The chapter

The story opens in London, in a year the book calls A.F. 632. We are inside a squat grey building of thirty-four floors: the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre. Over the door is the motto of the World State: Community, Identity, Stability. It is summer outside, but the light in the big laboratory feels cold. The workers wear white and rubber gloves.

The Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning, called the D.H.C., is giving a tour to a group of very young new students. They scribble down every word he says. He tells them they need only a general idea of the work, and not too much of one. He shows them the Fertilizing Room. Human eggs are kept warm in test-tubes, mixed with sperm, and checked under microscopes. Women give up the needed organ in an operation, and they get a bonus of six months' pay for it. The eggs meant to become Alphas and Betas are left alone. Eggs for the lower groups, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, go through Bokanovsky's Process.

This process shocks the egg with X-rays, cold and alcohol, and it splits into many buds. One egg can become up to ninety-six identical babies. When a student asks what the point is, the Director snaps that it is a key tool of social stability. Whole factories can be run by identical twins. A young man named Mr. Foster joins them. He loves figures. He says the record in this Centre is 16,012 people from one ovary, and he wants to beat the other Centres.

Next comes the Bottling Room. Each egg is placed in a bottle lined with tissue from a pig. Labels record its family line and its batch. In the Social Predestination Room, huge card files decide how many people of each type will be needed. Then they go down to the Embryo Store. It is a vast, dim cellar lit only by red light. The bottles crawl along moving racks for 267 days until they are taken out, or decanted, as babies.

Mr. Foster explains what is done to them along the way. Most female embryos are given male hormones so they grow up unable to have children. Lower-caste embryos get less oxygen on purpose, which harms the brain and keeps them below normal. Some are trained in the bottle to love heat, so they will work happily in the tropics. Others are made to tolerate poisons, or are spun round and round so they will feel good upside down. The Director says the secret of happiness is to like the job you have no choice about.

In a gap between the tunnels, they meet a pretty nurse named Lenina giving injections against tropical diseases. She greets Mr. Foster as Henry, and he reminds her of their usual meeting on the roof at ten to five. The Director pats her in a familiar way. Mr. Foster wants to show off the clever Alpha Plus embryos next. But it is ten to three, and the Director wants to reach the Nurseries before the children's afternoon nap ends. He agrees to one quick look at the Decanting Room first.

The chapter

The tour continues in the same London Hatchery. Mr. Foster stays behind in the Decanting Room. The Director takes his students up to the fifth floor, to the Infant Nurseries. The room is bright and sunny. Nurses in white set out big bowls of roses on the floor, and between them, picture books open at bright pictures of animals.

Then the nurses wheel in a group of eight-month-old babies on trolleys. They are all exactly alike, so they come from one Bokanovsky batch. They are Deltas, so they are dressed in khaki. The babies crawl happily towards the flowers and books and start grabbing them. Then the Director gives a signal. A loud explosion goes off, a siren screams and alarm bells ring. Next the strip of floor gives the babies an electric shock. When the noise stops and the books and roses are offered again, the babies shrink away and howl. After about two hundred lessons like this, the Director says, they will hate books and flowers for life.

A student asks why flowers too. The Director explains. About a century ago, lower castes were trained to love nature, so they would travel to the country and use transport. But a love of nature is free, and it keeps no factories busy. So now the masses are trained to hate the country but to love country sports. Those sports need lots of costly equipment. That way people still travel and also buy things.

Next the Director tells a story from long ago, when Ford was still on earth. He makes the students say the shocking word "parents." Babies used to be born, not decanted, and were raised by a father and a mother. The boys blush, because these words now sound dirty. A boy called Reuben once heard a radio talk in his sleep and woke up able to repeat it word for word. This led to sleep-teaching, called hypnopaedia. At first, people tried to teach facts this way, but it failed. A child could recite a fact about the Nile and still not understand it. The Director says the answer was to use sleep-teaching for moral training, which should never be based on reason. He mentions Our Ford's first Model T, and everyone makes a sign of the T on their stomach.

They go up to the fourteenth floor. Speakers whisper "Silence" in every hallway, and even the Director tiptoes. In a dim dormitory, eighty children are asleep, each with a whisper under the pillow. The lesson is Elementary Class Consciousness. A soft voice repeats that Alphas wear grey and work hard, Gammas wear green and are stupid, Deltas wear khaki, and Epsilons wear black. It says it is so glad to be a Beta. Each lesson is repeated over and over for thirty months. The Director says that in the end the child's mind is made up of these suggestions, for life, and they all come from the State. In his excitement he speaks too loudly, and he wakes the children.

The chapter

It is a warm June afternoon at the London Hatchery. Outside in the garden, hundreds of naked children are playing. Some play Centrifugal Bumble-puppy, a ball game built around a spinning steel tower. The Director says games now must use lots of equipment, so that people buy more. He smiles at two small children playing a sex game. Here, this is seen as normal and healthy. A nurse leads away a boy who cried and refused to join in, to have him checked by a psychologist. The Director tells the shocked students that in the past, such play was forbidden.

A stranger joins them. He is Mustapha Mond, one of the Ten World Controllers, in charge of Western Europe. The Director is thrilled and nervous. There are rumours that Mond keeps old forbidden books, like Bibles and poetry, in a safe. Mond quotes a saying of Ford's that history is bunk, and he brushes away all of the past with a wave of his hand. Then he tells the boys about the old days. People had mothers and lived in homes, which he paints as crowded, dirty and full of strong, dangerous feelings. Strong feelings, he says, make people unstable. Without stability there is no civilization.

