Book of a lifetime: Island by Aldous Huxley

From The Independent archive: Romesh Gunesekera is bewitched by the counterculture icon’s vision of paradise – governed by reason, love and a dose of liberating moksha

Aldous Huxley in the 1930s and cover detail of the 2016 Vintage edition of his final novel ‘Island’ (Getty Images/Vintage Classics)

Looking at my shelves, I spot two dusty paperbacks with creased, wrinkled spines. The pages are discoloured. Big Sur by Jack Kerouac and Island by Aldous Huxley. I bought them in the Philippines in the early Seventies. Big Sur has comments from me on the back page. I haven’t done that since.

Although Kerouac was probably the writer who got me writing (he made it look so easy), my youthful comments are harsh. “The problem w/ K is that he only describes and rarely works at evoking”. So Island has to be my choice today.

This was Huxley’s last novel, from 1962. An antidote to Brave New World. The years have made a wreck of my copy. The cover is brittle, barely attached. If I open the book too much the pages will crack and fall out. But it is a book I have re-read. There is a 1977 Birmingham–London British Rail timetable marking page 25 where Will Farnaby, a disenchanted journalist, talks about a military dictator on an Asian island and the ugly interests of a multinational petroleum company. Prescient?