Book Review 099 / Man Booker Prize 1999 / Disgrace by JM Coetzee

MAN BOOKER PRIZE

BOOKER CLUB: Disgrace

Looking back at the Booker: JM Coetzee

People will have you believe it's a masterpiece, but I found Disgrace didactic, thinly characterised and melodramatic

The 100 best novels written in English / The full list

Book Review

The 100 best novels / No 99 / Disgrace by JM Coetzee (1999)

Sam Jordison

Tue 24 Jun 2008

The book that won JM Coetzee his second Booker prize is, according to Time magazine: "A subtly brilliant commentary on the nature and balance of power in his homeland...Disgrace is a mini-opera without music by a writer at the top of his form." OK - if you think about it too hard, that last sentence doesn't make all that much sense, but you know what they're getting at. And hell, it's Time magazine! I could list any number of similar eulogies from similarly august publications. There's also the small matter of the Nobel prize for literature Coetzee received in 2003, not to mention the Booker. Disgrace is a book that most cultural arbiters want us to take extremely seriously.

 

John Steinbeck

Reading group

John Steinbeck

'My nerves are going fast': The Grapes of Wrath’s hard road to publication

Famously written in 100 days, John Steinbeck’s novel drew on years of other work and an agonised sense of duty to migrant farm workers

Sam Jordison
Tuesday 13 August 2019

In March 1938, shortly before he began working on The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck wrote to his agent Elizabeth Otis to turn down a commission to write about migrant workers.

“The suffering is too great for me to cash in on it … it is the most heartbreaking thing in the world,” he wrote. “I break myself every time I go out because the argument that one person’s effort can’t really do anything doesn’t seem to apply when you come on a bunch of starving children and you have a little money. I can’t rationalise it for myself anyway. So don’t get me a job for a slick.”

Winifred Watson / Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day / Has naughtiness ever been so nice?

Frances McDormand, left, as Miss Pettigrew and Amy Adams as Miss LaFosse in the 2008 adaptation. Photograph: Allstar/Focus Features

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day: has naughtiness ever been so nice?

This wonderfully warm classic is full of delicious innuendo and risqué fun – all thought up by Winifred Watson while she did the dishes

Sam Jordison
10 September 2019

Here’s something you may not expect to read in a bestselling book from 1938 about a virginal governess:

“But he’s a grand lover,” said Miss LaFosse wistfully.

“No doubt,” said Miss Pettigrew. “All practice makes perfect.”

“He reaches marvellous heights,” pursued Miss LaFosse pleadingly.

“What interests me,” said Miss Pettigrew,” is the staying power.”

“Oh!” said Miss LaFosse.

Oh, indeed. This innuendo is made all the more delicious because the lovely Miss Pettigrew is almost certainly unaware of what’s being implied. Perhaps her original readers were equally oblivious, although I’m hoping that they laughed as much as me at this passage. Winifred Watson had done a commendable job of priming them for naughtiness by this point in the book. As Miss Pettigrew’s unexpectedly enjoyable day develops, and she finds herself swept up into Miss LaFosse’s louche world, she encounters all kinds of taboos. There have been jokes about cocaine and Miss LaFosse’s three lovers. There have been impressive amounts of daytime drinking, wailing saxophones and nightclubs. There has, in other words, been a lot of fun.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is charming, but it is also racist

Difficult questions … Amy Adams (left) and Frances McDormand in the 2008 film of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day.

READING GROUP

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is charming, but it is also racist

Winifred Watson’s daffy characters are inclined to cheerful antisemitism, at a time when Nazism was taking over Europe. Can we still enjoy it?

Sam Jordison

17 September 2019

In last week’s article on Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, I started with a silly but sweet bit of innuendo. It seemed a good way to introduce a book that is, for most of its 233 pages, a light, frothy delight and widely loved as a feelgood read, so much so that it was chosen as our “fun” book for September.

I understand readers’ affection; for the most part, I share it. But there’s no getting around the feel-bad aspects of Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, specifically – as a few of you have pointed out – some distinctly racist passages.

