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| Cover art by Jeffrey Adams, per the Delacorte Press PB |
| GALÁPAGOS Kurt Vonnegut New York: Dell Publishing Company, October 1986 |
Rating: 4.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-440-12779-6 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-440-12779-3 | 295pp. | SC | $4.50 | |
Leon was dead, to begin with.
Many works of fiction deal with ghosts and spirits. There was The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and the TV show Topper, to give two examples. Shakespeare used them extensively, and three ghosts figure in the Dickens classic A Christmas Carol, whose first line I paraphrase above. But I am aware of no other work than Galápagos which is narrated by a ghost.
Leon Trout, son of Kilgore Trout and former Marine, was killed while building the Bahía de Darwin at a shipyard in Malmo, Sweden. He chooses to stick around in order to unravel the knot of humanity's fate. After a million years, he still hasn't gotten there.
But he has recounted a decidedly unheroic misadventure. The economies of all nations collapse as a deadly disease which prevents birth takes hold. A few lucky survivors stumble aboard the Bahía de Darwin, now docked in Gauyaquil, Ecuador for "The Nature Cruise of the Century." Despite the fact that the ship has been stripped of almost everything by a rampaging mob, it still functions and gets them to Santa Rosalia in the archipelago of the Galápagos. There, over time, a humbler but happier form of humanity develops.
Among the science-fiction community, Kilgore Trout is a well known in joke. Created by Vonnegut, his persona is that of a prolific science fiction author with an inflated sense of his own ability — and that is how Vonnegut describes him in this novel.
Trout's fictional oeuvre is said to include 19 novels, a memoir, a play, and numerous short stories.
On three occasions, his father appears from the afterlife and pleads for Leon to join him. Three times Leon denies him, thereby earning that million-year sabbatical. Feel free to impute some religious meaning to this.
"Leon! Leon! Leon!" he implored "The more you learn about people, the more disgusted you'll become. I would have thought that your being sent by the wisest men in your country, supposedly, to fight a nearly endless, thankless, horrifying, and, finally, pointless war, would have given you sufficient insight into the nature of humanity to last you throughout all eternity! "Need I tell you that these same wonderful animals, of which you apparently still want to learn more and more, are at this very moment proud as Punch to have weapons in place, all set to go at a moment's notice guaranteed to kill everything? "Need I tell you that this once beautiful and nourishing planet when viewed from the air now resembles the diseased organs of poor Roy Hepburn when exposed at his autopsy, and that the apparent cancers, growing for the sake of growth alone, and consuming all and poisoning all, are the cities of your beloved human beings? "Need I tell you that these animals have made such a botch of things that they can no longer imagine decent lives for their own grandchildren, even, and will consider it a miracle if there is anything left to eat or enjoy by the year two thousand, now only fourteen years away? "Like the people on this accursed ship, my boy, they are led by captains who have no charts or compasses, and who deal from minute to minute with no problem more substantial that how to protect their self-esteem." – Pages 254-255 |
This passage pretty much sums up the message of the novel, which is that humans of the twentieth century had brains too big for their own good — and now that they have evolved smaller brains incapable of abstract thought, they can live harmoniously with their natural environment and so are much better off.1 It is not a message I would ever endorse; I prefer to believe that humans will acquire bigger brains, or at least more intelligence, and surmount their propensity for fumbling into catastrophe that way.
First published 1985, Galápagos is Vonnegut's 11th novel. I found it disorganized and rambling, with too much messaging and an inconclusive ending. I'll give it a rating of 4.0, but I don't recommend it nor do I consider it a keeper. Vonnegut has a spate of good novels, including Slaughterhouse Five which does the anti-war sermon better.
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