Today, I'm happy to bring you another guest review. This time around, the subject is a potential left-field finalist, the near future novel The Delicate Ape by Dorothy B. Hughes. So I hand over to Don Briago to share his thoughts on The Delicate Ape.
***
If the Retro Reviews have taught us one thing, it's that the pulp
pioneers of the Forties didn't give a hoot about what we now call
"genre boundaries." They promiscuously jumbled mad scientists,
wizards, hard-boiled detectives, robots, vampires, astronauts and
cowboys, and stirred them all together into one glorious
pop-culture stew. So when a celebrated crime writer like Dorothy B.Hughes decides to add her fiction to the melting pot, the SFF
community should welcome her, not denounce her as an interloper.
However, we still need to ask, is The Delicate Ape science fiction?
It is a novel published in 1944 that is set in 1957 (or thereabouts
- Hughes never tells us the date, only that the story takes place
twelve years after the end of the war. By 1944, after the Battle of
Stalingrad, most Americans felt that the Nazis were toast but
feared that the war with Japan would drag on for years. Presumably
Hughes didn't want to jinx the outcome by naming a specific day of
surrender.) Technically it's about "the future", but otherwise it's
a purely mainstream, naturalistic thriller with none of the pulp
trappings of vintage SF. Hughes has no interest in delving into
possible technological or sociological changes. There are no jet packs. (Seriously, where
are our jet packs? It's 2020!) There are no other futuristic
gadgets (such as TV sets, which were already a reality) or any
dystopian tropes.
So is it SF or not? My head says "Yes" because Ape is set in an imaginary future. My heart says "No" because Ape doesn't feel like SF... And my head wins, because it enjoys writing posts for
Retro Reviews. Case closed.
Having delivered that totally disinterested and non-arbitrary
verdict, we can now ask if Ape is any good. It won’t be easy, but I’m going to resist the
temptation to point out the many ways Ape’s 1957 differs from our consensus-reality 1957, and laugh at all the
things Hughes got wrong. A work of fiction can never be "wrong." As
I decreed, Ape is inarguably SF, so I’ll treat it as if it were an example of the
alternative history subgenre.
In this alternate 1957, there is no Cold War. The Soviets aren't
even mentioned, and the defeated Germany is not split into
Communist East and Capitalist West. Instead it's occupied by a
benign if implausible new branch of the American government called
the Peace Department. For twelve years since the German surrender
the Peace Department has monitored the Germans to prevent them from
stockpiling arms and developing an air force as they did between
the world wars. Since the Germans have been behaving themselves
lately, why don't the occupiers withdraw and let the Germans
self-rule?
No way, says Secretary of Peace Samuel Anstruther, the Germans
cannot be trusted yet. He compiles a dossier on German crimes and
writes a short speech of such stunning, superhuman eloquence that
any diplomat who listens to it will instantly be converted to the
anti-German crusade. (When we finally hear it in the last chapter,
it's an unintentionally hilarious dud.) Unfortunately Anstruther is
bumped off on an airplane (too bad he didn't have a jet pack)
before he can deliver the papers at the Peace Conclave in New York
City, Hughes's forerunner to the UN. Piers Hunt, his deputy and the
hero of the novel, keeps Anstruther’s death secret while planning
to foil those uppity Germans.
Hughes is clearly in her element when Piers walks the New York
streets, and Hughes evokes the urban atmosphere. The rest of the
novel comes across as a laborious effort by the author to make a
Grand Statement while stretching herself and failing miserably.
It's dull and predictable, from the routine double-crosses, to the
three cartoon German villains (Brecklein, Schern, and von Eyna), to
the obseqious portrait of the U.S. President. I just can't bring
myself to summarize the rest of the idiotic plot and forgettable
characters.
I never expected such earnest, lifeless propaganda from Hughes.
It's not just that she writes as if she's never met a diplomat or a
German, it's as if she's never met a human being. Whenever the
story builds up a little momentum, Piers interrupts to remind us
how preferable peace is to war, and how noble the American cause
is. The lurid prose often set my teeth on edge, and the scenes with
the femme fatale Morgen are cheesy beyond belief. In a nutshell, Ape is a dumb political thriller that's transformed into a total slog
by windy rhetoric about War and Peace and Brotherhood.
Hughes received a fair amount of acclaim during her lifetime, and
some now regard her crime novels as among the best ever written. I
haven't read enough crime fiction to judge. Sarah Weinman, who has
an encyclopedic knowledge of the genre, has named Hughes her
favorite crime writer. Yet even Weinman doesn't care for Ape, which she considers a disappointing regression from the qualityof Hughes's previous novels. As with many artists at the time, the
war made Hughes temporarily lose her mind, along with her
talent.
I'd love to disagree with Weinman and say that Ape is an overlooked science-fictional gem, but it's only a mildly
interesting curiosity about the near future by someone who was
understandably anxious about the brave new world being formed
during a global cataclysm. It was probably something that Hughes
had to get out of her system before she could roll up her sleeves
and get to work on masterpieces like In a Lonely Place and Dread Journey. Ape is too overtly didactic to be convincing or entertaining as
fiction. History buffs could perhaps use The Delicate Ape as a springboard for a discussion about contemporary attitudes
towards post-war politics. That's something, but it’s not enough to
deserve a Retro Hugo.
***
Thank you, Don, for this great review of The Delicate Ape, even if the novel itself was diappointing.
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