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Thursday, January 30, 2003
posted by gbarto at 1:18 AM:
Book review: Trials of the Monkey by Matthew ChapmanQuote:
Unable to resist the lure of science, creationists have been seduced into a rationalistic trap. Their attempts to explain miracles through science can only end in sorrow: a miracle explained is a miracle destroyed.
This is one of the more reflective passages in a book that is funny, sweet and thoughtful. Matthew Chapman is a British-born, New York-based Hollywood screenwriter. He's also Charles Darwin's great, great, great grandson. So, given the chance to write a book, he focuses on the Scopes-Monkey Trial. Sort of. Along the way, he recounts the sordid details of his messed up life, and those of the messed up lives of an entire branch of the Darwin family tree. Says Chapman, his ancestor knew what he was doing when he titled his book on humanity's place in evolution "The Descent of Man." Having read Darwin's Beagle diaries a hundred years ago, I think Matthew may be being a bit harsh on himself. The picture he gives is open, honest, insightful and funny - and touching.
The form is unusual, but it works, works far better than if Chapman had tried to write a book on any one topic. With his odd form, Chapman contextualizes Dayton, Tennessee, his reactions to it, his life, his family history and the evolution debate all with respect to one another. Though the details get as embarrassing as Rousseau (or today's average tell-all), this is neither Rousseau's Confessions nor its modern counterpart, "I was a drug-addled, disease-ridden, teenage prostitute till the Maharashi saved my life." He talks about how the book came together, but it's not one of those meta-meta-meta books about writing about writing about writing. What it is, really, is (as the subtitle says) an accidental memoir in which we learn what it meant to Matthew Chapman to go to rural Tennessee, meet devout Christians who still believe in the literal truth of the creation story in Genesis, and discover, notwithstanding his snide atheism, that some of them seemed to have a better understanding of life and what it's about than he. (He also discovered some folks who might be in missing-link territory).
Chapman is above all a modern version of Montaigne, telling us about something very different from himself - the Scopes-Monkey Trial - but telling us about himself in the process. (For those who don't like Montaigne, the quirks are there but this is lighter reading.) A marvelous book.
