This is my fourth Vonnegut
book. Already I have loved three, and so the question is: will this next one be
as good? Will this next piece be the straw that broke the camel’s back, thereby
proving that Vonnegut can produce a dud just like every writer? Or is he a
one-trick pony who, once the trick has been played out a few times, seems a
little less special than he once did? Maybe he will, one day. But not today. Galapágos
has
that characteristic Vonnegutian (did I just make that word up?) flair that
marks these books, and makes them instantly memorable and downright
mind-fucking.
As per usual, Vonnegut just doesn’t care about keeping his
cards hidden. He tells you plot details that will happen later in the book,
sometimes to explain what’s happening now, but mostly just to confuse and
unbalance the reader. It’s a nice little quirk, and one that a sane writer
would avoid in order to try to surprise, to thrill, to keep you in suspense.
Yet with Vonnegut, he’s quite happy to tell you that Hisako Hiroguchi’s as yet
unborn daughter Akiko will turn out to be covered in fine silky fur like a seal
thanks to a chance mutation, fur that will allow her to live comfortably in the
waters around the Galapágos
islands, so events kind of happen a little out of order. There is definitely a
linear narrative going on, but it’s as though the story is being related by
someone who has no problem with giving you spoilers.
The story, then. The plot. The whirlwind tale of optimism,
heroics, and of square-jawed American heroes triumphing in the face of
adversity. Screw that, because this is a book about a bunch of random people
who end up marooned on an island and who, by sheer luck of the draw, become the
last human colony on Earth. Therefore they unintentionally wind up as the
progenitors of the next stage of human evolution, happy and animalistic aquatic
creatures with flippers and small brains. The bitter, bleak-comic tagline of
this novel is that humanity’s big brains are not evolutionary advantageous, and
that this strange design flaw will – through the process of natural selection –
be eradicated from the human gene-pool over the next million years. A big
brain, as the narrator points out, is ever coming up with new and inventive
ways to damage and destroy other human beings and generally bugger up the
planetary ecosystem.
Most of the story revolves around the events which lead up
to the marooning of this group of people on the island of Santa Rosalia; a
handful of tourists who choose precisely the wrong moment in history to go on a
nature cruise around the Galapágos
islands. Among them are a con-man who marries widows in order to deprive them
of their money; an American tycoon and his blind daughter; a Japanese inventor
and his pregnant wife; and Mary Hepburn, a high school biology teacher who has
recently lost her husband mere months after he first booked this doomed voyage
for the two of them. Such is Vonnegut’s usual character-roster of atypical
human beings (which actually means they’re more typical than people think), and
this is to say nothing of the incompetent ship’s captain, and of the
disembodied narrator who has witnessed all these events, who has seen humanity’s
ultimate fate.
A peculiar feature of this book, one which fits in nicely
with Vonnegut’s tendency to give the game away before it happens, is the faintly
unsettling practice of placing asterisks in front of the names of characters
who will die before the next sunrise. It makes all the difference to see the
name of *Andrew MacIntosh alongside that of Mary Hepburn, to know who will
die first. Seriously, this is not what writers are supposed to do, which is why
Vonnegut ends up doing it. It’s just odd, and makes you a little uncomfortable to see
characters marked out in this way. Another interesting peculiarity of this book
is the faintly ‘butterfly effect’ nature of the story; that in getting to the
end result of the Santa Rosalia colony a million years in the future, a huge
number of chance occurrences are pointed out throughout the book, leading to a
plot made up largely of incidental details. The events which led to each of the
passengers ending up on the cruise, the actions of extremely minor characters
which, though seemingly quite insignificant in the grand scheme of history, end
up unexpectedly contriving keep the main characters alive and to put them on
the ship, through which the human race survives extinction. This is an
interesting idea, and I would like to see more books that take this approach.
Now it comes about that I am to level a Criticism at my
beloved Kurt Vonnegut, which is possibly a first. This writer definitely has
his own style, and it’s all on display here: the short chapters, constructed of
simple statements; a certain lack of poetics or flamboyance in the writing; the
characters who are simple sketches which turn out to be somewhat multi-layered
as you get further along the story. It’s classic Vonnegut, but here there is
little that’s actually new from him. Galapágos feels like it’s
getting to be formulaic. Cat’s Cradle,
another of his works, is much more adventurous, while Slaughterhouse Five has a genuine soul at its heart. Even Breakfast of Champions, which slumps
towards the category of perhaps being ‘a little too much’, has its own peculiar
quirks that make it stand out. With this book though, I almost feel like
uttering the words ‘Is this it?’, as though this is the sort of thing Vonnegut
wrote when he was just passing time. Or maybe I’m just getting used to his style
now, so that it has ceased to surprise me quite so much. If this is your first
Vonnegut novel, it should feel as fresh and new as Slaughterhouse did to me.
Don’t
get me wrong, though. This is still a cracker of a book, and I would recommend
it to fans or newcomers alike. Come and read about the end of human
civilisation, and how that might be a good thing should we simply just evolve
into benign fish-eating creatures with flippers and small brains. Observe the
random twists of fate that allowed a tiny colony of humanity to survive far out
in the middle of the ocean, of a worldwide economic meltdown, a war between
Ecuador and Peru, of a cancelled cruise and the handful of unhappy passengers,
how two murders and a door being left open by mistake meant the human race
would, for the rest of its existence, be speaking a rainforest language called
Kanka-bono. And perhaps you may even learn of the blue tunnel to the afterlife,
something which our narrator has yet to discover.
Bibliógos
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. Galapágos.
Flamingo:
St. Ives. (1985).
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