Kazuo Ishiguro / The Unconsoled deals in destruction and disappointment

 

Kazuo Ishiguro

The Unconsoled deals in destruction and disappointment

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel can seem frustratingly circuitous – but that narrative confusion, as warped as quantum time or an Escher staircase, is the perfect structure to convey lost opportunities

Sam Jordison
Tuesday 27 January 2015

One of the many enjoyable revelations in last week’s webchat with Kazuo Ishiguro was his “dirty secret” that his subject matter doesn’t change much from book to book.

He explained: “Just the surface does. The settings, etc. I tend to write the same book over and over, or at least, I take the same subject I took last time out and refine it, or do a slightly different take on it.”

2020 / A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

2020 / BOOKS OF THE YEAR 

A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe

This 1722 ‘portrait of the face of London now indeed strangely altered’ offers a fascinating perspective on our current crisis

Sam Jordison

Tue 28 Apr 2020 12.15 BST

T

his month, we’re going to read A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, free to read on Project Gutenberg. This has been a popular request, for obvious reasons. It’s a book that will give us some useful perspective on our current crisis. It’s also been a source of wonder for centuries, with its stories of “the face of London now indeed strangely altered”, where, over 18 months in 1665 and 1666, the city lost 100,000 people – nearly a quarter of its population.

 Photograph: Hulton Getty

The first thing to say about A Journal of the Plague Year is that it is not, strictly speaking, a first-hand record. It was published in 1722, more than 50 years after the events it describes. When the plague was ravaging London, Defoe was around five years old. Defoe claimed that the book was a genuine contemporary account – its title page states that the book consists of: “Observations or Memorials of the most remarkable occurrences, as well public as private, which happened in London during the last great visitation in 1665. Written by a CITIZEN who continued all the while in London. Never made publick before” and credited the book to HF, understood to be his uncle Henry Foe. But that shouldn’t be taken too seriously: Defoe also claimed that Robinson Crusoe was written by a man who really lived on a desert island for 28 years, and that his book about the celebrated thief Moll Flanders was written “from her own memorandums”. He even put that claim in the latter’s title, which is worth recounting in full: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, Etc. Who was born in Newgate, and during a life of continu’d Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Year a Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own brother), Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv’d Honest and died a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums.)

Man Booker Prize 1983 / Life and Times de Michael K by JM Coetzee

MAN BOOKER PRIZE 1983

Booker club: Life and Times of Michael K

Sam Jordison
Tue 16 Jun 2009

JM Coetzee's first Booker winner about passive resistance in South Africa is elegantly crafted, but its protagonist is more clumsy plot device than character – I'm surprised it won

Thanks to the brief interruption of last year's Best of Booker Prize, the chronology of this trawl through past Booker winners has been warped. I reviewed JM Coetzee's second Booker winner, 1999's Disgrace before getting to this, his first, 1983's Life and Times of Michael K.

The reaction to that Disgrace blog made me nervous about this one. Especially since my negative opinions moved Canada's finest blogger, bookninja, to request that his followers kill me by slipping extra-strength ex-lax into my coffee. But even without that, criticising Coetzee is a dangerous game. He is a Nobel-winning sacred cow of contemporary literature, and any attempts to slaughter him must be made in the face of received and popular opinion.

At first, I thought I was going to escape such conflict. Like Disgrace, Life and Times of Michael K makes a good first impression. And who wouldn't be intrigued by a novel inspired by the moral rebellion of a giant panda?

JM Coetzee
Photograph: TIZIANA FABI

This animal, according to Coetzee, ate only young bamboo shoots when free and so refused all other food when captured. It died as a result. The titular Michael K, a borderline simpleton, "not right in the head" and burdened with a cleft lip, enacts a similar biological revolt.

Michael's journey to this ultimate form of passive resistance is well told. We first meet him in Cape Town, where things seem relatively normal – until in discomfitingly casual tones, Coetzee describes a jeep knocking a youth off a road, a crowd gathering, curfew sirens ignored, a man firing a revolver from a nearby building and the arrival of the military. Things are very wrong in this alternate South Africa.

