Not my favourite Vonnegut, but it's still clever, funny, humane and touching.
Memorable moments, plot developments and narrative devices: The entire tale is narrated by the ghost of Leon Trout; said ghost declines to enter the blue tunnel to the afterlife after being decapitated during the construction of the cruise ship which delivers the human survivors to their sanctuary in the Galapagos island; ghost waits for a million years for another opportunity to enter blue tunnel to the afterlife, witnessing the shipwrecked survivors of humanity evolve into seal-like creatures with fins and beaks (and highly attractive nubbins on their fins, vestigal traces of fingers); Biology teacher Mary engages in a little artificial insemination by reaching inside of herself to retrieve the sperm from the island's only male - she dips her index finger into herself and then into the six kanka-bono women who have been shipwrecked with the rest of the crew; Vonnegut places stars (*) in front of the names of characters who are about to die; The *'s start out as a purely amusing device but prove very affective when a character we have grown to have some sympathy with suddenly has a * placed before their name; Gary loves the fact that even after a million years have passed, even after mankind's brains have shrunk and their arms have evolved into fins, people still laugh when someone farts; there's a great description of the mating dance of the blue-footed boobie.
Here's something like a synopsis from the New York Times's original review: ''Galapagos,'' however, seems to scrabble back toward the energies of earlier works. It is the story, sort of, of a second Noah's ark, a 1986 nature cruise booked with celebrities (Mick Jagger, Paloma Picasso, Jacqueline Onassis and others) that in the wake of planetary catastrophe - famine, financial crises, World War III and a virus that eats the eggs in human ovaries - is fated to land on the Galapagos Islands and perpetuate the human race. Humanity ''was about to be diminished to a tiny point, by luck, and then, again by luck, to be permitted to expand again.''
All this may sound like a glittery and Darwinian ''Gilligan's Island'' - not really what ''Galapagos'' is at all. Although certainly the novel has something to do with the giant crush America has on celebrity, the famous people never really do make it into the story, and what we end up with is a madcap genealogical adventure - a blend of the Old Testament, the Latin American novel and a lot of cut-up comic books - employing a cast of lesser-knowns that includes a schoolteacher named Mary Hepburn, an Ecuadorean sea captain named von Kleist, a former male prostitute named James Wait (whose skin color is ''like the crust on a pie in a cheap cafeteria''), a dog named Kazakh (who, ''thanks to surgery and training, had virtually no personality''), plus a narrator who turns out to be none other than the son of Kilgore Trout, that science fiction hack from Mr. Vonnegut's earlier books.
Leon Trout, Mr. Vonnegut's doppelganger, speaks to us, moreover, from a million years hence, from the afterlife, whence he can best pronounce on what was wrong with us 20th-century folk - our brains were too big - and reveal what, through evolution and for purposes of survival, we became: creatures with smaller brains and flippers and beaks. Even if people of the future ''found a grenade or a machine gun or a knife or whatever left over from olden times, how could they ever make use of it with just their flippers and their mouths?'' Leon Trout asks. And: ''It is hard to imagine anybody's torturing anybody nowadays. How could you even capture somebody you wanted to torture with just your flippers and your mouth?''
Postscript: Here's the bit I like about the stars, "The two with stars by their names [this follows a list of names] would be dead before the sun went down. This convention of starring certain names will continue throughout my story, incidentally, alerting readers to the fact that some characters will shortly face the ultimate Darwinian test of strength and wiliness".
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