[In the following review, Fuller offers a negative assessment of Looking Beyond, finding it to be “awkwardly wrought” novel.]

Dr. Lin Yutang has written a leisurely, fantastic novel called Looking Beyond to serve as a fresh medium for telling us some of the things that he has told us before in The Importance of Living. To this extent it is a philosophical novel. Also, he has many tart, critical comments to make about the way the human species is conducting its affairs today. In this respect it is a satirical novel.

Among the minor things Dr. Lin extols, in passing, are the pleasures and benefits of bare feet. It is a bare-footed kind of novel he has written—genially relaxed, soft-footed, and comfortable. He isn't rushing anywhere, he isn't trampling. He shows an amiable indifference toward his story, letting it move erratically, tacking it together by improvisation. All he demands of it is that it divert us mildly, storywise, and serve him as a vehicle for ideas. In these intentions it succeeds.

The time is the year 2004. As in Aldous Huxley's “Ape and Essence,” the world has passed through an atomic debacle. But Dr. Lin's mood is brighter than Huxley's was. Not only has there been a World War III, but a World War IV. Yet men have learned, after the catastrophes of the third, that they dare not try such a thing again. World War IV, undesirable as it may have been, was more like our own years of cold war with hot spots. After it something approaching world government is in its formative operations.

However, these matters are secondary to Dr. Lin, perhaps carrying no more import than his conviction that we may commit further world-harrowing follies but will not quite wipe ourselves out. Given this, his interest reverts to what always has preoccupied him, the question of how men can most wisely live their lives, in 1955 or 2004.

A young geodetic surveyor and her fiancé land their plane on an unknown island off the coast of Chile. Its inhabitants are friendly but will not let them leave and Paul is killed resisting destruction of his plane. Barbara is rechristened Eurydice and becomes reconciled to stay.

The island, Thainos, has been colonized by a band of Greeks and Italians, under the leadership of the philosopher Laos, and the now deceased shipping millionaire Athanapoulos. Laos detests the word “Utopia,” but he and his followers have rejected the world and live on different premises: not idealism, but a stark recognition of the realities of human nature.

This is not supposed to be a retreat from progress and technology, but merely a moratorium, a suspension to permit evaluation of the situation. Laos “was not against material progress as such, he was against having too much of it, to the detriment of man himself.” In the outer, industrialized world, “human nature isn't whole any more. Something is lacking. His original and full nature is cramped, dessicated, dehydrated, and badly creased in the corners.”

Dr. Lin's blueprint for living is a mildly pagan neo-Hellenism. Response to the novel is going to hinge upon one's taste for this brand of humanism. It is orthodox non-orthodoxy. While the book is interesting, and generally valid in specific jibes at our mores, I'm afraid it fails ultimately in terms of its own devices. It seems to me to be awkwardly wrought.