Soon, Michael K decides he cannot stay where he is, especially since his sick mother is hankering for her rural birthplace. So he straps her to a makeshift trolley and heads for the hills. She dies on the way, but he continues with her ashes, to an abandoned farm where he begins to cut his remaining ties with the world; hiding himself away, in a self-made dugout, living off little more than water, light, a few gathered bugs and a crop of pumpkins.

Every so often Michael's quiet existence is disrupted by the war he feels he has no part in. He finds himself in and out of prison camps, forced to work, and to answer questions he does not understand. So he defies his captors by rejecting the food they give him.

All of this is told in fewer than 200 pages. But if it's a thin book, that's not because Coetzee doesn't have a lot to say, or doesn't paint a vivid picture. It's just that his prose is as lean and spare as Michael after months of bugs, pumpkins and sunlight. At its best his writing moves like a cracking whip.

But in spite of such pleasures, I have serious doubts. My main concern is Michael K himself. He's more of a plot device than a real man, and we are constantly reminded how simple Michael is, and how little he understands . Yet he is able frequently to outwit those who would capture him, to work irrigation systems and grow crops, build shelters and – most jarringly – speak eloquently and ask endless searching questions.

The way in which this "simple" man so often voices the central concerns of the book soon stops feeling uncanny and starts to feel clumsy. Perhaps it's intentional; perhaps Coetzee is making a point about how society disregards those who don't follow its absurd logic. But it's hard not to be cynical about such an obscure possibility when so much else in the book is so laboriously spelled out. Coetzee's habit of highlighting his didactic points, as if in red ink and underlined three times, aren't as pronounced as they are in Disgrace, but he still does it too often.

Michael K, for instance, is prone to reader-prodding reflections such as: "Is this my education? … Am I at last learning about life here in a camp?" While the doctor even ferments a desire to tell Michael that his stay in the camp was merely an allegory, and then expound several of the themes, ideas and potential meanings in the book, in case the reader missed them. Who needs York Notes?

Coetzee's lack of faith in his reader's ability to trace his meaning without such interjections becomes almost insulting. He also has an irritating fondness for gnomic utterances almost as annoying as the garden decorations themselves:

"Why does it matter where they are taking us?" he says. "There are only two places, up the line and down the line. That is the nature of trains."

Sounds good. Means nothing. Less than nothing if you consider the uses the Nazis had for their trains.

These are serious annoyances. Especially when so much of the book is so elegantly crafted. I was left with the feeling that this was a deeply flawed book. Much better than Disgrace, but not one I would be inclined to give a prize. Especially in a competition against Graham Swift's Waterland.

THE GUARDIAN

Stella Gibbons

READING GROUP

Beyond Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons' other works

The 100 best novels / No 57 / Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932) 

Her first novel has overshadowed all her other books, but there is much to relish in Gibbons' later catalogue

Sam Jordison

Friday 27 February 2017

Cold Comfort Farm has been an excellent choice for this month's Reading Group. It's provided - forgive me - fertile ground for discussion about the art of parody, transcending parody and race and class in the 1930s. Less seriously, but probably more importantly, it's also been highly entertaining and extremely funny: just the book to see us through the darkest month. I'm glad it came out of the hat – and I'm grateful to the readers who nominated it.

But something has been nagging at me as I've come to know more about the book and its author. Stella Gibbons might not thank us for focusing so completely on this novel, her most famous work. Her dazzling first novel made her name, but it also became a millstone. Late in life she described it as "some unignorable old uncle, to whom you have to be grateful because he makes you a handsome allowance, but is often an embarrassment and a bore." She also lamented the fact that it had so eclipsed the 20-odd other novels, not to mention various collections of short stories and poetry, that she also published. Heard of Westwood? I can't say I had either until this month.Cold Comfort Farm overshadows most other novels from the 20th century too, so it doesn't seem entirely unfair that it should have had a similar effect on the rest of Gibbons' oeuvre. But reading about her uneasy relationship with this book – and her fondness for her others – piqued my curiosity, and so I thought I'd look at a few more things she's written.