From here the chapter cuts quickly between three scenes. The four o'clock shift ends. In the girls' dressing-room, Lenina Crowne chats with her friend Fanny Crowne (many people share surnames). Fanny is taking a Pregnancy Substitute, a course of hormone medicines, on her doctor's advice. Fanny scolds Lenina for seeing only Henry Foster for four months. That is bad form. The lesson they all learned is that everyone belongs to everyone else. Lenina admits she is a little bored with Henry. She plans to accept an invitation from Bernard Marx, an Alpha Plus, to visit a Savage Reservation. Fanny warns her about his reputation. Bernard is small, likes to be alone, and is rumoured to have had alcohol put in his bottle by mistake.

In the men's changing room, Henry Foster tells the Assistant Predestinator that Lenina is splendid and that he should try her. Bernard overhears. He is furious that they talk about her like meat. He wants to hit them, but they are bigger. He also scorns the sleep-taught sayings, which he knows well as a sleep-teaching expert. Henry offers him soma tablets, and Bernard shouts at him. The two men laugh and leave.

Meanwhile Mond tells the students how this world began. After the Nine Years' War, which began in A.F. 141, and a great economic collapse, the choice was World Control or destruction. Force failed, so the Controllers used bottle births, conditioning and sleep-teaching instead. Old books, museums and monuments were destroyed. Religion was replaced: crosses had their tops cut off to make T's. The calendar starts from Ford's first Model T car. Then came soma, a perfect drug that gives a holiday from reality with no hangover. Old age has been beaten too, so people stay busy and never stop to think. Below, the bottles keep creeping along in the red dark.

The chapter

Straight after the shift change at the London Hatchery, Lenina steps into a lift full of Alpha men. She has slept with most of them, and they all greet her warmly. She spots Bernard Marx in a corner. In front of everyone, she says she would love to go with him to New Mexico for a week in July. Partly she wants to show she is not faithful only to Henry. Bernard blushes and begs her to talk somewhere private. Lenina finds this very funny, as if he were shocked by a dirty joke.

The lift reaches the roof. The liftman is a small Epsilon-Minus Semi-Moron in black. He is overjoyed by the sunlight, until a speaker orders him back down into the dark shaft. On the roof, Bernard looks at the sky and says how beautiful it is. Lenina answers that it is perfect weather for Obstacle Golf, and she runs off to meet Henry. A cheerful man called Benito Hoover offers Bernard soma. Bernard rushes away, and Benito decides the rumour about the alcohol in Bernard's bottle must be true. Henry and Lenina fly off in his helicopter. Below them lie London's parks, packed with sports grounds, factories and crowds of workers in caste colours. Lenina says khaki is a hideous colour, and she is glad she is not a Gamma.

The second part follows Bernard. He is miserable. Lenina said yes, but she acted just as a normal girl should, and that is what hurts. He is eight centimetres shorter than an Alpha should be and slim for his caste. People of lower castes are trained to respect size, so he never feels sure they will obey him. He snaps at the twin attendants who push out his plane. Women laugh at him and men play jokes on him. Feeling like an outsider makes him act like one, and that makes things worse.

He flies to Propaganda House on Fleet Street. This tall building holds the newspapers, the propaganda offices and the College of Emotional Engineering. There he collects his friend Helmholtz Watson. Helmholtz is big, handsome and gifted. He lectures in writing, writes for a newspaper, writes feely scripts, and is brilliant at slogans and sleep-teaching rhymes. His bosses say he may be a little too able. Like Bernard, he feels he is a separate person, but because of too much talent, not too little height. Lately he has dropped his girls and his committees. He turns down three girls who beg him to come on a picnic. Bernard boasts that he is taking Lenina to New Mexico, but Helmholtz barely notices.

In Bernard's room, Helmholtz explains a strange feeling. He thinks he has something important to say, and the power to say it, but he does not know what it is. His words can be sharp, but he only writes about empty things, like a Community Sing. He wonders if you can say something about nothing. Suddenly Bernard hushes him, sure someone is listening at the door. Helmholtz flings it open, but nobody is there. Bernard then pours out self-pity about how badly he is treated. Helmholtz feels sorry for him, but also a bit ashamed. He wishes Bernard had more pride.

The chapter

It is eight in the evening at the Stoke Poges golf club outside London. Lenina and Henry finish their game and fly home in his helicopter. Below them lies the club, with huge barracks for the lower castes and, behind a wall, smaller houses for Alpha and Beta members. Lower-caste workers crowd onto trains back to the city. They pass the Slough Crematorium. Henry proudly explains that phosphorus is now recovered from the smoke of burned bodies and used to help plants grow. So people stay useful even after death. Lenina notes that Alphas make plants grow no better than Epsilons.

This reminds Lenina of a night when she was a little girl. She woke up and heard the whispered sleep-lesson for the first time: everyone works for everyone else, and even Epsilons are useful. She was frightened at first, but the voice soon soothed her back to sleep. She wonders aloud whether Epsilons mind being Epsilons. Henry says no, because they know nothing else. As they fly over the chimneys, the hot air jolts the plane up and down, and Lenina laughs. Henry briefly turns sad. That bump, he says, was a human being disappearing. Then he cheers up and says that whoever it was had been happy. Everybody is happy now, they both say. They have heard this phrase every night for twelve years.

