Planet of the Apes (Pierre Boulle, 1963)

I plucked the slim volume that is Planet of the Apes from the shelf a few days ago, and I quickly polished off the translated-from-the-French tale of gorillas, chimps and orang-utans. I’d seen the Tim Burton movie of the same name (at the cinema, twice for some reason) and wasn’t very impressed, but I’ve not got round to watching the Charlton Heston-starring original, or any of its sequels. I had few expectations for the book, so I was pleasantly surprised to find it’s a cracking read.

Ulysse Moreau is our narrator, one of three men to jet off from Earth in the not-too-distant future into space, to another galaxy. After 2 years travelling, thousands of years pass and they land on an Earth-like planet named Soror, which turns out to be populated by men and apes. However, the men run naked and feral in the jungles, the apes wear clothes and hunt and experiment on the men, in a reversal of life on Earth. Ulysse is captured by scientists and he eventually persuades them through his ability to learn and talk the simian language that he is from another planet.

Even though I knew the shock ending, having seen the recent movie and being aware of the famous scene from the original movie (that’s printed on the front of the DVD box!) that reveals the planet Soror was Earth all along (spoiler!), the book is effectively creepy and maintains an air of mystery throughout. It is not actually explicitly stated that Soror *is* Earth, rather that the planet used to be like Earth before man got too lazy and the ape’s ability to ‘ape’ mankind lead to them overthrowing their human masters. There are a couple of extra twists after these revelations that I admit I didn’t see coming until the last point. The twists make sense too, rather than the weird monkey-Abraham Lincoln memorial at the end of Burton’s film.

It’s good to read a book that was originally written in a different language for a slightly different perspective on the world. For instance, Ulysse speaks French rather than English, and when he returns to Earth at the end he lands using the Eiffel Tower for guidance, and in less explicit ways there are non-US/English reference points. The simian characters in the book, Zira and Cornelius, and well drawn, and sometimes it’s difficult to remember they are chimpanzees. I especially liked the hierarchy between the three ape species, and how Orang-utans are stubborn bureaucrats, Gorillas law enforcers and chimps more intelligent scientists. The fact they live together harmoniously without war is another indictment of how man cannot do the same, and there is some social conscience about experimentation on animals. All of this commentary on the human experience is secondary to the cracking story and taught writing, and it all adds up to a satisfying whole.