Cold Comfort Farm / Old-fashioned humour and humanity

Stella Gibbons

READING GROUP

Stella Gibbons

Cold Comfort Farm: old-fashioned humour and humanity

The 100 best novels / No 57 / Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932) 

It's a parody that outlived the original objects of its scorn. Just why is Gibbons's novel so enduringly popular?

SAM JORDISON

Tuesday 17 December 2013

Last week, I described Cold Comfort Farm as a virtuoso send-up of early 20th century "loam and love child" books. But this isn't how most people read it. Mary Webb and friends are increasingly distant memories, after all, and you don't need to read a parody to see the funny side of DH Lawrence's novels. There are other reasons Cold Comfort Farm endures, as a contributor called Dowland pointed out:

The reason why CCF has survived so well is that it's a splendid book in its own right. You really don't need to know Lawrence or Webb's work to enjoy the book, since the characters and dialogue are so good. It's a bit like Three Men in a Boat or The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the works they make fun of are mostly forgotten now, but the work stands on its own …

If a parody has nothing to say other than to mock a certain style which is current (and which has probably had its day, mostly by inferior copies of a once vibrant original), then it won't outlive the original. But like Blazing Saddles, Cold Comfort Farm is a parody that also manages to say something original. Also, it's funny!

Reading group / PG Wodehouse's creative writing lessons

'I always feel the thing to go for is speed' … PG Wodehouse at his typewriter at his Long Island home in 1971.

Reading group

PG Wodehouse's creative writing lessons

Anyone wanting to learn about plotting, not to mention prose perfection, should look to Leave it to Psmith's lean, absurd genius

The 100 best novels / No 66 / Joy in the Morning by PG Wodehouse (1946)

Sam Jordison

7 May 2014

"I have been wondering where you would take this reading group for the book, although very enjoyable, isn't particularly nuanced or layered. What you read is all you get."

So wrote Reading group contributor AlanWSkinner wrote last week. I've been wondering too – worrying even. Leave It To Psmith offers plenty of delights. I laughed all the way through this story of impostors, jewel thieves and poets at Blandings Castle. But it's true that most of the novel's pleasures lie on the surface. AlanWSkinner may be right that there isn't much more than meets the eye. That's not a problem. But what scope does it leave for literary inquisition?

Man Booker Prize 1998 / Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

MAN BOOKER PRIZE 1998

Booker club: Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

Characters without personality, comedy without mirth – how McEwan's worst novel won the Booker is a deep mystery

Sam Jordison
Tue 6 Dec 2011

B

ecause Booker prize deliberations go on behind closed doors, we'll never really know what led the judging panel to Ian McEwan's Amsterdam. Naturally, that makes it all the more tempting and intriguing to speculate. What discussions were there? What compromises were made? Who stuck the knife into poor old Beryl Bainbridge? Were there displays of taste and erudition from Douglas Hurd and Nigella Lawson? How was the case made for Amsterdam? Were there compromises, or just a fuzzy consensus? Did anyone dissent? Did anyone actually try to suggest that this isn't a very good book?

On the latter question, we must assume that the answer was "no" – or that the person making the case against the book was roundly ignored. As I shall now attempt to show, a point-by-point debunk of the novel can be carried out in around five minutes – even less time than it takes to read the thing.

1) It's preposterous.

If you're squeamish about spoilers, look away now, because the simplest way of demonstrating Amsterdam's deficiencies is to lay out its story and denouement. Things are set in motion when Vernon and Clive, two old friends, agree that, should one of them enter into the kind of mental decline they have just witnessed in their former lover, Molly, the other will assist in his euthanasia. The plot thickens when the two friends argue over two questions of morality. The first question concerns newspaper editor Vernon's decision to publish a series of pictures the now-dead Molly took of the current foreign secretary in drag. The second, Vernon's failure to tell the police about the fact he witnessed an attempted rape while he was walking in the Lake District, because he was too engrossed in writing a symphony for the new millennium. The plot then curdles when Clive discovers he is about to lose his faculties and the two agree to meet in Amsterdam, but hate each other so much they murder each other with champagne laced with the poison they have procured from a euthanasia program.

