Customer Reviews

La\Planete des Singes

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Upon reading a review of Tim Burton's movie version of "Planet of the Apes", I was surprised to learn that the original was a French novel, and sufficiently intrigued to buy a copy at French Amazon. The book is a lot better than either movie version. It could actually be classified as literature. I'll admit that watching movie actors prance around in ape suits has a certain cheesy charm, but the novel is much more interesting than the films.
The novel is serious and thought-provoking, but also has its highly entertaining, funny moments. For instance, in the book the Charlton Heston character is captured by the apes and is then held captive in a laboratory as an experimental subject. The study's goal: elucidate human mating habits. The wounded pride and perplexity of our hero as he gradually figures out exactly what the apes expect him to do are wonderfully expressed in the book. (By the way: I don't recall this happening to Charlton Heston in the movie.)
For fellow students of French, I can assure you that this novel is readable. It's level is not too difficult, and the story holds your interest.

Coming from a part of Canada where French is not spoken
much, I usually find reading French fiction fairly challenging.
So I found it quite surprising that this book was so easy to
read (just as the other reviewer has noted).
I suppose a couple of factors that make the book easy for
a non-native speaker without the grasp of the conversational
language: on the one hand, it was probably written to appeal
to teenage SF fans; on the other hand, the main character spends
most half of the book locked up in the cage with no one to speak
to, and the other half, mostly talking about "scientific"
matters - which means that even if you don't know the
language well, you can guess the vocabulary, and hardly
ever need to use the dictionary.

I wish it had fallen into my hands some 20 years earlier:
to a teenager --even not quite francophone one--
it would be as much fun to read as any of
Isaac Asimov's novel, or Karel Capek's "War with the Newts".

Pierre Boulle is no Nevil Shute or George R. Stewart,
and does not aspire
to scientific plausibility. (Although, what with
tool-using and ASL-signing orangutans like Chantek, who
knows?). Like Capek's novel, Pierre Boulle's novel
well may be more satire than science fiction - especially
considering the author's wartime experiences in Indochina
and time of the novel's writing, right after the
breakdown of the Europe's colonial empires.

Am looking forward to getting of hold of Pierre Boulle's
other famouse book, "Le Pont de la Rivière Kwaï".