At Henry's apartment building in Westminster they eat dinner and take soma with their coffee. Then they go dancing at the Westminster Abbey Cabaret, where a band plays a love song to the bottle each person grew in. They do not notice the stars, which would only depress them. Their soma makes them feel safely sealed off from the real world, as if still inside their bottles. Even so, Lenina does not forget her birth control drill. Afterwards she asks Henry where he bought the green belt Fanny admires.

The second part follows Bernard. Every other Thursday he must attend a Solidarity Service at the Fordson Community Singery, a huge white building with giant T's on its corners. He arrives late. Twelve people, men and women in turn, sit round a table. He ends up next to Morgana Rothschild, whose eyebrows join in the middle, and he cannot stop noticing them. The group passes round a cup of soma in strawberry ice-cream and drinks to losing themselves. They sing hymns asking Ford to make the twelve into one. They wait for the Greater Being to arrive.

A deep, warm voice speaks from above, calling Ford's name and saying the Greater Being's feet are on the stairs. One by one, the others leap up crying that they hear him coming. Bernard hears nothing, but he jumps up and shouts too. They dance in a circle, chanting a song called Orgy-porgy. The lights turn red like the Embryo Store, and the group sinks down onto couches together. Afterwards, on the roof, Fifi Bradlaugh glows with calm joy and asks if it wasn't wonderful. Bernard lies and says yes. He feels emptier and more alone than ever, and he wonders if it is his own fault.

The chapter

Back in London, over the next few weeks, Lenina finds Bernard very odd. She almost goes to the North Pole with Benito Hoover instead. But few people ever get to see a Savage Reservation, and Bernard has a permit. Henry tells her some men are like a rhinoceros: they do not take conditioning properly. On their first date, Bernard wants a quiet walk in the Lake District, just to talk. Lenina drags him to a women's wrestling match in Amsterdam. He sulks and refuses soma, saying he would rather be himself, even if nasty. Flying home, he stops the helicopter over the dark, stormy sea and makes her look. She is frightened and cries. He asks if she would like to be free to be happy in her own way. She says she is free already. They go back, and they sleep together.

The next day Bernard says he wishes they had waited instead of going to bed on the first day. He wants to feel something strongly, like an adult. Lenina answers with sleep-taught sayings, such as the one about how a feeling person makes the community wobble. She feels he must find her too plump. Fanny blames the alcohol in his bottle. Lenina admits she still likes him, especially his hands.

In the second part, Bernard brings his travel permit to the Director to sign. It is already signed by Mustapha Mond. The Director sees it is for the New Mexican Reservation and drifts into a memory. About twenty-five years ago, he went there with a Beta-Minus girl. After lunch in the mountains he fell asleep. When he woke, she was gone, and a huge thunderstorm broke. He hurt his knee and searched for hours. She was never found. He still dreams about it. Then he realizes he has said too much and turns angry. He warns Bernard that reports about his behaviour are bad. If it goes on, Bernard will be moved to Iceland. Bernard leaves feeling bold and heroic, because he does not believe the threat. He boasts to Helmholtz that he told the Director off. Helmholtz says nothing, disliking the boasting, and Bernard blushes.

In the third part, they fly by rocket to Santa Fe and stay in a luxury hotel. Bernard warns Lenina there will be no comforts in the Reservation. The next morning the Warden lectures them on and on. The Reservation is fenced with deadly electric wire, and there is no escape from it. Babies are still born there. The people keep marriage, families, old religions and dead languages. Lenina takes soma and stops listening. Bernard frets that he left a scent tap running at home.

When Bernard phones Helmholtz to turn off the tap, he hears terrible news. The Director has said in public that he is finding a replacement for Bernard, and Iceland was mentioned. Bernard's courage collapses. Lenina gets him to take soma. A guard flies them over the Reservation's fence, where skeletons of animals killed by the wires lie scattered. They land at Malpais. The pilot leaves them at the rest-house with a sullen young local man who will take them to a dance. The pilot assures Lenina the savages are tame.

The chapter

In the Savage Reservation in New Mexico, the village of Malpais sits on top of a steep, flat-topped hill. A silent, unfriendly guide leads Lenina and Bernard up a narrow path while drums beat above. Lenina hates it all. She hates walking, the smell, the dirt, the flies and the dogs. Two men pass, painted and feathered, carrying live snakes. Then an old man climbs slowly down a ladder, toothless, wrinkled and bent. Lenina is horrified. Nobody looks like that at home. Bernard explains that in their world people are kept young until about sixty, and then they die. Lenina reaches for her soma and finds she left it at the rest-house. Bernard has none either.

Now Lenina has to face everything with no escape. Two young women are feeding their babies at the breast, and she turns away, shocked. Bernard, ashamed of his weakness that morning, tries to look bold. He says it must feel wonderful to have a mother. From a terrace they watch a ceremony in the village square. At first the drums remind Lenina of a Solidarity Service. Then masked dancers come up from underground rooms and dance with snakes. Images of an eagle and of a man nailed to a cross rise up. A young man of about eighteen walks round and round the snakes while a man in a coyote mask whips him. He makes no sound until he falls after seven rounds. His blood is shaken over the snakes. Lenina sobs and begs them to stop.

