On Reading Brave New World in Singapore

Brave New World is one of those books that… Well, I won’t exactly say that everyone has read it, but I’d imagine most people feel vaguely guilty that they haven’t read it, and mean to rectify this omission at the first opportunity, honest, and will totes get around to reading it some time very soon, and may well have had it on the Kindle for a while.

Or maybe everybody HAS read it, apart from me.

Anywise, Brave New World is the sort of book that should be on the school curriculum, along with 1984, and Fahrenheit 451, but isn’t, perhaps because of the sex and the drugs, perhaps because of the rather patchy prose. It’s a utopian dystopia, conceived by Aldous Huxley in the 1920s, thirty years or so before he got into hallucinogens, that holds up remarkably well in the era of the information revolution, despite not predicting it in the slightest.

And it’s stunningly well suited to Singapore, which is where I bought it. Because if there’s one thing that Singapore is undeniably great for, it’s book-shopping.

Now, it seems odd to write this at a time when many Singaporeans are grieving Lee Kuan Yew, founder of South-East Asia’s longest-running one-party state, a man who dragged Singapore out of poverty into its position as one of the world’s wealthiest nations, scattering human rights with gay abandon as he did so.

But there’s more than a touch of the Brave New Worlds about Singapore. In Brave New World, it’s shopping – consumption – that keeps society running. Mantras about the value of consumption are instilled into children from the foetal stage.

I have never, ever seen a society as focused on shopping as Singapore. In Vegas, you navigate the tourist zone by way of travelators through casinos: the carefully timeless, flatlining interiors substitute for streets and pavements, so much so that it’s entirely possible to spend entire days and nights without encountering natural light.

In Singapore, it’s malls that provide that perpetual, disorientating daytime. To leave them you typically burrow further downwards towards the MRT, rather than upwards towards street level: street level is, largely, a decorative irrelevance if you know downtown well enough. People eat in malls: breakfast, lunch, snacks, even fine dining. They shop in malls. They even, I’d imagine, date in malls.

And consumption remains the lifeblood of the city-state. Or, as Brave New World has it, “The more stitches, the less riches.” AKA, don’t mend. Throw out, and buy anew.

But what strikes me as most Huxleyesque about Singapore is the perky, lightly passive aggressive reminders to do one’s best for the great consumerist society.

In Huxley’s Brave New World foetuses are predestined from conception to one very specific class of society, right down to retarding their development with alcohol, if required. And, although Singapore is famously multi-racial, with no fewer than four official languages, sadly not including Singlish, it’s noticeable that street sweepers, builders and manual labourers tend to be more, well, tanned than the folk who work in finance and run the government.

But what strikes me as most Huxleyesque about Singapore is the perky, lightly passive aggressive reminders to do one’s best for the great consumerist society.

Singaporeans venturing on the city’s manicured parklands are repeatedly reminded to pick up their dogs’ poo (not “faeces”, not “waste”, not “mess” but that coy, infantilising “poo”). The Singapore Kindness Movement – a government initiative that Orwell might have appreciated – delivers tooth-hurtingly sweet reminders “Together, we can make someone’s day! Be gracious!” to encourage folk to give way when getting on the metro and similar.

Amid all this, Singaporeans live surrounded by ads that hero the Chinese work ethic in a distinctively Singlish vein. Pictures of young, fair-skinned, bright-eyed Singaporean women pushing for that dream career advertise job services bringing the latest career opportunities to your phone: most of them, it seems, in marketing.

Society’s expectations are written very, very large in Singapore. And they’re, fundamentally, pretty simple. Get a good job. Earn money. Then spend it, ideally in a mall.

“I know! Let’s balance a giant banana 70 storeys up on three wonky pillars then put some giant light-up trees behind it! Pass the bong!”

Architecturally, Singapore is stunning. Yet what’s odd about that stellar skyline, those trippy waterfront confections – “I know! Let’s balance a giant banana 70 storeys up on three wonky pillars then put some giant light-up trees behind it! Pass the bong!” – is that it faces inwards. This is a port city. A marine nation. And yet the city looks not out to sea, but inwards.

Further, in the vein of Brave New World, much of Singapore’s heritage has either been replaced with tower blocks, or disneyfied into abstraction. Neither Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy nor Escalator Squash Courts would sit amiss in this city where nobody walks.

On some levels, I love the cleanliness of Singapore, the absence of rough edges: I’m from London, a grimy city, and live in litter-strewn Bali. On others, when I wander through the candy-coloured tourist miasma of Clarke Quay, the reinvented, manufactured riverfront, a waterfront nightlife area both emasculated and defanged, I’d like to see a can or two floating in the river, a few fag butts on the street, a drunk or two grappling with a doorman.

Ports are not supposed to be well-behaved places. They’re just…. NOT.

It is a brave new world, Singapore. I love to visit our friends in their green and leafy suburb; I love those little first world comforts, like pavements, and public transport, and zebra crossings, and manicured flowerbeds, and fresh air; I love the way that everything works, that there are concierges in the malls, taxi drivers who don’t over-charge, and minimal crime.

And, at the same time, I find it stifling. I’m always glad to visit Singapore. And I’m always glad to leave.