Ape & Essence by Aldous Huxley
Originally published in 1948.
Huxley opens this philosophical novel with two Hollywood studio execs talking shop and digging through some slush pile scripts that have fallen off a garbage truck. One of these scripts is “Ape & Essence” by a Mr. William Tallis–who, we soon learn when the execs try to track him down, has recently died. He wrote the script hoping to make money to send his granddaughter. Why the execs bother looking for Mr. Tallis is unclear after we read the full screenplay, which takes up the remainder of Huxley’s book and is seemingly unfilmable.
“Ape & Essence” (the script) is, like Huxley’s superior book “Brave New World,” a dystopian fable. It is set in a post-apocalyptic future–somehow warring nations orangutans have forced shackled Einsteins to set off nuclear bombs. A botanist from the un-obliterated New Zealand, makes a voyage to America, where the mutated populace robs graves for clothing and worships a Satanic figure named Belial.
There are purification rituals and infanticides, as well as much poetry and chanting about “detumescence.” This is one of the more scattered and impenetrable of the early (post-Hiroshima) apocalyptic narratives.