Island is completely worth reading for its ideological wealth, even if it's sometimes a slog to get through.

A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala, and events begin to move when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Faranby, is shipwrecked there.Rather, the general definition of a novel is that of an at least vaguely fictional premise and/or fictional characters.

Farnaby, a journalist, political huckster, and lackey for the oil baron Lord Joseph "Joe" Aldehyde, is tasked with persuading the island's current queen—the Rani—to sell Aldehyde rights to Pala's untapped oil assets. That's right, to consume intensively, indirectly contributing to the destruction of the environment. People’ says one of the characters in this Utopian fantasy ‘are at once the beneficiaries and the victims of their culture.Add to that Huxley's insights into the Western man's (or at least the Western-man-of-that-time's - the Hero's) innate dilemmas and insecurities and their root causes. Murugan's voice through a loudspeaker encourages the people to remain calm and welcome the invading forces, while announcing the formation of the new United Kingdom of Rendang and Pala with himself as the monarch and Colonel Dipa as its prime minister.

Many of the ideas used to describe Pala as a utopia in Island appear also in Brave New World Revisited's last chapter, which aims to propose actions which could be taken to prevent a democracy from turning into a totalitarian world like the one described in Brave New World. On the other hand if humanity is part of the Divine, then the lion can lay down with the lamb without eating it. The explanation is of course quite simple: plot and characters are only embodiments of ideas and such writings, while mimicking the narrative structure, with its setup, conflict and resolution, follow subtly in fact either the Hegelian dialectic of thesis-antithesis-synthesis or the essay questioning parts of what-how-why.This book gets at an essential that many of us have not taken the time to absorb - but that is evident in the background should we choose to make the effort to observe it - like the saying the democracy depends on a well informed electorate and Albert Einstein's quote: "peace cannot be kept by force; it can only be achieved by understanding. And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principle—the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: "How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man's Final End? The great novels of ideas, including his most famous work Brave New World (published in 1932, this warned against the dehumanising aspects of scientific and material 'progress') and the pacifist novel Eyeless in Gaza (1936) were accompanied by a series of wise and brilliant essays, collected in volume form under titles such as Music at Night (1931) and Ends and Means (1937). This is exactly the kind of book the world needs right now, perhaps more relevant today than it was upon its publication in 1962. Beauty is superior knowledge and constant seek of harmonious relationships – be it in or between people, or between people and nature, or between people and gods.