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By Root 5572 0

of Job the omnipotent power is presented as entirely `light'. The symbolism of light and dark runs through the story. We are never left in any doubt that the only character who is dark and entirely at fault is job himself. It is his self-justifying ego which blinds his understanding, rendering him unable to see whole. The central point of the story is that his ego has to be crushed and his eyes opened, so he can at last see that he is just a self-centred little mortal creature who has no right to see himself as separate from the all-powerful, all-knowing spirit which created him and everything else, from the stars in heaven to the monsters of the deep. In this sense, job ends the story entirely at one with the eternal power which lies behind the universe. He has come to see whole. He has at last found his inmost identity, and for this he finds happiness to the end of his days.

In the middle decades of the twentieth century, when civilisation had been through unimaginable changes, two English novelists produced well-known stories based on a dark version of this plot. Each is set in an imaginary future, showing a world which has passed under the control of an immense totalitarian power which purports to be light, and which demands total conformity to its collective ways of thought and behaviour. Each centres on a hero who, like job, sets out to question that power - until in the end he is crushed into submission.

Like all stories set in some future time, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) is based on projecting into the future certain characteristics of the contemporary world in which the author was writing.' In his case these were features of modern Western civilisation which had become increasingly prominent in the 1920s, with its technological innovations, material comfort and loosening codes of sexual behaviour. The inhabitants of his `brave new world' live in a London dominated by a series of huge, shining concrete skyscrapers, set amid trees (along the lines of Le Corbusier's contemporary vision of the `radiant City' of the future). They are conditioned by drugs and by unconscious brainwashing to see themselves as entirely happy. Their consciousness is shaped entirely by the state, through slogans drilled into their subconscious while they sleep. They are born from test tubes, so that family life has been completely eliminated. The idea that anyone should have a 'Father' and a 'Mother' is regarded as obscene. They have been conditioned to hate anything to do with nature. The world, as they are conditioned to see it, is entirely shaped by man and his technology, just as history has been rewritten to support this view. And the ultimate crime in this society is for any of its members to think or feel for themselves. They must never be alone, except to engage in incessant, promiscuous sex. No one must form a lasting relationship with anyone else.

What this brave new world order represents is a collectivising of the human ego in the name of a selfless totality, except that everything representing the genuine Self has been ruthlessly excluded. Its citizens engage in quasi-religious ceremonies to keep them securely bonded into the collective identity. And what above all binds them together is the collectivising of the physical and mental pleasures of the ego, as the state arranges for them to enjoy an unlimited supply of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll (or its contemporary equivalent). This is performed in what had formerly been churches, such as Westminster Abbey, now converted into the equivalent of `discos' as society's central shrines.

The story begins when its hero, Bernard Marx, begins to commit the ultimate offence against this totalitarian order by feeling increasingly resentful of all the techniques used to make him conform. He invites a female colleague to join him on a visit to the `New Mexico Savage Reservation; inhabited by North American Indians, one of the few places in the world where nature and human beings are still allowed to survive in a 'wild' state. Here, in this `inferior realm', he meets John, generally