For me, there’s nothing better than Charlton Heston kneeling in the ocean, punching the waves and screaming, “You finally did it, didn’t you! You blew it up! Aw… Damn you! God Damn You All to Hell!” The original Planet of the Apes movie is a four star film, and deserves them all. Of course its unnecessary sequels get diminishing returns, and the Tim Burton remake from a few years ago should go without mention, because it Sucks. But what started all this? It turns out the original 1963 novel by Pierre Boulle is just as good as the original movie. And because the novel and movie are very different, it’s a perfect remake situation; there’s no Watchmen or Fight Club controversy, no need to argue if the book or movie is better, because both are excellent for the story they tell.
One interesting note, the copy I read is from the fifteenth printing of the 1963 paperback version. It has pictures from the 1968 movie on the cover, so it must be from sometime after that. I was thinking of calling it a novella, because my copy is 128 pages long. And the 128th page is the last piece of paper before the back cover, no padding. Now, looking on Amazon, I see a 2001 printing clocking in at 272 pages, more that double! It’s curious what’s going on here. I didn’t find the print in my version hard to read, but now that I think about it the words were compact. New chapters began after only a line break, as if the printer was trying to save on paper. And think, the new printer is using double the paper, with less than half the words per page. Do today’s readers demand larger words? Maybe a more robust book can command a higher price? My thin version looks worth its 75 cent cover price; it’s a very economical presentation. I hope this page discrepancy has explanations other than the obvious: today’s readers have half the ability of readers just 40 years ago. Extrapolating that trajectory, we’re 40 years away from a society collapsed under the weight of illiteracy, ripe for the Apes taking.
Our story begins in space, where a couple on a romantic getaway come across a bottle hurdling through the void. They maneuver their elegantly conceived ship, a sailing vessel able to change shape and color to tact across the solar winds, to catch the bottle, and discover a message within, the memoirs of a human named Ulysse Merou. The loving couple is then revealed to be a mere frame story, who comment on the tale in the bottle a few times and are then all but forgotten until the end.
Ulysse’s odyssey is a voyage undertaken by his journalist self and two other brave men of science, from the Earth to a planet in the Betelgeuse system. They travel aboard a ship able to do just short of light speed, and the pages detailing the ramifications of this are so boring I put down the book for a year and a half. I don’t exaggerate, I got the book two Christmases ago. It’s really just two pages that need to be powered through, pages explaining the subjective time the crew of the ship experience. Just as two boring pages can take a year and a half to read, just a handful of years aboard their speeding craft are hundreds from the universe’s perspective.
They arrive at a planet not unlike Earth, although with a redder sun and different continents, and a 20th century civilization, 500 years more primitive than the men’s star-faring society (and that was only when they left Earth). They take a launch and land in a forest away from the major cities, not wanting immediate attention. To be sure the atmosphere will support them, they let their trusty space chimp take point onto the surface. He breathes fine, and immediately runs off, likely not thrilled about having his life risked like it was nothing. The men disembark.
Soon they find a pool to frolic in, and they find a native. She’s a human, and she’s the hottest thing that’s ever happened to them. The writing takes on a fun pulpy style as the men observe her:
I held my breath at the marvelous beauty of this creature from Soror, who revealed herself to us dripping with spray, illuminated by the blood-red beams of Betelgeuse. It was a woman- a young girl, rather, unless it was a goddess. She boldly asserted her femininity in the light of this monstrous sun, completely naked and without any ornament other than her hair, which hung down to her shoulders. True, we had been deprived of any point of comparison for over two years, but none of us was inclined to fall a victim to mirages. It was plain to see that the woman, who stood motionless on the ledge like a statue on a pedestal, possessed the most perfect body that could be conceived on Earth. Levain and I were breathless, lost in admiration, and I think even Professor Antelle was moved.
Standing upright, leaning forward, her breasts thrust out toward us, her arms raised slightly backward in the attitude of a diver taking of, she was watching us, and her surprise clearly equaled our own. After gazing at her for a long time, I was so dazzled that I could not discern any particular feature: her body as a whole hypnotized me.
I wanted to quote a lot of that section, it’s fun right? The men hold a “Hee hee, Yeah!” conversation, and then to break the mood, their chimp runs out of the woods and the pretty naked lady instantly beats it to death.
Ulysse names this as-sexy-as-she-is-deadly woman Nova, and we’re all in love. The explorers soon find more like her, and they realize, the humans of this world have the minds of animals, making it all even hotter. They retreat to their launch, but the natives abhor these strange men acting against the local customs, and soon raid their base, wrecking the craft, tearing the men’s clothes off and destroying them, and marching them to their village of grass nests where our hero Ulysse and Nova get to cuddle. He makes it clear to the reader, that while she’s fun, he doesn’t quite think of her as a person, perhaps more as a pet? He weighs his feelings toward her: she did kill their monkey, and probably led the others in destroying their way home and forcing them on a hellish march through the jungle. “But how could one hold this against her when faced with the perfection of her body?”
