Book 29: "After Many a Summer" by Aldous Huxley
Friday, May 23rd, 2008 21:38![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittiwakeMrs. Pordage, The Araucarias, Woking, England," he wrote, smiling a little as he did so. The exquisite absurdity of that address was a standing source of amusement. 'The Araucarias, Woking'. His mother, when she bought the house, had wanted to change the name, as being too ingenuously middle-class, too much like a joke by Hilaire Belloc. 'But that's the beauty of it,' he had protested. 'That's the charm.' And he had tried to make her see how utterly right it would be for them to live at such an address. The deliciously comic incongruity between the name of the house and the nature of its occupants! And what a beautiful, topsy -turvy appositeness in the fact that Oscar Wilde's old friend, the witty and cultured Mrs. Pordage, should write her sparkling letters from The Araucarias, and that from these same Araucarias, these Araucarias, mark you, at Woking, should come the works of mingled scholarship and curiously rarefied wit for which her son had gained his reputation. Mrs. Pordage had almost instantly seen what he was driving at. No need, thank goodness, to labour your points where she was concerned. You could talk entirely in hints and anacoluthons; she could be relied on to understand. The Araucarias had remained The Araucarias.
The story starts with the arrival of a pretentious (see above!) academic at the Californian castle of Joseph Stoyte, who has employed him to work on the Hauberk Papers, 27 packing cases of manuscripts that he bought at auction. He finds himself working for an immensely rich man, an art collector and a philistine, a bully and a philanthropist, an ageing cemetery owner who hates and fears the idea of his own death. Stoyte also employs two scientists to search for a way to prolong human life, and when Dr Obispo realises that there may be a clue to an anti-ageing in the diary of a member of the Hauberk family, it paves the way for a shocking discovery.
Although I read a lot of Aldous Huxley's novels when I was at university, I don't think that this was one of them, as I would definitely have remembered the clever use of a particular biological concept that was mentioned on my course.
The story starts with the arrival of a pretentious (see above!) academic at the Californian castle of Joseph Stoyte, who has employed him to work on the Hauberk Papers, 27 packing cases of manuscripts that he bought at auction. He finds himself working for an immensely rich man, an art collector and a philistine, a bully and a philanthropist, an ageing cemetery owner who hates and fears the idea of his own death. Stoyte also employs two scientists to search for a way to prolong human life, and when Dr Obispo realises that there may be a clue to an anti-ageing in the diary of a member of the Hauberk family, it paves the way for a shocking discovery.
Although I read a lot of Aldous Huxley's novels when I was at university, I don't think that this was one of them, as I would definitely have remembered the clever use of a particular biological concept that was mentioned on my course.
