Galapagos

A few weeks ago, mostly on the Amtrak to and from Chicago, when I was visiting the lovely and talented Sarah E. Keister, I read Kurt Vonnegut's 1985 novel Galapagos. I guess this post will be a pseudo-review of that book.

It was pretty good, but also pretty bad. It was pretty good, because it was what Vonnegut is good at: funny, sardonic, inventive, and adeptly balanced between the extremes of darkness and light. The tale begins by explaining that 1986 was a million years ago, and that humans still exist, but have much smaller brains than they used to, which the narrator says is an evolutionary improvement. The second chapter is mostly an ecstatic description of a pathetic and magnetic character, the former male prostitute/murderer turned millionaire widow-schemer James Wait (known to others currently as Willard Flemming, an alias), and his plan to board the Ecuadorian ship 'Bahia de Darwin' (Bay of Darwin) on the "Nature Cruise of the Century" through the Galapagos Islands. After the chapter, I was expecting (and would have been content) to follow the narrative of Wait's time there because it was well-written. However, in the next several chapters, the tale spun by the omniscient narrator, Leon Trotsky Trout, the son of Vonnegut's own literary alter-ego, Kilgore Trout, gets much more complex than that. (LTT also happens to be a ghost. He was a Vietnam vet who gained political asylum in Sweden where he then worked as a shipbuilder. One of his jobs was the Bahia. He was decapitated while helping to build the ship. He tells the story as a million-year old ghost (due to his refusal to go to his somewhat despised father in the tunnel of whirring blue that is Vonnegut's portrayal of the tunnel to the unknown afterlife) in the present year 1,001,984 A.D.). The plot occurs, mostly, around 1986.

Here is a very condensed form of said plot. The world is in economic shambles. There are only a handful of countries whose currencies are still viable at all. Ecuador is not among them. An Ecuadorian hotel is hosting the guests of the "Nature Cruise of the Century." They include, due to the cancellation of celebrities like Jackie O. and Walter Cronkite because of the recent economic and political instability), Mr. Wait, Mrs. Mary Hepburn (a recently widowed and post-menopausal biology teacher from Ilium, NY), Mr. Andrew Macintosh a rude and boisterous American millionaire and his blind daughter Selena and her guide dog, and Macintosh's guests, the Hiroguchis. Mr. Hiroguchi is the Japanese inventor of the Mandarax, a device which translates among more than 1,000 languages, can diagnose more than 1,000 common diseases by asking medical queries in a 20-questions type sequence, as well as providing famous quotes relating to inputted search terms and lessons on Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging (also the profession of Hiroguchi's wife), among many other important and trivial tasks. At the helm of the ship is Captain Adolf Von Kleist, a bumbling socialite who graduated at the bottom of his military school class. His brother, Siegfried, runs the hotel. The brothers Von Kleist are both single and without child, as they are afraid they could be genetic carriers of Huntington's Chorea, which their father died of.

Eventually, after much chaos resulting from a Peruvian invasion of Ecuador (one of many ridiculous and ramshackle events as the world essentially crumbles), the ship departs, stripped of all its food and valuables, amid missile attacks, with Wait/Flemming (who is dying of a heart attack and hastily married to Hepburn), Hepburn, Selena, her dog, Hiroguchi's wife, the drunken Captain, and a group of a few young Kanka-bonos. (Macintosh, Adolf, and Hiroguchi are dead at this point; Kanka-bonos are Aboriginal-like African tribespeople. The girls found their way to Ecuador through the work of a benevolent Priest and fighter pilot (not important)). Eventually, the ship crashes on the fictional Galapogan isle of Santa Rosalia, where the remaining characters live out the rest of their lives. They are probably the last inhabitants of earth, as a result of worldwide famine and war as well as a mysterious disease that renders all women infertile (except of course, the women on the secluded isle; interestingly, the phenomenon of having all their females' eggs eaten by rats is the true reason for Galapagos tortoises' relegation to their eponymous isles). You could probably guess, as happens, that Hepburn uses the Captain's sperm to impregnate some of the females on the island and thus repopulates earth eventually.

It is not a great story, though it does have interesting points and techniques. The whole tale is told in a Slaughterhouse-5-type of disjointed narrative, and 3/4 of the 2-section story is devoted to the events leading up to the survivors' escape to the isle. Little time is devoted to their actual existence on Santa Rosalia. Each character gets a past-looking telling of their backstory, and there are interesting side events narrated along the way (such as the history of the Kanka-bonos). Vonnegut does manage to keep the nearly impossible plot technically taut (though through the use of convenient techniques at times). In fact, he gave himself an A+ for his technical efforts on the book during a later interview. His flair for alternative views of the afterlife and an inventive twist on the end-of-the-world story; his use of characters continuous of his other works (K. Trout); his ability to satisfactorily sew up otherwise problematic story jams in a few wry lines or less; the intricate interworkings of scientific narrative, humorous anecdotes, round characterization, and overall zealous creativity make the book a worthwhile read.

However, the technique (seen in his other works) of a repeated chorus by the intrusive narrator (here as the narrator's consistently blaming the downfall of humanity on humans' "big brains") is far less effective than the similar but much more poetic "So it goes" line of SLH-5, to the point of near annoyance. Also, the repeated insertion of historic quotes, from Mandarax, at both appropriate and inappropriate situations, is overused.

The high points of the book for me, in terms of poeticism and sheer interest value, are the character of the pure-hearted hotel employee Jesus Ortiz (ya I know); the motif of the mating dance of the blue-footed booby; the effective (though not perfect) incorporation of Anne Frank's famous "I still believe people are really good at heart" quote; the random genetic adaptation of Hirguchi's wife's first daughter to have a coat of fur, Vonnegut's practice of placing an asterisk* after the names of characters who are to be killed off shortly, and the haunting image of LT Trout's explaining at the end of the book that he's written the entire novel in air with his finger, for lack of paper or an audience with big enough brains to notice. Also when he explains that the simpleton fish-like humans of the "present" still laugh whenever someone farts.

Overall, the work is flawed but worth the relatively short read for its artistic achievements, grand technical undertaking, quirks, and inventiveness. It will make you think during reading it, but probably not too long afterward.