And then the Apes come. Of course on this planet, the Apes wear the pants, and the shirts and so on. They show up as a hunting party of gorillas, shooting some humans for sport and catching others to bring home, to be used. One of the Earthlings doesn’t make it, one disappears to turn up later, and Ulysse and Nova are taken and placed in the care of behavioral science.
Being on a planet of apes blows Ulysse’s mind. They have their own cars, airplanes, suits, language, and Pavlovian experiments. He, Nova, and others are placed in cages and taught to do simple tricks for rewards by an insightful chimp named Zira, and her superior, a rigidly thinking orangutan named Zaius. Ulysse immediately impresses by doing things he shouldn’t be able to do, amazing Zira, but leaving Zaius underwhelmed. During this time, Ulysse is placed in a shared cage with Nova, maintaining that while she’s pretty, she’s just an animal, and he’s much too principled to go there. To the reader it’s plain, despite his self-denial, of course he’s in love with her, she’s got all she needs to. Seeing Zaius pairing the humans off Ulysse takes offense at the experiments to come, but seeing who he’s paired with, “I made no protest when [the Apes] flung me at the feet of the nymph of the torrent.”
Again, the writing is quite fun. At first Ulysse refuses to play ball, but after Zaius suggests he be paired with an old lady, he gets pissed off, gets paired back with his woman, and to the joy of ape science, he and Nova enjoy some Business Time.
All the bits about science are clever satire. The fact of experimentation on humans, and the details, whether it’s behavioral stuff that seems silly from our perspective or moments of horror depicting exploratory brain surgery, are always a through the looking glass version of what we humans on this world do to our primate brothers. More than once while reading I thought some slight being forced on a human was unpleasant, only to realize the hypocrisy. But it’s all really funny rather than some hippie bull, take the Ape theory on why their kinds ascended and humans did not:
“With only two hands, each with short, clumsy fingers,” said Zira, “man is probably handicapped at birth, incapable of progressing and acquiring a precise knowledge of the universe. Because of this he has never been able to use a tool with any success.”
“Our being equipped with four hands is one of the most important factors in our spiritual evolution. It helped us in the first place to climb trees, and thereby conceive the three dimensions of space, whereas man, pegged to the ground by a physical malformation, slumbered on the flat. A taste for tools came to us next because we had the potentiality of using them with dexterity. Achievement followed, and it is thus we have raised ourselves to the level of wisdom.”
On Earth I had frequently heard precisely the opposite argument used to explain the superiority of man. After thinking it over, however, Zira’s reasoning struck me as being neither more nor less convincing than ours.
After weeks of living the good life, Ulysse gets ahold of some paper, and is able to demonstrate an understanding of science and mathematics beyond any animal’s training. Zira comes to understand him, and over time they learn each other’s languages in order to hold conversations like the one quoted above. Ulysse comes to understand the world he’s on: there are no wars, and three kinds of smart apes exist: gorillas, orangutans, and chimps. Of course this is a playing field for more social satire. Gorillas are brute and unimaginative, and so they serve as hunters, laborers, and upper management. Orangutans are the middle brow of every institution; they create a great volume of papers while adding nothing. Chimps are the ones to watch, the group responsible for the very few innovations ape society has known.
Curiously, the ape civilization has a bent toward science, but does not progress. And this is the core idea that makes the book so brilliant you’ll never hear the title in the same way again after I tell it. Ape history stretches back 10,000 years, but even at the beginning of that time things were the same, they were still riding cars and airplanes. Ulysse thinks about the products of his own world, take literature, is it made of masterpieces? No, the bulk of it is based on imitation, for every innovative advance is a deluge of copies, a constant repacking of old ideas. Now say you handed apes, so good at imitation that the words “to ape” mean the same, a fully working civilization, what would they make of it? And what if the first contact these apes had with civilization was at the hands of its science apparatus, so that they viewed it with prime importance, but without the minds for the kinds of breakthroughs that make science advance? Ulysse manages to gain the respect of the ape public, and works alongside ape research studying the distant past of their world. His theory contains some truths, but what they mean is open to perspective. As Ulysse adds to the theory, he doesn’t know if he should be proud that a civilization like his might be the basis for the one he’s in, or humbled that his civilization can be reproduced so easily.
For final act drama, Nova turns out to be pregnant. There’s a fun breakdown where Ulysse asks the reader to imagine what this is like for him, to travel hundred of light years, meet a human animal and be locked away with her, and then to become a father on this other world! The ape authorities are nervous over this: what if the child is intelligent? They don’t need smart humans trying to take over their good thing. Ulysse himself suffers from no less pride in his species, he’s thinking, hell yeah my kid’s going to talk, the first of many, we’re setting up shop here.
In other goings on, the Earthling lost earlier returns to the story with his own “solution to the problem of existence”, which is a clever phrase probably more profound than I can understand. Ulysse attempts to romance Zira and get a little side thing going, his poetic mind keeping their circumstances as bay, “Ah, what matter this horrid material exterior! It is her soul that communes with mine.” But is anything so simple?
And then the ending is fantastic, as fantastic as the one in the movie. But I won’t give it away here.