Then a young man in local dress steps onto the terrace. Unlike everyone else here, he has fair hair, blue eyes and white skin. He speaks good but strange, old-fashioned English. He is upset that he was not chosen to be whipped. He says he would have lasted far longer, to bring rain, to please the gods Pookong and Jesus, and to prove he is a man. The villagers dislike him because of his skin. Then he sees Lenina smiling at him and is so overcome that he has to look away.

Bernard asks him questions. The young man's mother, Linda, came from the Other Place long ago with a man who was his father. She went walking alone in the mountains, fell and hurt her head. Hunters found her and brought her to Malpais. John believes the man flew away without her. His name was Tomakin. The book adds that the Director's first name is Thomas, a strong hint about who that man was. Bernard is very excited.

They go to Linda's dirty little house at the edge of the village. Linda is fat, with missing teeth and a blotchy face, and she smells of alcohol. She hugs and kisses Lenina, weeping with joy at seeing a civilized face and clothes. She pours out her story. She was a Beta who worked in the Fertilizing Room. She did her birth control drill, but she got pregnant anyway, which shamed her terribly. Here, she says, people belong to only one partner. When she slept with other women's men, the women attacked her. Her son John hated her lovers too, and once tried to kill one. She tried to condition him, but she never knew how to answer his questions.

The chapter

Still in Malpais, Bernard and John walk up and down outside Linda's house. Bernard asks John to tell him his whole life story, and most of the chapter is John's memories. As a little boy, he sleeps beside Linda while she sings him nursery songs from the Other Place, about decanting and bottles. Men come to see her. One lifts John out of the bed and shuts him in the other room. Popé often brings mescal, which Linda drinks until she falls asleep. John hates all of these men.

One day three village women burst in and whip Linda because their men visit her. John bites one of them, and she whips him too. That night, when he tries to hug her, Linda hits him. She shouts that she is not his mother, and that without a baby she might have gone to the Inspector and escaped. Then she hugs and kisses him. Some days she stays in bed, sad or drunk. His happiest times are when she describes the Other Place: flying, music from boxes, clean babies in bottles, and everyone happy. The old men tell him their own stories of how the world was made. The village boys mock Linda with a song and laugh at John's rags, since Linda cannot mend. He throws stones and gets his cheek cut.

Linda teaches him to read. Her only book is a dull manual for workers in the Embryo Store, and he cries over it. When he is about twelve, Popé brings an old book found in a sacred underground room. It is The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. The strange words hit John like drums and magic. They give him a way to put his hatred of Popé into words. Finding Popé asleep with Linda, he grabs a knife, remembering a line about striking a man while he is drunk asleep. He cuts Popé's shoulder twice. Popé catches his wrist, stares at him, then laughs and calls him brave. John runs off to hide his tears.

At fifteen, old Mitsima teaches him to make clay pots, and he feels deep happiness working with his hands. At sixteen he watches a girl named Kiakimé marry Kothlu. He had loved her silently, and now it is finished. Then, on the night the boys go down into the sacred room to become men, the men drive John away with blows and stones. They call him white hair and the son of a she-dog. Bleeding and alone at the cliff edge, he thinks of jumping. He has discovered time, death and God.

Back in the present, John says he is always alone. Bernard says he is too, because he is different. John tells how he once stood against a rock all day with his arms out like Jesus, to know how it felt, and fainted. Bernard turns away from his scar in disgust. Then he asks John to come to London. He has worked out who John's father must be and has a plan. He even agrees to take Linda, thinking her ugliness could be useful. John is overjoyed. He quotes a line about a brave new world full of beautiful people, thinking of Lenina. He asks if Bernard is married to her. Bernard laughs and says no, and John laughs with joy.

The chapter

It is the evening after the ceremony at Malpais, in the New Mexico Reservation. Back at the rest-house, Lenina feels she has earned a complete holiday from the day's horrors. She swallows six half-gramme tablets of soma and lies down. Within ten minutes she is far away, and she will not wake for at least eighteen hours. Bernard lies awake in the dark until long after midnight. By the time he sleeps, he has a plan.

At ten the next morning, the guard's helicopter arrives. Bernard tells the pilot that Lenina is on a soma holiday and will not wake before five, so he has seven hours. The pilot promises she will be perfectly safe alone. They fly to Santa Fe and land at 10.34. Bernard phones the World Controller's Office in London. He is passed from secretary to secretary until, at 10.47 and a half, he hears the deep voice of Mustapha Mond himself. Bernard nervously suggests the matter may be of scientific interest. Mond agrees and tells him to bring the two people back to London. The orders are already on their way to the Warden.

At the Warden's office, the once-booming Warden is now polite and respectful. Bernard acts bored, as if he talks to Mond every day, and he enjoys himself thoroughly. He gets his papers, then relaxes at the hotel with a bath, a massage, the news, television and a long lunch. At half past two he flies back to Malpais.

Meanwhile John has come to the rest-house, as Lenina invited him to. The door is locked and nobody answers. He thinks they have left and sits down on the steps and cries. Half an hour later he looks through a window and sees a green suitcase marked L.C. Full of joy, he breaks the glass with a stone and climbs in. He opens the case and breathes in Lenina's perfume. He is fascinated by the zips on her shorts, admires her green slippers, kisses her handkerchief and covers his arms in her scented powder.