I'm guessing that I don't have to say much more than that.

2) It farts and belches.

While the broad outline above speaks for itself, it's worth also noting that there are many other, smaller, instances of absurdity in the novel – upon which the plot is completely reliant. For instance, Vernon comes a cropper because he holds off publishing the above-mentioned series of pictures for several weeks while steadily building interest about them in his paper. Has a newspaper ever said "We have some mind-blowing pictures. So, watch out! We're going to print them in two weeks' time"? Am I alone in finding that ridiculous?

Even if I'm wrong on that score, there are plenty of other complaints to make about a plot that moves forward with all the subtlety and grace of an England rugby scrum. There is bus-heavy foreshadowing of the euthanasia strand, for instance – an arrangement that points to doom with flashing red arrows. There are also characters dumped into strategic positions throughout the book – and who have no life beyond their role in the plot. On page 105, we meet an employee at Vernon's paper called Frank Dibben and are immediately told he is known as Cassius "for his lean and hungry look". Dibben whispers blandishments to Vernon, pretends to be on his side and with crushing inevitability is sitting in his editorial chair by page 130. He is there simply to serve a plot twist – although twist is perhaps the wrong word for such an unsurprising outcome.

Ian McEwan celebrates his victory at the 1998 Booker prize. Photograph by Toby Melville

3) The characters have no character.

Dibben is not really a concern when it comes to characterisation. McEwan makes no attempt to fill him in – but why would he when he comes and goes so quickly? The trouble is that everyone else is equally spectral. There is nothing to grasp in any of them. McEwan himself describes Vernon as a "a man without edges … a man who did not fully exist" and all that needs to be said is he does little to disabuse us of the notion. Clive, meanwhile, is offered to us simply as a composer with a mind dedicated only to the perfection of his art – to the extent that he can witness a rape and do nothing about it, as he'd rather be jotting down musical notes.

All of that would be fine, if rather unsatisfying, if McEwan didn't also want to suggest that they have a complicated emotional life. It's bewildering to see these ciphers suddenly bursting into emotional arguments with each other, bellowing about principles and hanging up the phone with soap-operatic violence. It's also strange to see such empty vessels pouring out for the lost Molly and gorging on revenge. McEwan expects them to eat when they have no stomachs.

4) There is nightmarish writing.

I would hesitate to say that McEwan's prose is ever truly bad. Sentence by sentence he is a fine craftsman. Even in a book as awful as Amsterdam there are moments of pleasure, such as the following description of a crowd at a funeral:

"So many faces Clive had not seen by daylight, and looking terrible, like cadavers jerked upright to welcome the newly dead. Invigorated by this jolt of misanthropy, he moved sleekly through the din, ignored his name when it was called, withdrew his elbow when it was plucked and kept on going towards where George stood talking to two women and a shrivelled old cove with a fedora and stick."

There's a beguiling unforced rhythm to the prose and it isn't just the fact that this book is so slight that makes it easy to finish in one brief sitting. But even so … As well as all those histrionic arguments, there are many embarrassing sequences. Vernon's lost editorship, for instance, is revealed in a one page chapter where McEwan suddenly starts talking about "the editor" where previously he has named Vernon, yet still expects the last sentence where "the editor" is replaced by "Frank" to come as a surprise. Worse still is Clive's death, supposedly the climax of the book, which is rendered ridiculous when it is described from within a dream-sequence in which Clive starts talking to the long-dead Molly. And even worse than that is the fact that this dreadful chapter is followed by one in which Vernon does the exact same thing.

5) It isn't funny.

The slightness of characterisation, the over-the-top prose, the obtrusiveness of the plotting and the idiocy of the premise might be more easy to forgive as sacrifices made in the service of comedy. Ian McEwan himself suggested in a fascinating Paris Review interview that the book has a "rather improbable comic plot" and grew out of a "long-running joke". The trouble is, that there are no laughs. The sly winking tone is irritating rather than amusing, the satire is too daft ever to hit home, and it's too easy to see the jokes coming.

