[Island] embodies a collection of the right responses to problems that the brave new world handled badly. But there is even more to the novel than that. Unlike News from Nowhere, Looking Backward, and other positive views of the future, Island can be defended as a reasonably complex novel in which a would-be utopian's attempt at optimism is challenged by the possibility that his characters inhabit a Manichean universe…. Unlike most utopians, Huxley tries to confront several inescapably negativ...

Aldous Huxley's career resembles that of several other eminent twentieth-century writers: he began as an enfant terrible and ended as a sage…. Each of his novels, from Crome Yellow through Island, is indisputably modern, even though the later books differ so radically from the earlier ones. Huxley seems to have been born mistrustful of received attitudes and disdainful of those creeds that provided his forebears with a sense of order, continuity, and spiritual composure. His intellectual tempe...

Island (1962), Huxley's last novel, presents as many facets of his comprehensive vision for man and community as he was able to commit to print before his death in 1963…. The book is Huxley's solemn and, in many ways, unique remedy for psychic atrophy and the specter of the bomb in the world of the 1960's. (p. 149) Huxley's fairly complex vision stems from his conviction that any operative ideal would have to be based on a syncretic approach to the problem of existence. (p...