Crome Yellow
Aldous Huxley
Paperback
(Binker North, Feb. 7, 2020)
Crome Yellow is an Aldous Huxley novel which is a witty recounting of a house party, wherein Huxley satirises the fads and fashions of the time--we hear the history of the house 'Crome' from Henry Wimbush, its owner and self-appointed historian; apocalypse is prophesied, virginity is lost, and inspirational aphorisms are gained in a trance. The protagonist, Denis Stone, tries to capture it all in poetry and is disappointed in love.The book contains a brief pre-figuring of Huxley's later novel, Brave New World. Mr. Scogan, one of the characters, describes an "impersonal generation" of the future that will "take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world."Crome Yellow is in the tradition of the English country house novel, as practised by Thomas Love Peacock, in which a diverse group of characters descend upon an estate to leech off the host. They spend most of their time eating, drinking, and holding forth on their personal intellectual conceits. There is little plot development. The book satirically describes a number of 'types' of the period. The house party is viewed largely through the eyes of the naive young poet Denis Stone.