Planet of the Ape
By Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
Feb. 23, 1992
REFLECTIONS on the natural world are rarely rewarded with large sums of money. Hence it was particularly gratifying that Ishmael, a thoughtful, fearlessly low-key novel about the role of our species on the planet, won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship last June, with a prize of half a million dollars for its author, a poet and freelance writer named Daniel Quinn. The monetary award, which was intended to encourage “fiction that produces creative and positive solutions to global problems,” was granted, however, under protest by some of the judges.
The size of the award seems to have been part of the problem. “Under no circumstances did we want to give this huge sum to any single book,” said William Styron, one of several judges proposing that a reduced award be divided among four finalists. Turner Publishing, which sponsored the competition, disagreed. Now, with the publication of the novel, readers can judge its merits for themselves.
Like many aspects of the natural world that it seeks to explore, Ishmael is inconspicuous. And without the award, it could well have passed unnoticed. After all, most of us know the basic facts presented here: that our species, with our heedless development and runaway population, is threatening the capacity of the earth to recover from our ravages. However, what distinguishes the book is the degree to which Mr. Quinn comprehends his subject, and his intelligence and originality.
The Ishmael of the title is a gorilla, so deftly drawn that one not only suspends one’s disbelief but becomes fascinated by him. Ishmael was captured as an infant and sold, first to a zoo and later to a menagerie from which he was rescued by a wealthy Jewish benefactor who freed him and provided for him in his will. Ishmael has perceived important similarities between his enforced captivity and our modern way of living, which has isolated us from the realities of existence for so long that we have forgotten who we are and how we got here.The narrator, in turn, has frequently been troubled by a distressing suspicion that he has been lied to about our condition, which is not, he suspects, what we claim. When he notices Ishmael’s ad for a pupil who wants to save the world, he answers it, and a brilliantly envisioned Socratic dialogue begins.
One of the most important things we have forgotten, Ishmael argues, is the fact that we are rooted in the natural world just as firmly as any other animal, and that the rules of that world apply to us too. Since the neolithic age, however, most of us have managed to ignore these rules temporarily. But we won’t be able to flout them forever. To survive, we will have to reinvent ourselves.
To do that we must turn from our favorite Creation stories, in which Creation ends with a pair of human beings in a garden. Instead, we need to remember a time when we lived without our garden, as the Kalahari Bushmen and their predecessors lived for three million years — a time when we understood, however unconsciously, that we belonged to the world, before we got the notion that the world belongs to us.
What makes the book is the way it links insight with imagery. Consider, for example, Ishmael’s reflection on a zoo: “The tiger you see madly pacing its cage is nevertheless preoccupied with something that a human would certainly recognize as a thought. And this thought is a question:
Why?
‘Why, why, why, why, why, why?’ the tiger asks itself hour after hour, day after day, year after year, as it treads its endless path behind the bars of its cage.”
Mr. Quinn writes equally well on the realities of human behavior. In discussing the problems of overpopulation, Ishmael reflects that “if the Navajo started feeling crowded, they couldn’t say to themselves, ‘Well, the Hopi have a lot of wide open space. Let’s go over there and be Hopi.’ Such a thing would have been unthinkable to them. In short, New Yorkers can solve their population problems by becoming Arizonans, but the Navajo couldn’t solve their population problems by becoming Hopi. Those cultural boundaries were boundaries that no one crossed by choice.”
No reality-probing story involving a large, intelligent, captive animal – especially a gorilla – can end happily, and Ishmael is no exception. Even so, by the end of the novel the state of the planet and what is probably the only way to its salvation are laid out for us with an originality and a clarity that few would deny.
