The Monkeys' Pa

PLANET OF THE APES by Pierre Boulle. 246 pages. Vanguard. $4.50.

Writers used to have fun with the simple-minded idea that if 50 monkeys were locked in a room with 50 typewriters, they would eventually turn out War and Peace. But nothing stays simple. Bringing the conception up to date for the space age, French Novelist Pierre Boulle has concocted a book in which chimps, orangutans and gorillas take over all of civilization and run it as well as it is run now--maybe better. If it isn't War and Peace, well, Boulle is after all only human.

His hero, a jet-propelled Gulliver named Ulysse Merou, lands his spaceship on a distant planet of the Betelgeuse system in the earth year 2502 and finds himself m a perfect replica of earthly society turned upside down. Men and women run naked through the wilds, hunted by beautifully tailored apes. Some are shot for sport, some are captured for scientific study. They are sent into trial space orbits, stuck in zoos, or utilized in medical experiments because they are, after all, physiologically very like the apes themselves. Ape scientists, in fact, believe that apes evolved coevally with man. They speculate that their own ultimate triumph was due to the fact that they had four hands instead of two and therefore used tools more effectively.

Prehensile Tale. Boulle's tale clings prehensilely to this one turnabout joke, but rings nearly as many satiric changes on it as Swift did on the horsey Houyhnhnms. Caught in a hunting drive, the captured earthman watches as elegant female gorillas in fine tweeds utter little cries of admiration for the bag of naked humans their husbands have shot. The survivors are put in cages in the local laboratory, and Merou finds that his dim-witted cellmates take weeks to learn to salivate when the keeper blows a whistle at mealtimes and never really catch on to the trick of piling boxes on one another to get the tasty reward offered by the simian scientists. Merou, however, dumfounds the experts with his speed and disconcerts them by learning the simian language, something that no human has ever done before.

Connubial Cage. When the apes want to study the mating habits of humans, Merou winds up sharing a cell with Nova, a delectable dish who looks like Brigitte Bardot but who troubles Merou because her eyes show no sign of human intelligence. Merou at first refuses to perform connubially for the apes. But when Nova is put in the cell opposite with another strapping human male, he finds himself clawing at the bars like an animal. The apes, reassured by this return to "human" behavior, restore Nova to him. "I must now admit," Merou then relates with a smirk, "that I adapted myself with remarkable ease to the conditions of life in my cage."

In all this, is the author just monkeying around? Not entirely. The human beings of Betelgeuse's planet, it turns out, were once dominant and as highly developed as man on earth in the 20th century. The master race of apes did not evolve faster than men, but superseded them when men became slothful, numbed by a feeling that life is meaningless. The meaning of Boulle's cheerful parable is not a mocking warning but an observation: human dignity is both precarious and precious; too often it is based on pride in achievements that can be matched by clever mimics of what has been done before. Like the Red Queen, Western man has to keep running if he is to keep his place as the lord of creation.

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