Time Must Have a Stop

Sebastian Barnack, a handsome English schoolboy, goes to Italy for the summer, and there his real education begins. His teachers are two quite different Bruno Rontini, the saintly bookseller, who teaches him about things spiritual; and Uncle Eustace, who introduces him to life’s profane pleasures.

The novel that Aldous Huxley himself thought was his most successful at “fusing idea with story,” Time Must Have a Stop is part of Huxley’s lifelong attempt to explore the dilemmas of twentieth-century man and to create characters who, though ill-equipped to solve the dilemmas, all go stumbling on in their painfully serious comedies (in this novel we have the dead atheist who returns in a seance to reveal what he has learned after death but is stuck with a second-rate medium who garbles his messages). Time Must Have a Stop is one of Huxley’s finest achievements.