Galapagos (Kurt Vonnegut)

Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a funny, satyrical book not unlike Slaughterhouse-Five. I really liked it. Those two are the only two Vonnegut books I've read so far and hopefully the rest of them are equally good.

Like in Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrator here is omniscient, but instead of being the author's voice or a meta-comment on his own experience, here he chooses -brilliantly- a ghost, that of his alter-ego Kilgore Trout's son. He's not an important character, just a disembodied voice that tells the main story, but his own story is where Vonnegut's warmth comes through. He, too, (Leon Trout, that is) has been scarred by a war.

But the book itself is a play on Darwin's evolutionary theory, using it (and the Galapagos islands) as a backdrop against which to tell a surreal story about a group of people surviving a plague that makes the rest of the world infertile, by shipwrecking in the Galapagos, and how, over 1 million years of evolution later, their big mammal brains have evolved so that they're little more than animals now. No tools, no philosophy, no worrying about the future. Just fishing with their fins and sleek bodies.

What in a lesser writer would have sounded stupid, or a mean critique of manking, or preposterous, plays to Vonnegut's strengths. He fills his characters with humanity -that is, failures- and each phrase is beatiful to read and say aloud. The story jumps back and forth as the narrator fancies, very much like in Slaughterhouse-five, only the excuse here for that technique is not Billy Pilgrim being unstuck in time, but rather that a million years is a long time for a ghost to dwell on humanity's foibles, and so we give him a little leeway to shape the story however he wants to.

The book is brilliant, and I didn't give it a five because I felt it lacked a stronger conclusion or another anchor to the story. The very nature of the back and forth technique takes some of the energy out of the end of the story, but that's what gives the overall experience a very solid feel, without ups and downs in plot.
Likewise, the characters are well-crafted, but not especially likable or interesting. Only the narrator, whose voice grows in strength and weight as the story rolls out, ends up being our own small conscience in our big brains.

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