Galapagos

He treads (as ever) a fine line between kooky craziness and a sort of maudlin pessimism. Incredibly it works over the length of the novel and this is engaging and funny throughout, without being so ridiculous that the ideas and message are lost. As an overall meditation on evolution, it doesn’t really work - or, in any event - he’s not really talking about biological evolution as such, but more whether people are better (or worse) than animals and whether intelligence, culture, morality etc. are worth all that much in the end. For such a humorous novel, actually the overall conclusion seems pretty bleak. His answer is ‘no’, if we lost those things that made us human, or even if the human race was wiped out completely, well - nothing of value was lost…