Aldous Huxley: Point Counter Point

For many readers Point Counter Point marks the climax of Aldous Huxley's early writing and is his most outstanding novel. The wit and gaiety which had bubbled up so readily in Antic Hay and Crome Yellow may show signs of evaporating, but in their place the reader is confronted with a great fantasia of extraordinary people and profound ideas, where the comedy is constantly verging on tragedy. Huxley still tilts, and often with uproarious effect, at the intellectual postures of the disrupted society of the twenties, and portraits of D.H. Lawrence and Middleton Murry (apostles, perhaps, of the coming weirdness) are to be found alongside his caricatures of aristocratic dilettantes. But behind the laughter there are already hints of the mysticism which later engulfed the author.