Hearing a small noise, he finds Lenina asleep in the next room in pink pyjamas. She looks beautiful and childlike to him, and he cries. He kneels by the bed and softly recites love lines from Shakespeare about a woman's beauty and a hand that is whiter than anything. When a fly buzzes near her, he waves it away and remembers lines about flies stealing kisses. He reaches towards her hand but does not dare touch it. For a moment he thinks of pulling open the zip at her neck. He is disgusted with himself and shakes the thought away. Then he hears the plane coming. He jumps out of the window and runs to meet Bernard as he climbs out of the helicopter.

The chapter

Back in London, at the hatchery, it is twenty-seven minutes past two in the afternoon. The whole building is busy, like a hive. Eggs are being fertilized and split into twins. Embryos travel slowly through the red-lit basement. Babies in the nurseries are being fed. Small children sleep while sleep-teaching voices whisper lessons to them. Older children play. The workers sing and whistle and joke. Everyone seems happy.

The Director is not happy. His face is stern as he walks into the Fertilizing Room with Henry Foster. He explains his plan. He wants to make a public example of Bernard, here, in front of the room with the most high-caste workers. Henry says Bernard does good work, but he does not mean it kindly. The Director says that makes it worse. A clever man can lead more people astray. He says that behaving in an unusual way is the worst crime of all. Murder only kills one person, and new people can be made easily. Unusual behaviour attacks society itself.

Bernard arrives at half past two, nervous behind a show of confidence. His greeting comes out too loud, then too soft. The Director calls for everyone's attention, and the room goes silent. He accuses Bernard in front of all the workers. He lists Bernard's crimes: odd views on sport and soma, an unusual sex life, and refusing to act like a happy child outside work. He calls Bernard an enemy of society. He says he will fire him and ask for him to be sent to a small centre in Iceland, far from other people. Then he asks if Bernard can give any reason why this should not happen.

Bernard says yes, loudly. He opens the door to the passage, and Linda walks in. The workers gasp. One girl screams. Someone knocks over test tubes. Among all the firm young bodies, Linda looks fat, wrinkled and old, and to them she is frightening. She smiles her broken smile at the Director and calls him Tomakin. She says she would know him anywhere. She asks if he remembers his Linda. His face shows only horror and disgust. She throws her arms around his neck, and people start to laugh.

The Director shouts that this is a horrible practical joke. Linda screams that he made her have a baby, and that she was its mother. The room goes deadly quiet, because these words are shocking here. Linda sobs that it was not her fault, because she always did her birth-control drill. Then she calls for John.

John walks in quickly in his soft moccasins. He kneels in front of the Director and says, in a clear voice, "My father!" The word "father" is rude here, but less shocking than "mother", so it breaks the tension. The room explodes with laughter that will not stop. More test tubes are knocked over. The Director looks around, pale and humiliated. He covers his ears and runs out of the room.

The chapter

In London, after the scene in the Fertilizing Room, the Director resigns and never returns. All of upper-caste London wants to meet John, now called "the Savage". Nobody wants to see Linda. She is a mother, she looks old, and people feel sick looking at her. Linda only wants soma. Dr. Shaw lets her take up to twenty grammes a day, and tells Bernard it will stop her breathing in a month or two. John objects. The doctor says each soma-holiday is a taste of eternity. John gives in. Linda lies in a room in Bernard's building, always on holiday.

Because John can only be met through Bernard, Bernard is suddenly important. Henry Foster is friendly. Benito gives him gifts. Women want him. He boasts to Helmholtz about six girls in one week. Helmholtz says he is not envious, just sad. Bernard storms off. Success makes Bernard like the world more, but he keeps criticizing it to feel big. Behind his back, people say he will come to a bad end.

Bernard shows John around, with orders to show him all of civilized life. At the Charing-T Tower, John is not very impressed by a fast rocket. Bernard writes reports to Mustapha Mond. In one, he says he agrees with John that this life is too easy. Mond is angry, then laughs, and thinks he should teach Bernard a lesson. At a factory, every job is done by a group of identical twins. John remembers Miranda's words about a brave new world, then runs off and throws up.

At Eton, a school for upper castes, the Provost, Dr. Gaffney, and the Head Mistress, Miss Keate, show them around. Bernard flirts with Miss Keate. In one class, students watch a film of people in the Reservation whipping themselves, and they roar with laughter. John is hurt and confused. The library has no Shakespeare, only reference books. Children are taken to a hospital for the dying twice a week from a young age and given treats, so death never upsets them. Later, John sees lower-caste workers each given a small box of soma after their shift.

Bernard has a date with Miss Keate, so he asks Lenina to take John to the feelies. Lenina is famous now too, invited everywhere because she knows the Savage. She admits to Fanny that John avoids her and will not touch her, yet she catches him staring. She likes him more and more.

At the feely, holding metal knobs lets the audience feel what the actors feel. In the film, a black man hits his head, falls madly in love with a Beta woman and kidnaps her in a helicopter. Three Alphas rescue her, and she becomes the lover of all three. Lenina is thrilled and presses close to John. He wants her but is ashamed, and calls the film low and shameful. At her building she expects him to come in. He says good night and flies off. At home he reads Shakespeare's Othello, whose hero is also a black man. Lenina, in tears, takes soma.

The chapter

In London, Bernard is giving a grand party. Important guests are waiting to meet the Savage, including the Arch-Community-Songster of Canterbury, a top religious leader. But John has locked himself in his room. Bernard shouts and begs through the door. John refuses. He has met these people enough. He curses in Zuñi, his Reservation language. Bernard has to tell the guests the Savage will not come.

