Island by Aldous Huxley

Will Farnaby is shipwrecked on the forbidden island of Pala. He is found by the Palanese and nursed back to health. During his convalescence, Farnaby discovers that the Palanese have combined the best of Eastern spirituality - especially Mahayana Buddhism - with the best of Western science and technology.

The Palanese seem to be the sanest people in the world, their way of life maximising their opportunities for self-actualisation and societal harmony. However, there is a serpent in the garden: the Palanese are sitting on a huge oil reserve that the West desperately wants to tap and exploit, and Will Farnaby is (secretly) working for a large oil company. Having come to know and admire them, does Farnaby betray the Palanese, or protect them?

Where Brave New World was Aldous Huxley's dystopia, Island is his truly utopian novel. It is also Huxley's last novel, reflecting a lifetime of thought in its themes. Some of it is plain wacky, much of it is profound. As Huxley himself acknowledged, the novel is not the best vehicle to convey this kind and amount of thought - at times the argument and exposition swamp the other literary elements of the story.

In short, Island is a good book but a bad novel. Despite its flaws, it should appeal to anyone interested in understanding power, venality, compassion and existence. Island seems as relevant today as it did when it first appeared in 1963. Read it and you may well understand why the Beatles placed Huxley on the cover of the Sgt Pepper album.

Hrafnkel's Saga and Other Stories

For much of history Northern Europeans emerged from winter and the hungry gap of early spring with their bodies' stores of most vitamins severely depleted. This put them into vile moods, making them prone to violence and rancour.

Violence and rancour are two notable themes of many of the seven short tales from 13th Century Iceland that make up Hrafnkel's Saga and Other Tales. Written by Christian authors about 300 years after Christianity first came to Iceland, these tales hark back to a time when the pagan warrior ethos of the Vikings had not yet been blunted by Christian love and pity, or by the recent adoption of settled agriculture as a way of life.

In one tale, when the son of an old Viking raider is challenged to one-on-one combat by a man seeking to restore his honour, his father condones the fight, saying: "I'd much rather lose you than have a coward for a son." His is a hard creed, one neither the son nor his foe can fulfil. They patch up their differences and live long lives as farmers.

Yes, swords and murder abound in these tales, but they are not the main point. In fact, action plays a relatively minor role in the narrative process. What primarily interests the authors are the motivations of the characters. Funnily enough, vitamin deficiency is never mentioned once. Rather, we are told of many other motivations, including honour, revenge, humiliation, wanderlust and oath-fulfilment.

However, the dominant theme of this collection of stories is suffering, and the sharing of suffering. This should not be surprising as the authors were most likely Christian clerics. What is surprising is that these authors do not use their stories for propaganda purposes. While suffering is the theme, the non-Christian elements of their stories are presented in a factual and even-handed manner. For example, the eponymous Hrafnkel is a priest of the god Frey. The author of his saga tell us this as a fact and places no moral judgement on it.

The tales are told in a brief (but not overly terse) and straightforward manner. They are short, and some of them can be read in matter of minutes - which just may be what you need if you don't have a long winter's night to kill. Even for all their brevity, the stories do provide an illuminating insight into a world that has long since vanished but whose echoes we may still hear today.

Publishing details: Hrafnkel's Saga and Other Stories translated by Hermann Palsson (Penguin, 1971, 136 pp.)

The Epic of Gilgamesh

Here we have a story written over 5000 years ago. Think about it. 5000 years. That's equal to 70 lifetimes, or 166 generations, or 1 plot development in Days of Our Lives.

Funnily enough, the concerns of the ancient Babylonians are exactly the same as those confronting us today: food, sex, drugs and the fear of death. It is the fear of death that forms the central theme of the Gilgamesh epic.

Gilgamesh is the semi-divine king of Uruk. He is a lusty lad with unlimited wants and desires and the resources to fulfil most of them - lock up your daughters, sons and barnyard animals, here comes the king. Then one day Gilgamesh witnesses the death of Enkidu, his best friend and, possibly, the only person on the planet with a greater lust for life. Gilgamesh ponders the question of his own mortality. Deciding he does not want to die, Gilgamesh goes in search of the secret of immortality and has many adventures on the way.

Gilgamesh meets Noah (called Utnapishtim) and is given the recipe for the Good Life by the goddess Siduri. This recipe is uncannily like that given in the book of Ecclesiastes, and has more than a passing resemblance to the spirit of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Entertaining, illuminating, puzzling and relevant, I recommend this short but long-lived piece of literature to anyone who is interested in seeing how far and how little we humans have come in 5000 years.

A Sense of the World by Jason Roberts

The 18th century is my favourite century. It features Captain Cook and his voyages of discoveries, the founding of European Australia, the French Revolution, Voltaire and his smirk, and the comedy commandos Boswell and Johnson. It was also a long century: beginning in 1688 with the Glorious Revolution and ending in 1815 with the demise of Napoleon at Waterloo.

Having said that, Jason Robert's book A Sense of the World takes place mainly in the 19th century, but it ought to have been an 18th century tale. It is Faction par excellence - a true story told with the marriage of the best parts of factual history and the best parts of narrative fiction.

Here is the tale of James Holman (1786-1857) who was once the most renowned traveller of his age but is now virtually unknown. Holman became crippled with rheumatism through his service in the cold fogs of the North Atlantic for the British Royal Navy, and he was suddenly struck blind by a mysterious ailment. All this by the tender age of twenty six.

In order to survive in a world where welfare was almost unknown, Holman suborned his natural adventurous spirit and accepted a stipend as a quasi-religious hermit. Yet he sought a cure for his afflictions. In doing so, Holman hit upon the radical notion that good food - especially lots of fresh fruit and vegetables - combined with generous amounts of physical exercise produces an acute sense of well-being.

Having discovered an new sense of health, Holman gave up his stipend and embarked upon three great journeys on foot that saw him, a blind man, scaling Vesuvius during an eruption, travelling the frozen wastes of Eastern Siberia (where he was arrested by the Russian secret police) and embarking on a circumnavigation of the globe that brought him to Hobart in Tasmania (amongst other places), where he became the toast of the town. Simply put, Holman wanted to be the first person to walk around the world.

Jason Roberts tells James Holman's incredible story with a deft economy of words. The picture is painted in precise but sufficient brushstrokes to produce a narrative that compels the reader to turn the page - and the next, and the next. Roberts gives us detail and pace - a rare combination of literary commodities - while 'illuminating' the world of the blind for us.

I thoroughly recommend this book, if for no other reason than to say: find out how and why a blind man in the 19th century attempted to walk around the world.