Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"Already breast to breast and toe to toe, [the birds] made their sinuous necks as erect as flagpoles. They tilted their heads back as far as they would go. They pressed their long throats and the undersides of their jaws together. They formed a tower, the two of them - a single structure, pointed on top and resting on four blue feet."

I am slowly working through Kurt Vonnegut's opus and the ninth book of his that I am reviewing here does not get my recommendation. Galápagos (1985) is to me among the bottom tier of Vonnegut's works and the author's failure makes me wish I have rated higher some other novels, such as the great Bluebeard or the very good Breakfast of Champions ( Slaughterhouse-Five being in an altogether different category of masterpieces of world literature). Galápagos is a cautionary fantasy tale about the ills of mankind. The fantasy overhead of the novel obscures the message and diminishes its worth.

The story is located in Ecuador in 1986 but is told from a vantage point one million years later, after humans have evolved away from their twentieth-century form, away from having huge brains. In 1986 the entire world is in the throes of financial crisis that causes severe hunger on all continents. The fertility rates are dwindling to zero. Six tourists are preparing to board "the Nature Cruise of the Century", from Guayaquil to the Galápagos Islands. While the cruise does not proceed exactly as planned and while not all participants get to the islands, those who do - as well as some stowaways - will have a tremendous impact on the future as they will be the ancestors of the modern (i.e., year 1,000,1986) humans.

The fable implies that the homo sapiens' big brains are responsible for the immense vastness of human stupidity, greed, and love for violence. Not only the individual people are vile, like one of the main characters, James Wait, a marital swindler and accidental murderer, but also the entire repulsive, failed human race demonstrates that it has evolved in a completely wrong direction and deserves annihilation. This is the same motif as in Slaughterhouse-Five but there it was masterfully told, without fantasy gimmicks, and the one-million-year perspective does not provide any payoff here.

One of the few things in the novel that I like is a wonderful passage where Mr. Vonnegut compares a missile that acquires a target to the culmination of sexual intercourse. This image will stay in my memory. Is there a well-written novel focused on the boys' and men's fascination with weapons and killing as being derived from the penile-based sexual drive? If there is not, there should be.

In addition to the overall clumsiness of the story and the overabundance of fantasy components I do not like the story's take on evolution. While the mention of Darwin's work on Galápagos provides a nice addition, the whole evolutionary motif is trivialized and just plain silly. As to the storytelling itself I do not think that the innovative trick of providing an asterisk in front of the names of characters that are just about to die works at all.

Two loose comments: in Mr. Vonnegut's commentary - as usual, he editorializes a bit too much - he seems to be emphasizing that randomness plays much more important role in evolution of species than the natural selection mechanisms. As a proponent of randomness as the guiding force of everything and anything, I would strongly agree.

On another note, the author refers numerous times to two devices: Gokubi, a hand-held translator, and its advanced model, Mandarax, that is a sort of repository of knowledge. One might say that Mr. Vonnegut, as a purported sci-fi writer, predicted the advent of cell phones, Google, Wikipedia, and the like.

And, of course, my usual personal peeve about Vonnegut's novels: the recurring character of Kilgore Trout. In his better novels he sort of disappears overwhelmed by other, good stuff. Here he does not...

Two stars.

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