Ape and Essence: A Novel [Paperback]

The book is pretty easy to describe. Two Hollywood types find a manuscript that dropped off a truck bound for the incinerator. The script is entitled, "Ape and Essence," by a William Tallis. Somebody didn't care much for his script; they marked it incinerate and underlined that word twice. The two read the script and try to find Mr. Tallis, only to discover that he died a few months earlier. What follows this brief introduction is the script, in its entirety.

"Ape and Essence" is about a post-nuclear holocaust world. New Zealand escaped the holocaust, and now they are sending explorers to America to see how the world is coming along. The main character here is Dr. Poole, a botanist. The survivors who roam the ruins of Los Angeles capture Poole and agree to let him live if he can improve crop production. Poole witnesses some unusual behavior amongst the natives, behavior that is explained to him by the archpriest of Belial.

Huxley uses this odd world as a backdrop for his own views on humanity in the 20th century. Huxley feels that mankind never got past the beast (or ape) inside. The beginning of the script shows apes dressed as humans, engaging in such delightful activities as chemical warfare and mass killing. These apes even keep Albert Einstein on a leash, signifying man's inability to use our genius to overcome our basest instincts. While strange at times (almost David Lynch-like), I don't think this is too strange for an intellectual like Huxley. He relies on extreme images to capture his despair over the state of mankind. The time frame in which Huxley writes is telling. It's 1948, only a few years after Hiroshima and just about the time the Cold War is really cranking into gear. Huxley must have been appalled that just a few years after the most destructive war in human history, even more horrors are starting to lurk on the horizon.

Huxley makes special mention of a few of man's ideas that lead to this type of nightmare. Both progress and nationalism are killers of mankind, according to Huxley. Nationalism, or the idea that one state is divinely sanctioned over all others, leads to useless killing. As Africa and the Balkans clearly show today, Huxley is not only insightful for his own time, but also prescient for today, as well.

The idea of progress is just as important. Why, with man's ability to create, does he so often use his talents for destructive purposes? It is progress that led to industrialization, which led to cities full of people with created needs. These needs found expression through war, when one set of people decided to take things from others to fulfill their own needs.

Huxley is insightful and his views on what makes humanity tick are dead on. I thought his use of a movie script to convey his ideas was clever, even though it is uneven at times. Huxley does seem to recognize the growing importance of media in disseminating ideas, and perhaps that is why he chose the format he did. I had to chuckle over the idea of this becoming a film in Huxley's day. The Catholics, who were keeping a close eye on Hollywood at this time, would have had a field day with this script-Satanism and unusual mating rituals would send them into histrionics. You can't go wrong with Mr. Aldous Huxley by your side.