition, or pre-dispose someone’s outlook and alter it to a bias, but to set it free.
Point Counter Point was handed to me by my friend Nikhilesh, in my college days in Poona. We were spending a weekend at my house. (What we called a debauchery, engaging in all the vices that a 20 year old is aware of.)
Point Counter Point is about contrasts. Its about people. Its about society. Its about you and me. Its about the conversation you had with your friend a minute ago. its about the conversation you had with your friend a decade ago.
Contrasts.
Mismatched couples, political opposites, social rivals all make their point in his philosophical treatise. Well, almost philosophical. The strangest thing is when you desperately seek a central character, again because we are all conditioned to do it, (a societal condition? how compelling is society as a drug?) and when we don’t find him, we seek elsewhere. A web of words. A plethora of emotions. Sharp comments. Cool points, otherwise debatable. A dozen or so characters sway in and out of the novel. Consisting of mainly British nouveau riche and the noblesse, we find fascists, communists, ardent christians, social climbers and struggling artists all in a room awaiting a grand finale of sorts.
If you are looking for a plot, forget it. It is a novel of words and characters. Things just happen because they are supposed to - death, happiness, criticism. A series of characters are made to march in front of us and are stripped again by words of their contrasts, their differences, their humanness. Engaged in existentialist truths (?) the true satire is quite an uncomforting feeling. Despondency looms large, savage sarcasm and wordplay are both the strong and the weak points of the study.
Point Counter-Point isn’t a something that I would put over everything else, but it is worth a read because it exposes a timeless character of humans.
As I always say, it looks good on the shelf too.