a book about socialites talking and thinking and doing things they want or don't want to do.

a book about ideas and uncertainties and conflicting ideas (points and counterpoints, so to say). i like huxley's prose when he really gets going (mainly with philip quarles and mark rampion and spandrel) about ideals and affairs and god and government and love and science.

for a book where not much actually happens, its quite full.

the ending part with beethoven's 3rd movement in string quartet no. 15 (Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit, in der Lydischen Tonart) was quite beautiful to read with the music accompanying.

Point Counter Point is Aldous Huxley’s 1928 novel about a group of writers, artists, heiresses, politicians and scientists, going to parties, having affairs, setting up fascist organisations, all while having long conversations about the nature of art, science, God and humanity.

The prose style ignores all the guidance given to beginner writers. There is a lot of telling rather than showing, point of view flits all over the place and adverbs are everywhere. Taking the adverb situation as an example, judge for yourself with the following sentence:

They looked at him calmly, coldly, as though they had seen everything before and were not much interested – only faintly amused, very faintly and coolly amused.

Calmly, coldly, faintly (x2), coolly.

Huxley also loves the word rather used as a qualifier. Things are rather this and rather that. There are five uses of rather in the first chapter alone, and 225 in the whole book – that’s between seven and eight per chapter.

The writing is stuffed with redundant words. I came to this book fresh from reading Hemingway. There I was, all rugged, tanned and lean from my time in the great Spanish outdoors, suddenly confined to an over-furnished drawing room, eating too many rich pastries and wishing someone would open a window.

That all said, I did keep reading – for over a month – even with my daughter giving regular and sensible advice to “DNF”.

I kept reading because through the thicket of words I saw a book that was oddly relevant to contemporary concerns. Through those long, intellectual discussions about science and art, Huxley portrays science as something that is not human, since a scientist has to put all their human foibles aside, their assumptions and prejudices, in an attempt to see what’s in front of them.

What the scientists are trying to get at is non-human truth. Not that they can ever completely succeed; for not even a scientist can completely cease to be human.

For Huxley, people don’t live in the world of science. They live in a world of opinions, which they raise to the level of fact – where one person’s facts can be as good as another. For example, some people love certain types of music and others don’t. Some people admire Point Counter Point, and others don’t. Who is to say who is right or wrong? A novel can be good or bad depending on who you talk to. This is fair enough, until Huxley seems to raise all these opinions to a kind of folk wisdom, where experts and non-experts have the same claim on authority about anything:

The course of every intellectual, if he pursues his journey long and unflinchingly enough, ends in the obvious, from which the non-intellectuals have never stirred.

I don’t think that is true. People used to think that the sun went round the Earth, which was the obvious view. Science showed the not so obvious reality that the Earth went round the sun.

In recent times, we have seen the downside of assuming that everyone’s opinion has the status of truth. Political views, alternative facts, apparently rigged elections, pandemics which some people want to deny are even happening – people express their opinions on all of these things, as though they are experts. I do wonder whether the idea of science crushing our humanity is increasingly old-hat. We live in a time which has provided a graphic demonstration of the downside of people’s crazy desire to see the universe revolving around them – to see truth in whatever supports their narrow interests and world view. There is no reason to believe science is somehow anti-human, when in the end, science can save people from themselves.

So, in my subjective opinion, Point Counter Point has some interesting moments and ideas, but suffers from flabby writing and a cynicism about science, which is unwarranted.

I give this book two stars but not because I consider it mediocre. It's just an average of two extremes: some moments superb and some moments catastrophically bad. Particularly if you're a feminist, or have any investment in a non-rapey world.

THE GOOD:
Huxley pays attention to class. A person's position of power or disenfranchisement is shown as the foundation for the most intimate of thoughts (you can only believe certain things when you have a guaranteed weekly income). It is latent in any physical object (a house is described not just architecturally but historically, through political economy: meaning you trace the rounds of theft and disenfranchisement behind the splendour of the rich). I began the book with excitement, thinking somebody had combined the delicate social psychology of Henry James -- which bathes a reader’s brain in the jubilation of being a social primate, capable of reading thoughts into actions and faces that in turn can read your own -- somebody had joined this with a subject matter that actually mattered. James is all the petty interplay of the frivolously rich; Huxley promises to delve straight to all the big questions.

Most of the action of the novel is gathering to talk (until the very end, where Huxley throws in several astonishing events). Sometimes the conversations are marvellous, like the rousing argument between a right-wing paramilitary leader and an upper-class scientist about phosphorus.

THE BAD: At other times it's all impossible to believe. In an actual life, when very intelligent people get together, no one ever is allowed to monologue for an entire chapter, with only occasional three-word questions here and there to keep the good lecturer going. It feels too obvious that Huxley had written an essay and wanted to push it in there somewhere. As Huxley himself writes in the book: "people who can reel off neatly formulated notions aren’t quite real; they’re slightly monstrous. Living with monsters becomes rather tiresome in the long run." So does reading about them.

