From The Independent archive: Romesh Gunesekera is bewitched by the counterculture icon’s vision of paradise – governed by reason, love and a dose of liberating moksha
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L ooking at my shelves, I spot two dusty paperbacks with creased, wrinkled spines. The pages are discoloured. Big Sur by Jack Kerouac and Island by Aldous Huxley . I bought them in the Philippines in the early Seventies. Big Sur has comments from me on the back page. I haven’t done that since.
Although Kerouac was probably the writer who got me writing (he made it look so easy), my youthful comments are harsh. “The problem w/ K is that he only describes and rarely works at evoking”. So Island has to be my choice today.
This was Huxley’s last novel, from 1962. An antidote to Brave New World . The years have made a wreck of my copy. The cover is brittle, barely attached. If I open the book too much the pages will crack and fall out. But it is a book I have re-read. There is a 1977 Birmingham–London British Rail timetable marking page 25 where Will Farnaby, a disenchanted journalist, talks about a military dictator on an Asian island and the ugly interests of a multinational petroleum company. Prescient?
Huxley in the Sixties was a counterculture icon: part of the intellectual establishment but revered by the young for his psychedelic experiments and heady talk of freedom. He put a lot of that into this novel about an island paradise governed by reason, love and a dose of liberating moksha.
I discovered the book from a friend of my father’s, Tarzie Vittachi , the veteran Sri Lankan journalist, who would often bring new ideas from across the world into our house in Manila. I remember him speaking one boozy afternoon about Huxley’s vision of a truly civilised society: an idyllic island of ecological balance.
Tarzie was the one I confessed to, years later, about wanting to be a writer. His response then was to give me a copy of Marquez ’s One Hundred Years of Solitude , not yet so famous, and say, “Read that if you want to know what fiction is going to be like from now on.” It put me back years as I struggled with a magic-realist novel set in Asia until Salman Rushdie blew that idea out of the water, luckily, and freed me to find a different kind of voice.
But to get back to the Island . Here was a book not afraid to blend radical ideas into straight stories. And he did try to evoke a place and give his characters a chance to escape his grip.
It may not be a great novel, like Marquez’s epic, but it gave me more sustenance in the longer run. The idea of an island as a world, paradise wanting. I have had a bit of fun with the surreal from time to time, but the shape of an island has been far more bewitching for me. And so from an island with a reef, in my first novel, I have moved now to an island with a prisoner for my sixth.
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