Like Brave New World, Many a Summer is a kind of fantastic parable. In Mr Huxley's earlier book the vehicle of the parable was a tragi-comical romance of the future. In this novel it is a rich extravaganza with a contemporary setting that is in part American, in part English.
Central to this extravaganza is the story, at once grotesque and realistic, farcical and reflective, of an attempt on the part of a rich man to prolong the span of human life indefinitely.
In terms of this fantastic, sometimes nightmarish tale, which Mr Huxley tells with unsurpassed wit and brilliance, the book treats of the ultimate topics of all philosophy - bondage and liberation, reality and illusion, the problem of good, the nature of evil.