The guests are furious. They feel tricked into being polite to a man they never liked. They repeat the old gossip about alcohol in his bottle. Henry Foster mentions that the ex-Director had been about to send Bernard to Iceland. Bernard begs them to stay, but they ignore him or insult him. Only Lenina is quiet. She came planning to tell John she likes him more than anyone. Now she decides he stayed away because he doesn't like her, and she feels sick and empty. The Arch-Songster warns Bernard to change his ways, then leaves with Lenina. Everyone follows. Bernard, alone, cries, then takes soma. Upstairs, John reads Romeo and Juliet.

Meanwhile, Mustapha Mond reads a brilliant science paper and bans it. It suggests life might have a purpose beyond happiness. Mond privately thinks that might even be true, but it could unsettle clever people, so its author will be watched. At Lambeth, the Arch-Songster playfully tugs at the golden T zipper he once gave Lenina, and she quietly decides to take soma.

Next morning Bernard is his old, gloomy self. John is kinder to him now. He says he prefers real unhappiness to false happiness. Bernard blames John for ruining his party, though he knows that is unfair. Secretly he wants small revenges on John, because John is the only one he can hurt. Bernard also asks Helmholtz to be his friend again. Helmholtz agrees with no blame at all. Bernard is grateful, but also resents his kindness.

Helmholtz is in trouble too. He read his students a poem he wrote about being alone, and they reported him. Now he is a marked man. Yet he seems deeply happy, as if he is finally finding something to write about. Helmholtz and John become friends at once, and Bernard feels jealous. When John reads Shakespeare aloud, Bernard spoils it by sneering that a poem sounds like a Solidarity Service hymn. Helmholtz threatens to throw him out.

Then Helmholtz himself spoils a reading. John reads Romeo and Juliet with deep feeling, picturing himself as Romeo and Lenina as Juliet. Helmholtz admires the writing as clever emotional engineering. But when Juliet's mother and father push her to marry a man she doesn't want, he bursts out laughing. Parents seem ridiculous and dirty to him. John, hurt, locks the book away. Helmholtz apologizes. He explains that great writing needs painful, mad things to feel strongly about. His world has none of those, and he does not know where to find them.

The chapter

In the red-lit Embryo Store of the London hatchery, Henry Foster asks Lenina to a feely. She just shakes her head. She looks pale and sad. Henry suggests a doctor, or a stronger passion-surrogate treatment. Lenina snaps at him to shut up. She is thinking only of John. Distracted, she cannot remember whether she gave one bottle its sleeping-sickness injection. She skips it, to avoid a double dose. The book then jumps ahead. Over twenty-two years later, a young Alpha administrator in Africa will die of that disease, the first case in fifty years.

In the changing room, Fanny tells Lenina it is silly to get upset over one man. Lenina says he is the only one she wants. She has tried dozens of others, and soma only helps for a while. Fanny tells her to go and take him, whether he wants it or not. Take half a gramme of soma first, she says, and act now.

At his flat, John has decided to tell Helmholtz about Lenina, and runs to answer the bell. It is Lenina, in a white sailor suit, calm from her soma. John falls to his knees and kisses her hand. He praises her in lines from Shakespeare. As she leans in to kiss him, he jumps up. He says he wants to prove he is worthy first. In Malpais, he explains, a man brings a lion skin to the woman he wants to marry. He offers to do anything, even sweep the floor. Lenina is confused and cross. There are no lions, and machines do the sweeping. At last he says he loves her. He talks of marriage for ever, and she thinks that sounds horrible.

Lenina kisses him. He thinks of the feely and feels horror. Then she takes off her belt and her clothes and comes toward him, singing the soma love song. John backs away in terror. He grabs her wrists and pushes her off. His face twists with a mad fury. He shakes her, calls her a whore, and throws her to the floor. He threatens to kill her. She runs for the bathroom, and he slaps her hard as she goes. She locks herself in and finds a red handprint on her skin.

Outside, John paces up and down, angry lines from Shakespeare about lust and dirt pounding in his head. Lenina asks for her clothes. He pushes them through the vent above the door. She asks for her belt too. Then the phone rings. John learns that a woman, probably Linda (my guess, because she is the only sick woman he knows, and Chapter 11 said soma would soon kill her), is very ill and has been moved to an address on Park Lane. He rushes out. Lenina peeks out, finds the flat empty, and runs. Only in the lift does she feel safe.

The chapter

In London, John arrives at the Park Lane Hospital for the Dying, a tall tower of yellow tiles. Brightly coloured hearses fly off its roof toward the crematorium. Linda is on a ward for people whose bodies and minds fail very fast. It is a sunny room of twenty beds. Each bed faces a television that is never switched off. Cheerful music plays all the time, and the scent in the air changes every fifteen minutes. A nurse explains they want it to feel like a nice hotel. When John asks if there is any hope, she says no, of course not. Then he says Linda is his mother. The nurse blushes deeply and looks away.

Linda lies in the last bed, smiling vaguely at a tennis match on the screen, deep in a soma dream. She knows John for a moment, squeezes his hand, and falls asleep. He sits beside her and tries to remember the good times. He thinks of her singing to him, the silly rhymes she taught him, the reading lessons, and her stories about the beautiful Other Place. Tears fill his eyes.

