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Portraits of Consumer Society: Brave New World and Fight Club

While the content may tread similar ground, the narrative style of the two books is vastly different, as is only to be expected from two novels written more than sixty years apart. The style of Brave New World’s prose is distinctive in itself, in that it is conspicuously unadorned, informative rather than elegant. There is something functional and subjective about Huxley’s penmanship on this novel, mirroring the emotional flatline of the society it describes, and suggesting that here is a story too important to require – or perhaps even allow – a lavish prose style. For example, in Chapter X, Huxley writes: ‘On all eleven floors of Nurseries, it was feeding time. From eighteen hundred bottles eighteen hundred carefully labelled infants were simultaneously sucking down their pint of pasturized external secretions.’ The writing is proficient and without technical fault; the statement is thorough and provides the reader with all the relevant information. However, there is no contrived sophistication or elegance in the way it has been written. George Woodcock observes: ‘… in Brave New World the form is less emphatic [than in Huxley’s other writing] because it is deliberately less elaborated. Huxley has a lesson he is anxious to teach, and he is willing to sacrifice something of elegance, something of pattern, to make sure that his homily does not go unheard.’ First and foremost, this novel was didactic. By contrast, Palahniuk has a style that encompasses blunt and gritty realism along with a certain elegance that is sophisticatedly jaded. This narrative form makes sense, considering the kind of protagonists he tends to create: flawed and dysfunctional and dissatisfied, but intelligent, well-travelled, urbane. In Fight Club, the narrative seeps middle-class ennui: ‘… when I came home angry and knowing that my life wasn’t toeing my five year plan, I could clean my condominium or detail my car. Some day I’d be dead without a scar and there would be a really nice condo and car.’ The prose style is carefully considered, incorporating free-flowing stream-of-consciousness, but with a sparseness to it that makes for greater impact, and provides such soundbites as ’On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone will drop to zero

Craig Thompson's new graphic novel Habibi is an enormous and genre-busting graphic novel that blends Islamic mysticism, slave/liberation narratives and post-apocalyptic science fiction, creating a story that is erotic, grotesque, and profoundly moving.
Habibi is set in an atemporal Middle Eastern country that seems at times to be caught in classical times, but whose landscape is dotted with derelict jeeps, poisoned water awash in rotting consumer goods and other elements from out of time. Dodola, a child bride, is captured by slavers who murder her older husband, a scribe who had reared her on the stories, sutras and legends he was paid to calligraph. On the run, she rescues a younger slave boy, Zam, and the two become refugees together. They find a new home in the desert, a strangely out of place wrecked ship amid the sands, which they make into a snug home. Dodola raises Zam as her son, and to feed them both, she must prostitute herself to the caravans that pass by their hiding place.

When violence comes again -- when Dodala is enslaved to a capricious sultan's harem -- Zam is on his own, and is also soon in trouble. The story veers into Scheherazade territory as Dodola tries to charm the sultan into releasing her, but with the dark threat that usually lurks in the background in Scheherazade brought to the foreground. Zam is battered by life and circumstance, mutilated and enslaved, and still the two pine for each other.

Habibi is told in a dreamlike, non-linear, dense style, with asides for swirling Islamic legends, the theory and practice of magic squares, the hidden meanings in Arabic calligraphy, jumping from time to time and place to place, giving the book a deep, mythic resonance. The tale is epic and often horrific, but so well told that it grips you right through it's 670-odd pages.

I don't think I've ever read a book quite like this, and I expect I'll be thinking about it for a long, long time.

Posted by Cory Doctorow