Modern Utopian Fictions: From H. G. Wells to Iris Murdoch (review)

Nearly everyone who has read the great utopian fictions of twentieth-century England remembers them vividly: Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Their futuristic horrors chill us long afterwards, and we continue to evoke their paradigms to describe totalitarian states, world events, and — to a large extent — human nature.

In his study Modern Utopian Fictions: From H. G. Wells to Iris Murdoch, Peter Firchow points out that the function of literary utopias, which initially served as treatises about ideal social structures (e.g. Plato’s “Republic” or Sir Thomas More’s Utopia), has since the beginning of the eighteenth century been transformed into satire: “Utopia is no longer primarily a vehicle for describing in sociopolitical detail what an ideal state might look like, but has become chiefly a means for showing the deficiencies of existing states and institutions — and people.” In other words, its new aim is “negative rather than positive.” This fundamental shift in the genre goes hand in hand with Firchow’s contention that twentieth-century history has made this change inevitable, as for many writers it became “more and more difficult to believe that either humanity itself or its institutions (or both) can be made perfect” (190–91). Writing in a period when advanced technology has made many previous possibilities become reality, the authors whose works Firchow examines bear out this assumption, creating fictional worlds which reflect their rage and horror at many of the dehumanizing aspects of modern life.

The appeal of utopian fiction in any age is its basic premise: what if certain social or physical constraints were off, and the freedom for which we lusted was ours? The answer, of course, is that characters would still have to deal with the anarchic forces of sexuality, desire, and the shadow side of our natures ... unless they were changed into something else, which becomes a further problem in itself. It is an immensely exciting possibility to ponder. Utopia, a quite precisely rendered setting of no-place, provides a way for novelists to escape constrictions of setting imposed by the tradition of literary realism. Paradoxically, it allows more acute commentary on contemporary society because it puts “real” people into experimental — even bizarre — situations, and with the imaginative power of fiction, makes such possibilities seem or feel immediate and real. It can frighten us very effectively indeed.

What makes utopian fiction so compelling is the sense that the authors have something urgent and imperative to say. When considered in historical context, as John Carey does in his anthology of the genre, which ranges over the literature of the past two thousand years, utopia serves as a record of humanity’s desperate passion to be heard: because they “grow from desire and fear, utopias cry out for our sympathy and attention, however impractical or unlikely they may appear.”¹

The unifying principle of Modern Utopian Fictions is that the author has chosen major literary works which have had a huge and lasting impact on the public imagination. Peter Firchow analyzes individual works by H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, William Golding, and Iris Murdoch. Utopian fiction has often been mangled in interpretation on the occasions when it has been read without a sense of irony, for the sake of political analysis, disregarding its artistic nature. To counterpoise such approaches, Firchow offers us a close reading of each of the chosen works, while also placing them in literary context — showing, for instance, how Lord of the Flies is deliberately modeled on R. M. Ballantyne’s Coral Island, the highly popular Victorian adventure story, or how Murdoch’s The Bell draws directly on her study of Sartre’s existentialist ideas.

Above all, it is the magical, surreal, imaginative quality of these works that remains so fascinating — especially if authors such as H. G. Wells can convince us that time travel is real. That is the glorious province...