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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #76141 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

About the Author
Aldous Huxley was born on 26th July 1894 near Godalming, Surrey. He began writing poetry and short stories in his early twenties, but it was his first novel, Crome Yellow (1921), which established his literary reputation. This was swiftly followed by Antic Hay (1923), Those Barren Leaves (1925) and Point Counter Point (1928) - bright, brilliant satires in which Huxley wittily but ruthlessly passed judgement on the shortcomings of contemporary society. For most of the 1920s Huxley lived in Italy and an account of his experiences there can be found in Along The Road (1925). The great novels of ideas, including his most famous work Brave New World (published in 1932 this warned against the dehumanising aspects of scientific and material 'progress') and the pacifist novel Eyeless in Gaza(1936) were accompanied by a series of wise and brilliant essays, collected in volume form as Music at Night (1931) and Ends and Means (1937). In 1937, at the height of his fame, Huxley left Europe to live in California, working for a time as a screenwriter in Hollywood. As the West braced itself for war, Huxley came increasingly to believe that the key to solving the world's problems lay in changing the individual through mystical enlightenment. The exploration of the inner life through mysticism and hallucinogenic drugs was to dominate his work for the rest of his life. His beliefs found expression in both fiction (Time Must Have a Stop, 1944 and Island, 1962) and non-fiction (The Perennial Philosophy, 1945, Grey Eminence, 1941 and the famous account of his first mescalin experience, The Doors of Perception, 1954). Huxley died in California on 22nd November 1963.

Customer Reviews

Huxley's sermon on the mount
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.

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. The words and the sentences, the way they are so poignantly structured is magical to say the least. I think this is the greatest achievement of the book. It may be true that some of the ideas that he extrapolates i find disaggreable at some levels, but the beauty of the book lies in its literary ingenuity and it is for that reason that i shall recommend this book to everyone interested in literature. I believe if the purpose of life be the pursuit of happiness then books are its poetry and this book is that poetry that illuminates the hearts and the intellect in such a complimentary way that it is difficult to see who can write as greatly as this man did.

A difficult start made up for by brilliant drawing-together of pieces
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.