The only really laughable thing is the fact that Amsterdam won the Booker Prize when it so clearly didn't deserve it, but that too leaves a sour taste. In his Paris Review interview McEwan noted: "[Amsterdam's] (as opposed to my) misfortune was to win the Booker Prize, at which point some people began to dismiss it." That's true to an extent, but I'd say it's been his misfortune too. There's an argument that the attention he received from Amsterdam paved the way for Atonement's well-deserved conquest of the world a short while later, but it's hard not to feel the award has done McEwan's reputation lasting damage. The fact that it won the Booker will make many people (and more and more of them in the future) assume that Amsterdam must be McEwan's best work, when it is far from it. And if Amsterdam were the only book of his I'd read, I'd never read want to read another – and so miss out on one of our best contemporary novelists. It's small wonder that he has become the target of so much online sniping – there must be thousands of people out there who've read only this one McEwan novel, seen it garlanded with awards, and assumed that he and the British literary establishment are locked in a conspiracy to feed us trash. It is a sad moment in the illustrious histories of the novelist and of the Booker prize.

THE GUARDIAN

Reading group

The Doors of Perception: What did Huxley see in mescaline?

Given his damaged sight, the book's emphasis on the visual is all the more piquant, complicating the question of how much its visions reveal

Sam Jordison
Thu 26 January 2012

D

isconcertingly, given the detailed discussions of art and the visual world in The Doors Of Perception, Aldous Huxley was almost blind. Or, at least, some people said he was. Like much else in Huxley's life, the state of his vision was a source of considerable controversy and speculation.

The known facts are these: in 1911, while this scion of one of the UK's foremost intellectual families was studying at Eton, he suffered from a very unpleasant illness called keratatis, which left him blind for several years. Huxley's vision recovered enough for him to study at Oxford, with the aid of thick glasses and a magnifying glass, but further deteriorated over the next 20 or so years.

It's in 1939 that things become murky. Desperate for help, Huxley was persuaded to pursue the Bates Method, a controversial theory (now largely debunked) suggesting, among other things, that glasses shouldn't be worn, natural sunlight could be beneficial and a series of exercises and techniques could help improve vision. He claimed impressive results: "Within a couple of months I was reading without spectacles and, what was better still, without strain and fatigue … At the present time, my vision, though very far from normal, is about twice as good as it used to be when I wore spectacles."

That quote comes from The Art Of Seeing, the book he published about his experiences with The Bates Method in 1942. Reviews, were mixed at best. The British Medical Journal review declared: "For the simple neurotic who has abundance of time to play with, Huxley's antics of palming, shifting, flashing, and the rest are probably as good treatment as any other system of Yogi or Couéism. To these the book may be of value. It is hardly possible that it will impress anyone endowed with common sense and a critical faculty."

In the same article the author suggested that Huxley's vision may actually have improved naturally with time as some conditions move in cycles. Others, meanwhile, doubted that he could see much at all. Wikipedia cites a Saturday Review column from Bennett Cerfpublished in 1952, just two years before The Doors Of Perception, describes Huxley speaking at a Hollywood banquet, wearing no glasses and seemingly reading from his notes with ease: "Then suddenly he faltered — and the disturbing truth became obvious. He wasn't reading his address at all. He had learned it by heart. To refresh his memory he brought the paper closer and closer to his eyes. When it was only an inch or so away he still couldn't read it, and had to fish for a magnifying glass in his pocket to make the typing visible to him. It was an agonising moment."

In Huxley's defence, he always admitted he still needed a magnifying glass, but whichever way you look at all these arguments, they add an edge to the writer's enthusiastic artistic criticism in The Doors Of Perception. Was he protesting too much? Alternatively, was his delight and concern for the visual world all the more heightened because he had fought so hard to retain his sight – and knew what it means to lose it. Given that The Art Of Seeing had aroused such anger and doubt, was he perhaps using the Doors Of Perception as a way to answer his critics? Is it possible that Huxley's subconscious was operating in ways he didn't care to acknowledge?

