Galapagos - Kurt Vonnegut (First UK edition)

Mrs Jacqueline Onassis was persuaded to take the cruise by the courtship dance of the blue-footed boobie. Having seen the phenomenon on educational television, she found it more than she could resist. After that Henry Kissinger, Rudolf Nureyev, Paloma Picasso and all the rest of them signed up at once. Unfortunately, just at the last moment, 'The Nature Cruise of the Century' fell foul of a world-wide economic crisis and a deeply insulted Ecuadorean waiter, so that the flight from New York carrying the notables to their ship, the Bahia de Darwin, had to be cancelled. Six lesser mortals, however, had arrived at the Hotel El Dorado in Guayaquil, Ecuador, under their own steam and it would be left to three of them, with very dubious assistance, to carry on the human race once everyone else on the planet had perished soon thereafter. That was in A.D. 1986, a million years ago.

Human beings had preposterously large and active brains in those days – weighing three kilograms or more – which got them into no end of trouble. Former biology teacher, Mrs Mary Hepburn (easily the least notable person on the original passenger list) used to maintain that the human brain admirably equipped the species for survival. That was a laugh. She had not yet been marooned on Wolf Island in the Galapagos Archipelago with an incompetent naval captain, a very pregnant Japanese lady, a blind girl and six Kanka-bono natives – also female.

In a sense it probably was Mary Hepburn's brain more than anything else which saved mankind from extinction, though Captain von Kleist took none too kindly to her playing fast and loose with his sperm in her ad hoc artificial insemination programme. How was Mary to know there was a calculable chance that von Kleist carried a strain of 'Huntington's chorea' in his genes – a hereditary disease of the brain which might have passed on to the humans of the next million years a propensity in the male to murder his mate sometime in mid-life? The good captain never mentioned it. As chance would have it, von Kleist was not a carrier, but it was a close ecological shave.    At the heart of the gripping dottiness of this unforgettably entertaining novel are vital messages for our species. Not since Charles Darwin have the Galapagos Islands thrown up such thought-provoking morsels for our three-kilogram brains to ingest. Amongst the flightless cormorants, larcenous frigate birds and, of course, the blue-footed boobies, we witness the Law of Natural Selection in action as it has certainly not acted before. Kurt Vonnegut has never been funnier or more serious.