Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

After I recently re-read Slaughter-House Five, I shared that I had read all of Vonnegut’s early fiction but that I had been disappointed in his later books and eventually stopped reading them. I think Breakfast of Champions, published in 1973, was the last I read. (Though I must have read it later. I was eleven in 1973). A friend recommended I read Galapagos, which came out in 1985. He said it was one of his favorites. I pretty much always take up book recommendations from friends. So I read it.

Galapagos takes place in 1986, one year in the future for Vonnegut as he writes the novel, but it takes place a million years in the past for Vonnegut’s narrator, who we learn by the end of the novel is the ghost of Leon Trout, the son of Kilgore Trout, the prolific but unsuccessful science fiction writer that hovers in the background of many of Vonnegut’s novels, including Slaughter-House Five.

The story, in 1986, is that a handful of people have arrived in the port of Guayaquil, Ecuador, preparing to embark on the boastfully marketed “Nature Cruise of the Century” bound for the Galapagos Islands. Unfortunately for the cruise, and for all of humanity, that particular day sees numerous simultaneous catastrophes that will destroy all human life on the planet except for a few of Vonnegut’s characters who survive, isolated on the fictional Galapagos island of Santa Rosalia where they become the Adam and Eves of a new human race. One million years later humanity still exists but transformed by their island environment and the process of natural selection, into fur-covered water creatures, with flippers and beaks, adapted for fishing, and, blessedly, with smaller brains.

All of Vonnegut’s hallmarks are here. Not only Kilgore Trout, but Vonnegut’s style of writing by arranging discrete paragraphs one after the other. Vonnegut, through his narrator, swings through his story intermixing dollops of plot with facts about the Galapagos islands, and Charles Darwin, and philosophical asides. The story is told linearly but the narrator, remembering the story from a million years later drops hints of information about future events in the lives of the characters before we get to them chronologically. The story, then, is delivered as a set of disconnected notes, which then get put together piece by piece as the reader reads through them.

Vonnegut’s dark humor is here, as is his sympathetic but ultimately pessimistic view of humanity. The big idea of Galapagos is that evolution has cursed the human species with brains far too big for any practical purpose, and so our brains constantly lead us astray into lying (to ourselves and others), assigning importance to fictions like money, and creating machines that accidentally or deliberately destroy other humans and other life-forms on the planet.

Of course we create wonderful things, too, like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (Vonnegut’s example) and Vonnegut’s own novels, which no flippered human a million years from now will be able to do, or have any interest in doing. But Vonnegut reminds us that very few humans ever achieve anything like that, and anyway those few creations of human genius are vastly outweighed by our folly.

Are our big human brains an evolutionary mistake? Well, evolution has a means of correcting mistakes. Would the world be better if we hadn’t developed these brains? Well “better” isn’t a judgement evolution can make. Only a species with a big brain can do that.

I could give you a list of characters and the incidents that fill their time in Guayaquil (Book One of the novel) and then on Santa Rosalia (the much shorter Book Two) but they don’t really matter that much. The characters and plot are the thin medium for Vonnegut to present his ideas about the evolutionary dead-end of intelligence. And that’s OK. But it makes for a strange sort of novel.

Although Vonnegut was completely wrong in predicting world-wide, species-ending, disaster in 1986, he was extraordinarily and amusingly prescient about one thing. One of the characters that gather in Guayaquil is a Japanese inventor named Zenji Hiroguchi. Hiroguchi has invented a pocket computer called Mandarax that has the ability, among other things, to translate human speech from one language to hundreds of others, to pull up quotes from historical figures based on any key word, to diagnose the thousand most common human diseases, and to teach subjects like Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging, which Mandarax learned from Zenji’s wife. In the fictional world of Galapagos, in 1986, Mandarax is a prototype with only ten in existence, nine in Japan and one in Guayaquil with its inventor. In the fictional world of Galapagos, on May 9, 2016, Zenji’s Mandarax is thrown into the ocean where it’s swallowed by a shark. In real life, today, I have a Mandarax in my pocket, and you probably do, too.