Galapágos, by Kurt Vonnegut

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).

The Epic of Gilgamesh

The Epic of Gilgamesh is a story which was written down long before Homer’s Iliad or Odyssey, thereby making it arguably the oldest extant piece of literature in the world. If you want to know more of its composition, found as fragments on clay tablets lying buried for thousands of years around the Near-East, fragments that were gradually reassembled by Victorian nutters [read: Assyriologists] into something vaguely resembling a complete, continuous narrative, then I fully advise you to delve into the subject to learn more. I myself have sufficed with not one, but two different ‘Penguin Classics’ editions. The first, an older and shorter prose version, has more than half the length of the book taken up with a gentle ‘idiot’s guide’ to Gilgamesh [Bilgames] and his ancient world, and as an idiot myself I found it a generally quite helpful introduction. The second version is a tad more involved at introducing its subject, and is recommended for the slightly more hardcore fans of this – the world’s very first – written story.

                The tale is essentially one of bromance. Gilgamesh is king of Uruk, two-thirds god, a third mortal, and one complete randy bastard. Then enter the wild-man Enkidu who, after squaring off against Gilgamesh, quickly becomes his side-kick – before the two of them head off to cause havoc elsewhere in the world.  After killing Humbaba, a general horrifying thing in the forest, and a great magical bull thing too (sent by the pissed-off sex goddess Ishtar), the gods begin to get a bit fed up with Gilgamesh. As punishment they kill Enkidu, which really upsets our dashing protagonist. It’s like Top Gun all over again.* With such a tragedy deeply affecting him, Gilgamesh sets off to find immortality, at which point he meets Utnapishtim [Uta-napishti] the Faraway, a curious fellow who tells him a tale all about the great mythical flood (one which has a very similar plot to the Biblical tale of Noah and his Ark, including the animals and everything).  Having failed to achieve eternal life, Gilgamesh returns home to Uruk and inscribes the tale of his adventures on stone, before dying at last.

                For this review I had a look at two different Penguin editions; one slim and lean, the other a tad more thick and informative. As is generally the case with Penguin editions, the first version I sampled has any accuracy or scholarly pretences sacrificed in the name of readability, in my view a sacrifice worth making as far as a gentle introduction is concerned. Here we get one story roughly outlined, the characters and settings presented, and a speedy though firm introduction to the history of this remarkable text, all in a good and consistent English prose format. The epic, as presented here, is enjoyable to read and remarkably quick to assimilate, so I would heartily recommend it. A much easier-to-appreciate thing than its next oldest literary rival, the Iliad, at any rate. The second version, a much more modern edition, is laid out less like a prose story and more like an epic poem, with verses and line-numbers and everything. The sexy thing about this one, prepared by Andrew George, is that unlike most other epics which are divided into ‘books’, this one is divided according to tablets. A nice little constant reminder that this is a story set in stone. Also it makes no illusion about having a full, accurate translation of the original text, if such a thing exists; gaps (lacunae) appear in the text, with words and partial sentences added in square brackets to give a better sense of how the poem is supposed to operate.  

                One of my initial difficulties with this story was the unfamiliarity of the characters, landscape and themes that it deals with, but this leads onto one of the most interesting things I encountered in this book – the Story of the Flood. The first part of tablet eleven contains a story that may be rather familiar to anyone who has ever heard the myth of Noah’s Ark, and I know I’m not alone in seeing the parallels between it and this section of Gilgamesh, as it was one of the things that attracted Western scholarship to the Epic of Gilgamesh in the first place. After all, in our culture we are raised in this peculiar Judeo-Christian culture whether we like it or not, and even if one hadn’t read the Bible all the way from start to finish (as I would boast) then we at least know the rough story off by heart. Certain angry deities try to wipe out humanity with a world-encompassing flood, only for somebody to construct a giant boat and fill it with all the animal and human resources necessary to rebuild the world after the flood-waters have subsided. Even the sending out of birds, to check if it was safe to disembark, is here in this ancient Near-Eastern text. Utnapishtim is essentially a Mesopotamian Noah, and as a consequence is more interesting. The flood-narrative contained within Judeo-Christian mythology holds similarities with many other flood stories throughout the ancient world, so it is interesting to see it reflected so strikingly here. I’m sure much sweat, blood and ink has been expended on this subject since the 19^th Century, and I can almost say I’m curious to see some of what has been written about it. At the moment it seems clear that the flood-myth managed to spread far and wide in the ancient world, impregnating Mesopotamian and Judaic cultures as well as others.

                All in all though, the story of Gilgamash as a whole is rather an interesting thing.  We begin with this king of Uruk who’s a bit an arsehole, who develops as a character through his friendship with Enkidu and has a bit of a crisis after this same friend ends up dying. Seeking immortality, Gilgamesh is frustrated and goes back home, writing an account of his adventures which ultimately provide him with the only realistic way of achieving a semblance of immortality; through being remembered. That the words of this tale have survived to the Modern Era is a fitting testimony to the character and to the myth, neatly cyclical in its own little way. The strangely hotchpotch nature of the epic – more adequately reflected in the George edition – is just as interesting as the story, and the inclusion of other ancient Gilgamesh-related texts gives a more rounded impression of the history of these characters and their tale (much in the same way as the Song of my Cid, reviewed last month). However you end up experiencing this text, this thing, this phenomenon, make sure you do. It’s certainly one of the most interesting things I’ve been exposed to this year.

* Foot-gnote: The editor would like to apologise for the appearance of a pop-culture reference in this review. In all the years of ‘Artichoke Readings’, never has this mad old reader made such a statement, likening a concept to something that people may have actually heard of. We will endeavour to make sure this sort of thing never happens again.