Well, maybe. But now I'm in the realm of speculation. Just before I leave, one more conjecture: Huxley wouldn't be entirely delighted at the suggestion the book is somehow about his eye trouble. For him, it was all about mescaline. The message was the drug and its astonishing potential. It marked (forgive me) the high point in a lifelong obsession.

As anyone familiar with Brave New World will know, Huxley's most famous novel also shows the influence of drugs. The citizens of the future are nearly all hopped up on Soma, a powerful hallucinogen that allows "a holiday" from reality, imparts a tremendous feeling of well-being, softens up the mind and poisons the body. In the climactic scene in the book, when John the Savage rebels against Fordist society, his anger is concentrated on Soma, which has come to symbolise all that is rotten in this future-state.

It's fascinating to re-read this earlier book in the light of The Doors Of Perception – especially since, in it, Huxley frequently suggests that Soma is very similar to mescaline in its effects. Back in the 1930s, he even described mescaline as a worse poison than Soma, rendering poor Linda vomitous and even dumber than usual.

Clearly, in the 22 years between the publication of the two books Huxley revised his opinions about the drug. By the time he finally sampled mescaline he was convinced it would offer him insight rather than the distraction from reality offered by Soma. As The Doors Of Perception demonstrates the drug exceeded his expectations. Huxley was to remain a dedicated psychonaut for the rest of his life.

On Christmas Eve 1955, he took his first dose of LSD, an experience he was to repeat often and he claimed allowed him to plumb even greater depths than mescaline. The literary culmination of this self-medication can be seen in Island, the 1962 novel, which can be viewed as an answer to Brave New World. It describes a utopia rather than a dystopia, and this time around drugs perform an entirely beneficial function, providing serenity and understanding. They are as the book puts it, "medicine".

Ironically, Pala, Huxley's utopia sounds even worse than the alternative future Huxley describes in Brave New World. The Palanese are crashing bores. They are the kind of people who (in one of the most inadvertently hilarious passages I've read) think it's OK to rewrite the climax of Oedipus Rex with a lecture from some Palanese children, who inform the luckless mother-lover that he is being "silly" and ought to follow their philosophy rather than tear his eyes out … But never mind that. Although it is awful in many regards, Island still holds the charm of Huxley's cultured prose and fertile mind. The knowledge that he wrote the book shortly after his first wife died from cancer and he himself had received a terminal diagnosis also adds real poignancy to the book's many passages about coping with disease. One of his ideas is that tripping may ease the passage into that good night – advice he famously took on 22 November 1963 when he asked his wife second wife Laura Huxley to give him LSD. "Light and free you let go, darling; forward and up," she whispered to him as he drifted away. "You are going forward and up; you are going toward the light."

We'll never know how Huxley's final trip went, but we do know that his psychedelic experiments had a remarkable afterlife. (Psychedelic, incidentally, was a word Huxley helped coin along with Humphry Osmond. Huxley can lay considerable claim to kick-starting the 1960s revolution in the head. It wasn't just the fact that The Doors Of Perception was so influential. He was also personally instrumental in introducing luminaries like Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary to the possibilities of psychedelic experimentation (as described in the early pages of Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain's Acid Dreams, the definitive story of the way LSD swept through America in the 1960s – thanks to the many contributors Reading group who recommended that).

It's safe to say that Huxley changed the world. Without him there might have been no turn on, tune in, drop out, no Merry Pranksters, no Sergeant Pepper, no Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, no Focus.

I scoffed when I read JG Ballard's introduction to my edition of The Doors Of Perception and he said that the book was "even more prophetic" than Brave New World (and also, incidentally, that Brave New World is more prophetic than Orwell's 1984). As this Reading group month draws to a close, I can see that – as usual – Ballard was quite right. The book didn't just point the way to the future (or one potential version of it), it changed it. The big question now is whether it has opened any doors for you? Has Huxley changed your view of mescaline and/or reality? And are you tempted to follow in his footsteps?

THE GUARDIAN