Planet of the Apes

© 1963 by Pierre Boulle
Translation by Xan Fielding



If you’re a man my age (early-forties), I guarantee you spent hours and hours and hours as a little kid watching the four Planet of the Apes movies. You may also have had the Planet of the Apes dolls – excuse me, action figures – and spent countless afternoons playing with them. Me and my brother had them all. Taylor, Cornelius, Dr. Zaius, the gorilla warrior, probably even Zira the female chimpanzee. We even had a Planet of the Apes fortress complete with catapults, wagons and bamboo-style prisons. One of my 1970s Christmases was basically a Planet of the Apes extravaganza.

I also read Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes way back then. This was the source novel for the Ape phenomenon from the early 70s. Despite the pics of Chuck Heston or miscellaneous apes from Tim Burton’s 2001 “re-imaging” on the cover, the novel is different from what you may be familiar with from teevee. I hardly remembered the book I read over thirty years ago – save for the twist ending, a twist which is different from Heston writhing before the half-buried Statue of Liberty in the first movie. So I wanted to re-read it. Another factor initiating a second visit was the fact that Boulle also wrote The Bridge over the River Kwai. Perhaps I was in for a rare treat that my juvenile brain could not appreciate all those years ago.

Verdict: It was okay. A surprisingly quick read, I finished the 268-page paperback in about three hours. A “B” grade popped into my mind immediately on completion. Also this thought – I understood how it was a revolutionary novel at the time of publication, a “satire” of varying degrees of subtlety, but I also have to say this is one of the rare occasions where the movie version is “better” than it’s source novel.

Honestly, it’s probably been thirty years or more since I first saw the original Charlton Heston film adaptation in its entirety, so forgive any little bit of haziness I may have. I was a little apprehensive about this review because the most natural thing would be to compare and contrast the novel with the film, but that’s just something I can’t do. But I can tell you some broad differences, and give my thoughts on the novel.

Generally, the book and movie tell the same story. Human astronauts land on an earthlike planet, discover simians are the ruling species, protagonists get captured, are revealed to be intelligent, must prove it, and then must get out because it’s too dangerous to ape society. Both contain the destroyed landing craft, the hunting of humans in the field by the gorillas, caged protagonists, the revelation of human intelligence. Cornelius, Zira, and Dr. Zaius are in both. The endings are different, however, and the book contains not one but two pretty shocking surprises in the final pages. Yeah, I was able to anticipate them, but I was looking for them. And though they don’t pack the visual impact of that half-buried Statue of Liberty, they still made a reading of the book worthwhile.

The apes in the book were more advanced. They had aircraft and surgery with anaesthesia and were launching Sputniks. Their dress and manners were more a mirror of 20th century human society than comes across in the more primitive culture of the movie. They do speak a different language which our hero has to learn – that always bugged me in the movies, how Heston didn’t think twice that all the apes spoke English. And I like how Boulle keeps the reader guessing as to whether this planet is Earth in the future or not. I didn’t find the answer out until the last chapter or so.

Boulle considered the novel a satire, and it’s all there. I was sickened by the cruelty of the ape scientists experimenting on the semi-intelligent indigenous humans. The doctrinaire orangutan scientific establishment mocks the lock-step of our contemporary scientific community. The brutal scenes of gorillas hunting men, women, and children makes me regret even more the two pheasants and two rabbits I shot as a teen. And perhaps this is why I gut-feel the movie better than the novel. The movie created a realistic ape society for action, shock and surprise, and only then satire, whereas part of my brain kept reminding me as I read the book that the ape society so much like ours existed only to critique our humanity.

As a final note: the novel was originally written in French. So instead of our hero being a macho American astronaut named Taylor, he’s a Frenchman named Ulysse Merou. That conjures up a whole different set of images, doesn’t it? But I’m willing to give the novel a pass here; I actually kinda dig that name. Plus, Apes is written with “France” as “home.” So, for example, when Earth is approached we see first the cloud-enshrouded globe, then the Euro-African land mass, then Europe, and then, finally, France. Another neat point: The translation I read was done by someone named Xan Fielding. Don’t know anything about that person, but I absolutely love that name. Might make it into some of my fiction down the road …