Then a stream of identical eight-year-old boys in khaki pours into the ward. They are a twin group, here for death conditioning. They climb over beds and make faces at the patients. Linda scares them because she looks fat and old. In this world, even dying people of sixty look young, but Linda, at forty-four, does not. One boy peers into her face. John grabs him and boxes his ears. The Head Nurse threatens to have John thrown out. He steps toward her angrily, then stops himself and sits down.

John tries again to hold on to happy memories, repeating Linda's old alphabet rhyme like a spell. But only ugly ones come back: Popé, the mescal, the boys calling her names. Then the scent changes. Linda wakes, smiles, and murmurs Popé's name. John begs her to know him. She whispers Popé again. Grief turns to rage. He shouts that he is John and shakes her. She sees him and knows him, but thinks he is angry about Popé. She starts to say that everyone belongs to everyone else. Then she cannot breathe. Her lips turn blue. She looks at him in terror, and he thinks he sees blame in her eyes.

John runs for the nurse, crying that something has happened and that he has killed her. By the time they get back, Linda is dead. John falls to his knees and sobs. The nurse is angry, worried the twins will learn that death is something terrible. She distracts them with chocolate éclairs, and they forget Bed 20 at once. John keeps whispering to God. Five twins with chocolate on their faces stare at him and ask if she is dead. Without a word, John walks out. When one boy follows, still asking, John pushes him to the floor.

The chapter

At six o'clock, at the Park Lane Hospital in London, the hospital's Delta workers finish their shift. There are 162 of them, from just two twin groups. One group is red-haired women, the other dark men. They gather in the entrance hall to get their daily soma. John steps out of the lift into the middle of them, lost in grief, and starts pushing through. The twins push back angrily. He looks around at the crowd of the same two faces repeated again and again, and feels horror. Miranda's hopeful words about a brave new world seem to mock him.

A young Alpha, the Deputy Sub-Bursar, arrives with a black cash-box full of tiny soma boxes. The twins forget John and line up. When they shove, he threatens to stop handing out soma, and they quickly behave. Watching, John suddenly feels Miranda's words change. Now they sound like a call to action, a chance to make even this nightmare beautiful. He thinks Linda was a slave and has died. Others should live free. He knows what he must do.

John shouts "Stop!" and pushes to the table. He tells the Deltas that soma is poison, for body and soul. He begs them to throw it away. Those words make the crowd angry. The scared Sub-Bursar slips out to phone for help. Elsewhere, Bernard and Helmholtz are looking for John. Helmholtz gets a call from a friend at the hospital saying the Savage seems to have gone mad. They hurry over.

When they arrive, John is shouting at the Deltas, asking if they like being slaves and babies. They only stare at him with dull resentment. In a rage, he says he will make them free whether they like it or not. He throws handfuls of soma boxes out of a window. The crowd charges. Bernard is sure they will kill him. Helmholtz laughs with joy, pushes in, and fights beside John, helping throw out the soma. John cries out that they are men at last. Bernard hovers at the edge, too scared to help and too ashamed to leave.

Police arrive in gas masks. Bernard rushes to them shouting "Help!" to feel useful, and one policeman knocks him out with a water pistol full of drugs. Others spray soma vapour into the air and switch on a machine that plays a soft, loving Voice. It begs everyone to be happy and good. Within two minutes, the Deltas are crying and hugging each other. Even John and Helmholtz nearly cry. New soma is handed out, and the twins leave in tears of affection. The Sergeant asks John and Helmholtz to come quietly, and they agree, bruised and bleeding. Bernard tries to sneak out, but the Sergeant asks if he is their friend. He cannot deny it, so he is taken too.

The chapter

After their arrest, John, Helmholtz and Bernard are shown into Mustapha Mond's study in London. Helmholtz laughs that it feels more like a party than a trial. Bernard, terrified, picks the most uncomfortable chair. John looks around and finds a big book by Ford about his life and work. Mond comes in, shakes hands with all three, and speaks to John. He says John doesn't much like civilization. John decides to be honest and says no. He admits some things are nice, like the music in the air. Mond answers with a line from Shakespeare. John is delighted. Mond explains that Shakespeare is banned, but he makes the laws, so he can break them.

Why is it banned? Mond says it is old, and they want people to like new things. John says the new things, like the feelies, are stupid. Why not show people Othello? Mond says they could not understand it. Their world has no mothers, lovers, fear of death or deep passions, and great tragedy needs those troubles. People are happy and stable, and if anything goes wrong, there is soma. Mond agrees that Othello is better than the feelies. But a world must choose between happiness and high art, and this one chose happiness. Helmholtz admits that writing when there is nothing to say is idiotic.

John asks about the twins. Why not make everyone a clever Alpha? Mond says a world of Alphas would fall apart. Alphas would go mad doing simple work. He describes the Cyprus experiment. An island was given to 22,000 Alphas to run themselves. Within six years they were fighting a civil war. When only 3,000 were left, they begged the Controllers to take over again. Society, he says, should be like an iceberg, eight-ninths below the water. He also explains that shorter work hours were tried and only made people restless. They keep many inventions unused. Every change threatens stability, so even science must be chained.

Helmholtz is surprised, since he was taught that science is everything. Mond says their science is like a cookery book that no one may change. He was once a good physicist who did real, forbidden science, and was nearly sent to an island. At the word "island", Bernard panics. He begs, weeps, blames the other two, and falls to his knees. Mond has him carried off, given soma, and put to bed.

