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434 The twentieth century: 1900–45<br />

a book which captures the particularly negative and destructive<br />

elements of the times.<br />

A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main<br />

entrance the words CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND<br />

CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State’s<br />

motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY.<br />

The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north.<br />

Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical<br />

heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the<br />

windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid<br />

shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and<br />

nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness<br />

responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white,<br />

their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light<br />

was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the<br />

microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance,<br />

lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious<br />

streak in long recession down the work tables.<br />

‘And this,’ said the Director opening the door, ‘is the Fertilizing<br />

Room.’<br />

Aldous Huxley became disillusioned with war in Europe and moved<br />

to California, where he became preoccupied with the kinds of visionary<br />

experience which hallucinogenic drugs can produce. The Doors of<br />

Perception (1954) and Heaven and Hell (1956) – both titles which suggest<br />

links with the visionary Romantic poet, William Blake – record these<br />

experiences. In 1962, Huxley wrote the novel Island, which appears to<br />

describe a society which is a genuine utopia – the opposite of Brave<br />

New World – where a good and optimistic life exists. This world is,<br />

however, eventually destroyed by a brutal and materialistic dictator, not<br />

only echoing the political threats of the 1920s and 1930s but also reflecting<br />

the terror of a post-war world which now possessed nuclear weapons.<br />

WOMEN WRITERS<br />

Virginia Woolf is the most influential and probably the most widely studied

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