Eyeless in Gaza (novel)

The novel focuses on four periods in the life of a socialite named Anthony Beavis between the 1890s (when he is a young boy) and 1936 – but not in chronological order. It describes Beavis's experiences as he goes through school, college and various romantic affairs; the meaninglessness of upper-class life during these times; and Beavis's gradual disillusionment with high society, brought to a head by a friend's suicide. He then begins to seek a source of meaning, and seems to find it when he discovers pacifism and then mysticism.[1]

The English journalist Simon Heffer has called the novel Huxley's best book and his only "great novel". According to Heffer, the book both harkens back to Huxley's early satires and links to the more serious and philosophical concerns of his later novels. Formally, the novel uses a modernist, stream of consciousness approach, but based in fact, unlike the novels of Woolf, Proust and Joyce, whose narrators' memories are unreliable. Heffer writes that the novel explores the tension between wartime and pacifism in a particularly productive way, that Huxley is a "sophisticated, original English man of letters" who deserves a reevaluation, and that this novel is a good place to start.[2] In Strictly English, Heffer's guide to writing clearly, he recommends Eyeless in Gaza as containing examples of what he considers to be Huxley's masterful use of parentheses (both brackets and dashes) and of the single dash.[3] The blogger Josh Ronsen has created a table of the novel's events, rearranged in chronological order.[4]

The novel was adapted by Robin Chapman as a BBC television mini-series in five episodes, which aired in 1971.[5]

• Eyeless in Gaza at Faded Page (Canada)