Mond explains that islands are really a reward. They hold the most interesting people in the world, everyone too individual to fit in. He was once offered a choice: go to an island and do real science, or join the Controllers' Council. He chose to serve other people's happiness, and sometimes regrets it. He says truth and beauty were given up after a terrible war, for peace and comfort. Happiness must be paid for. Then he asks Helmholtz what climate he would like. Helmholtz wants a bad one, with wind and storms, to write better. Mond suggests the Falkland Islands, and Helmholtz agrees. He goes to check on Bernard.

The chapter

In Mustapha Mond's study in London, John and Mond are now alone. John says this world has paid a high price for happiness: art and science. Is there anything else? Mond says religion too. Before the Nine Years' War there was something called God. John wants to speak about the lonely night on the mesa, the cliff edge, and death, but he cannot find the words, not even in Shakespeare.

Mond opens a safe in the wall and takes out old religious books, including the Bible. He jokes that he keeps God in the safe and Ford on the shelves. John asks why he does not give people these books. Mond says they are about God long ago, and people have changed. He reads two old writers. One says that people are not their own masters, and that being independent only works while you are young and well off. The other says people turn to God as they grow old and lose life's pleasures. Mond points out that in this world nobody loses youth or pleasure until the very end. So people have no need of God.

John asks if Mond thinks there is no God. Mond says there probably is one. But today God shows himself as an absence, as if he is not there. God does not fit with machines, medicine and universal happiness, and the world chose those. John says belief in God feels natural when you are alone at night, thinking about death. Mond answers that people believe what they are conditioned to believe, and that this world makes sure nobody is ever alone. John sadly thinks how in Malpais he suffered from being shut out, and in London he suffers because he can never be alone.

They argue on. John uses Shakespeare to say the gods punish bad behaviour. Mond says that in this world bad behaviour brings no punishment. John says belief in God gives reasons for patience, courage, self-denial and staying pure. Mond says this society cannot work with any of those. Nobility and heroism only matter where there is war, temptation, or someone to love and defend. Here there is none of that. If anything goes wrong, soma makes anyone calm and patient. He calls soma Christianity without tears.

John says the tears are needed. He tells an old Malpais story of a girl whose suitors had to hoe her garden while magic insects stung them. Only the one who bore it won her. Mond says this world simply got rid of the insects. That is the problem, John says. They remove everything unpleasant instead of learning to bear it. He thinks of Linda floating away on soma, and of the ex-Director, still escaping his shame on a holiday of his own. Nothing here costs enough, John says. Mond explains that once a month everyone gets a V.P.S. treatment, a dose that gives the body the effects of fear and rage, without any danger. John says he wants God, poetry, real danger, freedom, goodness and even sin. Mond says John is claiming the right to be unhappy, to grow old, be sick, hungry and afraid. After a long silence, John says he claims them all. Mond shrugs and says he is welcome to them.

The chapter

In London, Helmholtz and Bernard come to say goodbye to John before leaving for their islands. They find him pale from making himself sick with mustard and water, the Malpais way of purifying himself. He says he ate civilization and it poisoned him. Bernard apologizes for how he behaved, and John warmly takes his hand. The three friends are sad, yet happy together. John says he asked Mond to let him go to the islands too. Mond refused, because he wants to continue the experiment. John refuses to be experimented on any longer. He will leave too, anywhere, as long as he can be alone.

He chooses an abandoned air-lighthouse on a hill in Surrey, a quarter of an hour's flight from London, among woods, heather and ponds. On his first night he stays awake praying, and holds his arms out like a man on a cross until the pain is unbearable. He buys tools, seeds and flour, plans a garden, and makes a bow as old Mitsima taught him. The work makes him happy. Then he catches himself singing and feels guilty, because he came here to suffer and make up for Linda's death. He drinks mustard water and whips himself. Three Delta workers driving past stop and stare.

Three days later, reporters arrive. The first one asks about the whip and about civilized girls. John curses him in Zuñi and kicks him hard. It makes the front page. More reporters come and are chased off. John shoots an arrow through the floor of a hovering helicopter. For a while he is left in peace.

One hot day, thoughts of Lenina overwhelm him. He throws himself into prickly juniper bushes, then whips himself, shouting insults as if he were whipping her. Hidden in the woods, a feely photographer, Darwin Bonaparte, films everything. Twelve days later, the film "The Savage of Surrey" is showing everywhere. The next day a huge swarm of helicopters lands around the lighthouse. Hundreds of people stare, laugh, take photos, and throw sweets at John as if he were a zoo animal. They chant that they want the whip.

One more helicopter lands. Out steps a ruddy young man and a young woman in green shorts. The book does not name her. She is probably Lenina (my guess, because of her clothes, her cry for Henry, and John's insults from Chapter 13). She smiles at John, cries, and reaches out her arms. John rushes at her, calling her names, and lashes her with the whip. She falls, crying for Henry, who hides behind the helicopter. The crowd surges in, excited by the pain. John whips himself and her. The crowd copies him, striking each other, and then begins the orgy-porgy song and dance.

The last helicopter leaves after midnight. John, dazed by soma and worn out, wakes in the heather the next morning. He remembers everything and cries out to God. That evening, a ten-kilometre cloud of helicopters arrives, because the papers have reported the night's events. The first visitors walk into the dim lighthouse. Under an archway, a pair of feet hang, slowly turning one way, then the other. John has probably hanged himself (my guess, because the book shows only his dangling feet).