And of course you'll get uneasy about the gimmick of a novelist writing a novel about a novelist writing a novel about a novelist writing a novel . . . "And so on to infinity, like those advertisements of Quaker Oats where there's a Quaker holding a box of oats, on which is a picture of another Quaker holding another box of oats, on which etc., etc." Very cool idea . . . for an oat package.

THE TERRIBLE: RAPEY! ALERT!

I mentioned Henry James earlier, who could do one thing Huxley can't: write of a woman who thinks. In PCP, women can be funny, shrewd, wicked or good, but they cannot be thinkers.

There’s more, and there’s worse: Rape is real, and a legitimate subject for literature. A crucial subject for literature, even. But while I live in the world with soaring sexual abuse rates, I’m not about to have any patience with an author -- particularly a male author -- who presents rape as a great way to win your girl.

It's all throughout the book, but the real rapey-charmer is the paramilitary strike-breaker, Webley, who writes this gem of a letter to the lady he fancies:

I warn you: one of these days I’ll try the good old methods. I’ll do a slight Rape of the Sabines and then where will your ineffable, remote superiority be? How I hate you really for compelling me to love you so much! It’s such a damnable injustice -- getting so much passion and longing out of me and giving nothing in return. And you not here to receive the punishment you deserve! I have to take a vicarious revenge on the ruffians who disturb my meetings [. . . at which point he describes beating up some commies . . .] it was really you I was fighting. If it hadn’t been for you I wouldn’t have been half so savage. [. . .] The next fight will be against the real enemy -- against you. So be careful, my dear. I’ll try to stop short of black eyes; but in the heat of the moment one never knows.

Whew, what a charmer! So MANLY! Nothing says I love you like a “slight rape” threat!

The female characters appear to be into this bruise-your-face 'uncontrollable passion.' It feels like I'm reading an Ayn Rand novel.

When rape isn't happening or being threatened, misogyny can be more versatile. Philip, the character stand-in for Huxley himself, gets irritated that a woman he thinks is hot wants to actually talk to him. He thinks: "A woman who uses the shapeliness of her breasts to compel you to admire her mind -- [. . .] trying in private life, very trying indeed." You heard right -- she's just using her boobs to make a man listen to her ideas. Very bad manners.

When he pushes for sex, and she is clear she doesn't want his "pouncing and clawing," Philip leaves her with this lecture: "if you were really and consistently civilized, you'd take steps to make yourself less desirable. Desirability's barbarous. It's as savage as pouncing and clawing. You ought to look like George Eliot. Good-bye."

She sexually assaulted me first . . . by not making herself ugly enough for me to not want sex.

If Huxley had been interested in doing some of the same insightful analysis of gender that he does with class, this could be one of the best books, even if it couldn't escape the inevitable problems of a "novel of ideas." But he fails spectacularly.

Though it is exhiliratingly funny at times, and heart-breakingly tragic at others Huxley cannot evade the sentiment that he is too well-read and educated to be a novelist, even a novelist of ideas. Part of the allure, however, is that the author of Point Counter Point is too-much aware of his perennial condition as an intellectual that he goes on to satirize even his own negative-self within the post-war, modernist-flared London of 1920s.

Such a good book, Has lots of great characters. The book is set in high society with lots of fancy dinner parties and the upper class being snobbish and out of touch. Great ending, and has lots of interesting ideas about the future of humanity. Loved the way it was written

For some reason I thought that I haven't finished this novel. Reading it again, I realized that I had finished it. I didn't mind rereading it, thought. I still think that is an excellent novel.

Point Counter Point, the title says what the book is about - the double bind that humans are in. The quote on the frontispiece is by Fulke Greville. "Oh, wearisome condition of humanity, Born under one law, to another bound,…"

I read Point Counter Point about ten year ago. With novels that have a vast cast of characters, I started keeping a folded sheet of paper as a book mark adding all the names of the characters as they are introduced into the story so as to remember who is who, and I started writing down lines, quotes, words, not forgetting the page number!

Books like P. C. P. are character and ideas based, with the author's philosophy sown into the tale. I don't remember too much of the story, I remember the characters and some scenes. So the notes I kept while reading P. C. P. are a great memory jogger. Looking back I'm surprised at the amount of notes.

The situation towards the end of the book with Spandrell and Illidge and the dead body of Everard Webley is unique and hilarious, describing the planning and removal of the corpse, one of those 'physical burst out laughing' moments. I loved the book.

Too many characters for a start. It felt like the novel kept beginning anew as yet another character was introduced. Point Counter Point is a novel of ideas. The trouble with ideas is they don't always age well. I only have to think of some of the ideas I had when I was nineteen. It often takes the form of intellectual debates between clever men in drinking clubs. This is a very masculine novel. Women have a background virtually nondescript role. Usually they're worrying about children or complaining about husbands. My feeling throughout was that Huxley doesn't have a natural gift for the novel. He's incredibly clever, psychologically and politically astute but sort of dry and heavy handed when it comes to dramatization. He's trying to bring ideas to life rather than people. He doesn't have that enlivening sensibility other writers of his time had - Woolf, Forster, Lawrence, Mansfield. Lawrence features as a character in this novel. If it's not tiresome listening to him preaching in his own novels here we get him doing the same preaching in someone else's novel. I was glad to get this over with.