Bibliomesh

The Epic of Gilgamesh: An English Version with an Introduction. N. K. Sandars (ed). Penguin: Reading. (1960).

The Epic of Gilgamesh:  The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian. Translated by Andrew George. Penguin: St. Ives. (2000).

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, by C.S. Lewis

The second great fantasy series to have emerged out of 1950s Britain (the first being Tolkien’s Middle-Earth stories), C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia are a beloved children’s classic based on a rather loose interpretation of Christian mythology. The first book of the series to be published was The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, although canonically is the second book in the Chronicles of Narnia series, and so I will review this one before I - at some point in the distant future - attempt to review the entire series as a whole. To begin, what we have in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a fairly benign, if slightly dull fairy tale, featuring childhood escapades into a magical world that can only be accessed through an everyday item of furniture. Beware, this review may (or may not) contain spoilers, so if you have not read the story, and you wish to experience it without any prior knowledge, then go off and read it.

                There are four children who, due to the irritation of the Second World War, are evacuated from London and are sent to live with a kindly eccentric man far out in the countryside, in a big old house where the only entertainment involves sprawling games of hide-and-seek. Lucy, the youngest of the siblings, discovers that a certain chunky old wardrobe is (would you believe it?!) also a gateway to the magical world of Narnia, a pseudo-medieval fantasy realm held in the grip of winter by an evil White Witch. After failing to convince her siblings, Peter, Susan and scumbag Edmund, that it really is real, the four of them wind up in Narnia regardless. Now the four children must trek through the snowy woodland, on the run from the Witch’s evil minions, apparently to fulfill a prophecy in which they have to sit in four magical thrones and undo the Witch’s spell for all time. Oh yes, and apparently there is a lion king on the move, who is more than capable of sorting out the Witch on his own but for some reason is beholden to some supremely arbitrary rules. 

                The style is basic. Perhaps one might say simple, almost childish. This means it’s not difficult to read by any means, but like a certain old-school of children’s writer, Lewis can be a little patronizing at times. I honestly wish that writers of children’s stories wouldn’t do this; speaking down to the reader. Margery Williams was able to go without doing this. Kenneth Graeme wouldn’t do this. A.A. Milne was incredible in the way he never did this. But C.S. Lewis, in this supposedly ‘great’ children’s classic, felt that he had to talk down to the reader.

                ‘“It’s all right,” [Mr Beaver] was shouting. “[...] It’s all right! It isn’t Her!” This was bad grammar of course, but that is how beavers talk when they are excited; I mean, in Narnia – in our world they usually don’t talk at all.’

 [Excerpt, pg. 98]

                But never mind; this is just a minor quibble, and could almost be funny if viewed in a certain light. The style is overall quite simple, and ought not to be sniffed at too much. What about the story, then? It quite simply falls into two halves. The first half in which Lucy discovers Narnia and tries to prove that she’s not lying, and the second in which all the children find themselves in Narnia, and it occurs to them that they are the rallying-point for an anti-Witch resistance movement. Yet the two halves bleed seamlessly into one-another; the transition from the real world to the events of Narnia happens unnoticed, and the one or two events and character-developments that take place in the first half of the story continue to have weight and consequences right through to the later sections. In terms of characters, the four children are generally not that interesting. Of course, the audience is naturally most invested in Lucy, but when the character of Peter takes on more of a role in the second half of the story he does tend to feel a bit dull as a result. This is nothing to say of Susan, who does not exist really other than to be an extra voice to the character roster. But for our extra child, Edmund, we must offer some commendation; to the sneaky back-stabbing brother who ends up defecting to the Witch’s side, and thereby drives the entire plot inexorably forward. He seems to be an interesting, well-rounded character who stands as a stark contrast to the other children, and through whom we see the villainy of the Witch laid out in all her wickedness. He provokes anger and dislike from the reader, but is yet handled with sympathy and compassion by Lewis so that one nevertheless feels sorry for him.

                What about Aslan the lion king? What are we to make of our quadrupedal Jesus-surrogate? And what about the famous scene; the one involving the stone table? Admittedly, this particular moment in the story almost went and moved me, and it is by far the most climactic you’ll find within the pages of this book. It makes sense within the context of the plot, and as I’m feeling lenient I’ll even go as far as to overlook the incredibly convenient post-hoc explanation for Aslan’s miraculous return. The allegories that have been drawn with Christian legends and mythology are difficult to ignore, and the various symbols found through the story – particularly during THE SCENE – can be quite satisfactorily tied to such themes. I don’t feel inclined to be too judgmental on this, because the story isn’t about religion as such. It’s a metaphor for a metaphor, a story about children wandering in a fantastical imaginary world, inhabited by a big old lion and some talking animals and mythical creatures. When I first experienced this story as a child, I had no idea it was meant to refer to Christian ideology. To me it was just a story. I will reserve my absolute judgement on C.S. Lewis’ masterpiece until a later time, perhaps until after I’ve read the entire Chronicles of Narnia. Until then I can say no more than it is a story that can be enjoyed in two separate ways: as a children’s fairy tale, or as a minor reworking of certain Christian myths.

                Is it good enough to read? Well, it’s not long or difficult to get through, and overall the story isn’t too bad. I enjoyed it as a child, but I certainly prefer other Fantasy tales and children’s stories to this one. Again I’ll reserve the right to change my verdict for when I’ve gotten through the entire Chronicles of Narnia series, but at the moment I’m offering a distinct “Meh” on the whole thing. It’s famous for what it is, but unlike other children’s classics (and venerated literature in general) I struggle to see why this deserves as much praise as others. Take it or leave it, as there’s nothing especially remarkable about The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe from what I can see

The Biblion, the Biblitch and the Bibliodrobe

Lewis, C.S. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. HarperCollins: Glasgow. (1998 [First published 1950])