Zoological Satire

You SHALL KNOW THEM (249 pp.)--Vercors--Little, Brown ($3.50).

Save for the fact that his "little mouth protruded like a snout," that his jaw was chinless and that he had almost no neck, Garry Templemore was a fine baby. With proper feeding and education he might have overcome the handicap of having four hands and become, like his father Douglas Templemore, a British newspaperman. But the world was not destined to know. Garry was a mere 24 hours old when his father gave him a lethal shot of strychnine.

"Is the mother here?" asked the police inspector, as he stood by the body.

"No . . . She was taken back to the zoo yesterday," said Douglas Templemore.

"The zoo? Does she work there?"

"No. She lives there . . . She is a female of the species Paranthropus erectus."

So opens You Shall Know Them, a pungent new novel by Vercors (real name: Jean Bruller), onetime French Resistance leader and author of the 1944 novel, The Silence of the Sea. Coming as it does only a few months after French Novelist Jean Dutourd's dour little satire, A Dog's Head, in which the human hero was born with the head of a spaniel, it may half persuade U.S. readers that French literature is now steering hell-bent for zoology. But Paranthropus erectus is, in effect, a mere monkey trick to help Author Vercors raise the question: What is man?

Murder or Not? Vercors' question comes up when British scientists discover in New Guinea a large tribe of cliff-dwellers. Paranthropus ("tropi" for short) is a queer chap, human in that he smokes his meat and buries his dead; simian in many of his physical characteristics; a bit of both in that, though normally erect in stance, he is happy to drop on all fours and thunder off at a gallop. Australian wool interests hope that the "tropis" will prove to be a dream-come-true--workers who can be trained to operate a loom without benefit of paycheck.

Newspaperman Douglas Templemore, an idealist, considers the tropis a fine chance for a test case. By killing his son (bred by artificial insemination of a female tropi), Douglas hopes to cause a riot in the realm of race relations. Is he a murderer or merely an owner of a pet, which he has "put to sleep"? If he is a murderer, he may be hanged, but the tropis (and all so-called inferior races) will gain in security and dignity by judicial affirmation that they are human; if he is not a murderer, racists may at last have legal biological grounds for their prejudices.

Metaphysics or Not? As his plot suggests, Vercors is more supple than subtle in the use of his imagination. His strength lies in his good humor, which comes out best when Douglas Templemore comes up for trial. The scientific experts file into the witness box; one is deaf, one is shortsighted, one is smooth as candle grease; but none agrees with the next on what constitutes a human being. Is man to be defined by his jawbone? By his rational capacity? By his grasp of metaphysics? Or is the judge right when he muses (without a trace of cynicism) that the tropis must be animals because they are not cannibals?

Vercors' own conclusion is that while all such criteria are technically important, what really matters is "that no one is a human being by a right of nature . . . What we call human is defined by us alone." Man can become man only when human society recognizes him as such.

You Shall Know Them also contains a halfhearted love story which in no way hides the fact that the book is more a polemic than a novel. On the other hand, since experts have always had trouble defining the novel too, the best all-round term may be: an entertaining tropi.

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