3 stars is my 'I don't know what to think about it so I'll let it sink in until I figure it out' rating as far as this novel is concerned. As I was going through it, it did not cease to occur to me that it didn't work as well as a whole as it did in some parts, such as the opening description of Marjorie and Walter's dysfunctional relationship, the psychological workings of which find themselves later exemplified again when Walter fruitlessly asks his boss for a raise, or the night Walter and Lucy finally have sex, or even Elinor's maternal angst at the sight of the suffering of her child towards the end of the novel. These and other passages of the book are treasures of English prose.

However, one will agree there is more to a novel than an addition of allegedly beautifully portrayed scenes and psychologically refined characters. Indeed, what Point Counter Point often seems to be lacking is a sense of unity. True enough, some psychological habits seem to flow from one character to another as Huxley goes on satirizing modern godless men's soulless theorizing and pointless existences. And it seems like the whole point of the novel is to show how much harm people can do one another whether they mean it or not simply because they find themselves trapped in their own disgusting idiosyncrasies, which tend to look more and more like fate as one keeps on reading.

The apparent lack of unity (apart from the pervasive sense of amorality that is) between the (too?) numerous characters therefore turns out to provide one with a strange feeling of fatality, as if the lives of all these seemingly damned souls were bound in some ways one can see and others that shall remain obscure, as the bitter and cynical ending of the novel suggests. Innocent beings will suffer and guilty, horrible men will triumph, not that they are intrinsically bad but rather as though the objective interaction of their quirky bundle of habits and manners *naturally* provoked many an unintended evil numerous steps further down the road. This feeling of being trapped within one's own existential perspective is made all the more vivid by the narration switching focalizers every now and then, though I do not think Huxley is good enough a writer to manage it as perfectly as Woolf could have, no matter how much effort he so obviously put in trying to copy her matchless writing (the most visible example of that being probably when Huxley describes Miss Fulkes attempts at focusing on her reading of Smith's The Wealth of Nations).

Maybe Huxley tried to encompass too much. The political discussions tend to be rather too stereotypical for one to really get involved in them. The narrative has its flaws as well: I'm not sure, for example, that Spandrell's death is a good idea. It comes completely out of the blue just one page before the end and the whole musical get-together that comes just before makes it downright silly and all-too dramatic. A surprising flaw indeed in a novel the realism of which is otherwise rather striking.

All in all what Point Counter Point really is about is how flawed human relationships are, how hopeless social upheaval and unrest looks like and how impossible, if not downright dangerous, the quest for happiness and the overcoming of one's allegedly miserable human nature really are. I think the fact I read it in just four days still speaks in its favor. Maybe it deserves 3.5 stars but hell these ratings don't mean anything.

Por una razón que desconozco, tenía entendido que el libro giraba en torno a un asesinato. Me equivoqué. Por lo tanto, pensaba que el principio era una introducción de los personajes. Cuando llegué a la mitad y seguía siendo lo mismo, me decepcionó un poco.
Es muy largo pero me pareció interesante.

Neither brilliant nor awful. It has some good elements but it has no central theme or idea, and no plot to speak of. It reminds me of a cross between Vile Bodies and The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir. It is a book about the racy nihilism and the upper classes in the jazz age and a 'roman a clef' about the ideas and personalities of the twenties. I recognized the character of DH Lawrence, and it was interesting to see how highly he was thought of at the time. I think I got who James Middleton Murray was supposed to be, and I think I might have understood who Huxley himself was, but I have no idea who Katherine Mansfield was supposed to be as none of the female characters are writers or New Zealanders. It wasn't a bad book but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. The most interesting bit of it for me was the character of Philip Quarles, who resembles me so much he could have been based on me.



I should add that as a novel of ideas it is nowhere near the quality of the great, usually Germanic novels of ideas. It isn't in the same league as books like The Magic Mountain, The Man Without Qualities, Atomized or anything by Dostoyevsky.

Huxley'in 19 karakterden oluşturduğu tam bir karakter nasıl oluşturulur çalışması. İnsanın eline defteri alıp satır satır okuyacağı bir kitap. Söylendiğine göre hepsi de yazarın çevresinden tanıdığı bildiği insanlar. Entellektüel, akıllı, yaşamlarını istedikleri gibi yönetebilecek maddiyatı olup yaşam sıkıntısı çekmeseler de hayata, varoluşa toplum ve insan ruhuna ait yetkin bilgileri olan ve bunu daha da şekillendirme uğraşındaki insanlar. Aralarındaki detaylarda saklı farklılıkları bile öyle açıklayıcı olarak anlatıyor ki, kişiler bile kendilerini böyle net bir bakışla tanımamıştır. Üstelik düşünce romanlarının uydurma olduğunu böylesi bir düşünce romanında, kendisi olarak düşünülen phillip karakterine söyletmesi ne kadar objektif olarak baktığını açıklıyor bizlere.