"Ape and Essence" by Aldous Huxley

In the frame narrative, on the day Gandhi is assassinated, a script-writer and the narrator discover a film script in a movie studio; when they seek out the writer they find that he has died. The second part of the book is his script. Some of it is sententious nonsense. The rest is a science fiction story in which an explorer from New Zealand, the only country to escape nuclear destruction in the Third World War, discovers the post-holocaust society in Los Angeles. Gamma rays have made all but a despised minority 'on heat' only for a five week window every year; those males who are permanently randy are castrated. The Belial-worshipping society is communist-authoritarian and babies born with more than the usual number of disabilities (thanks to gamma rays) are killed as infants just before the next round of copulation.

It is, in short, another chilling dystopia from the author of Brave New World.

The frame narrative (Tallis) seems unnecessary, introducing the scriptwriter impoverished by his womanising and the narrator who sees the world in terms of scenes as painted by old masters. This section was a little wordy: "For all their silken softness, the folds of every garment would have the inevitability and definitiveness of syllogisms carved in prophyry, and throughout the whole we should feel the presence of Plato's God, for ever mathematizing chaos into the order and beauty of art." (Tallis).

When the script began my heart sank: there were elements of pomposity and poetry that got in the way of what is an uncomplicated science fiction story that could have graced any B-movie lucky enough to have escaped the censor. Then, in the middle, the crux of the book revolves around an arch-priest explaining the tenets of his devil-worship: that the devil is in all of us as clearly evidenced by the way mankind repeatedly self-destructs.

It is the message of the book, rather than the magic of its story-telling, that makes this a worthwhile read. In a few short pages Huxley-the-prophet predicts environmental catastrophe and consequent nuclear holocaust resulting from greed and breeding (all excerpts from 'Script')

• "If a machine is fool-proof, it must also be skill-proof, talent-proof, inspiration-proof. Your money back if the product should be faulty and twice your money back if you can find in it the smallest trace of genius or individuality." 
• "Immortal souls ... lodged in bodies that grow progressively sicklier, scabbier, scrubbier, year after year." 
• "Even without the atomic bomb, Belial could have achieved all His purposes. A little more slowly, perhaps, but just as surely, men would have destroyed themselves by destroying the world they lived in."
• "Those wretched slaves of wheels and ledgers began to congratulate themselves on being the Conquerors of Nature ... In actual fact, of course, they had merely upset the equilibrium of Nature and were about to suffer the consequences." 
• "Progress - the theory that you can get something for nothing; the theory that you can gain in one field without paying for your gain in another; the theory that you alone understand the meaning of history ... the theory that Utopia lies just ahead."
• "Since ideal ends justify the most abominable means, it is your privilege and duty to rob, swindle, torture, enslave and murder all those who, in your opinion (which is, by definition, infallible), obstruct the onward march to the earthly paradise." 

The title comes from a passage (cited at the start of the Script section of this novel) in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure when Isabella begs the sexual hypocrite Antonio for the life of her brother, sentenced to death for the crime of premaritally impregnating his fiance:
But man, proud man,
Drest in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d;
His glassy essence, like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven,
As make the angels weep.
Great moments:

• "Ptolemy was perfectly right: the centre of the universe is here, not there." (Tallis)
• "Doesn't every schoolboy know it? Ends are ape-chosen; only the means are man's." (Tallis)
• "Girls. not as they lamentably are, but as the idealists of the brassiere industry proclaim that they ought to be." (Tallis)
• "What she was, unfortunately, was a bit of a bitch. And that bit had grown larger with the passage of the years." (Tallis)
• "Tragedy is the farce that involves our sympathies; farce, the tragedy that happens to outsiders." (Script)
• "From the second century onwards no orthodox Christian believed that a man could be possessed by God. He could only be possessed by the Devil." (Script)
• "Unconditional surrender ... how many millions of children forced to be thieves or prostituting themselves for bars of chocolate?" (Script)
• "If you want social solidarity, you've got to have either an external enemy or an oppressed minority." (Script)

Other books by Aldous Huxley include:

• The Doors of Perception about his experiences with psychoactive drugs which made him a hero to the hippies of the sixties and provided the name for the sixties rock band The Doors.
• Time Must Have a Stop: novelised philosophy of a rather pretentious adolescent

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God