Galapagos – as might be deduced by the title, is about evolution. It is also about The Vietnam War, marriage, time, ghosts, devastating economic crises, survival, maternal/ paternal relationships, time, coincidence and more. The book is only two hundred and thirty odd pages long, and Vonnegut masterfully orchestrates his short paragraphs and chapters in order to tell us a sweeping tale that covers over a million years.
I recognised the style of Galapagos as similar to Slaughterhouse 5. Vonnegut is no literary realist, and instead he employs a fiction by inference technique. He is able to build up a picture of the destruction of human society, for example, in a very sparse smattering of sentences that he scatters throughout his chapters and paragraphs. It is an efficient and economic technique that enables him to tell a potentially very long story in a short novel.
Vonnegut follows the tradition of HG Wells in positing the possibility of evolution into a lower form. Wells had the Morlocks and the Eloi, who were much inferior to the Time Traveller, but adapted to their environment all the same. Vonnegut has the stranded humans also adapt over the million years to become very well adapted to their environment, but with much less sophisticated brains.
The tale tells the story of how the passengers of a cruise to the Galapagos come to be marooned upon one of the islands, and end up being the only survivors of the human race. The tale of how they get there involves short biographies of the principal characters, short sketches of incidental charaters and broad strokes that place the tale into context.
Vonnegut employs a surprising narrator, has an unusual villain and a tragic-comic denouement for the survivors. I really enjoyed this book for its scope, detail and surprising asides and meditations. It is well worth a read.
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Originally Posted by larryF
