Book Review: Trials of the Monkey

Through a strange serendipity (is there any other kind?), I started reading Trials of the Monkey at about the same time as I was watching the Nova show Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial. In Judgment Day, the author of Trials, is interviewed. An avowed atheist and great-great-grandson of Darwin himself, Matthew Chapman is now a successful screenwriter, living in New York City.

He was feeling closed in by the rat race that is Hollywood and began casting about for something else to do. As the annual recreation of the famous Scopes Trial was coming up, he decided to write a book about current views in that area of Tennessee. So he embarked on a bus journey there, and began writing his book.

Which quickly evolved (nyuk nyuk) into an autobiographical sketch, leading to the subtitle of the book -  An Accidental Memoir. This surprised him as much as his editor, but it leads to a very interesting description of his growing up in England as the son of a very colorful parents, including his mother, an alcoholic great granddaughter of Darwin. Through some very colorful vignettes, Chapman describes his childhood, complete with his unnatural fixation on girls from an early age, which leads to his expulsion from several schools. His is a brutally honest book, often painting himself with almost painful glee as a very warped child!

Interspersed with these autobiographical chapters are the descriptions of his first trip to Dayton, Tennessee, a few months before the trial recreation. As someone who has lived most of his life in the nearly secular (at least, relatively speaking) Northeast US, I found the description of Dayton, with its 45 churches for a population of about 6,000 and its never ending series of religious billboards, to be particularly scary. There are some pretty funny (yet eerie) chapters of him poking about into tent revivals, interviewing the head creation "scientist" at the local Bryan College and other outrageous examples of religion gone wild that I just never have to deal with here.

Chapman also gives an excellent overview of the Scopes Trial itself, complete with thumbnail biographies of the three main contestants - Scopes, Bryan and Darrow. He also gleefully quotes HL Mencken all over the place:

Today, with the curtain barely rung up and the worst buffooneries to come, it is obvious to even the town boomers that getting upon the map, like patriotism, is not enough... Two months ago the town was obscure and happy. Today it is a universal joke.

There is one chapter ("Spelunking with the Christians") that has to be one of the funniest chapters I have read in a very long time. I haven't laughed so hard reading a book since my first reading of A Confederacy of Dunces. I had tears running down my cheeks, as his description of the ride over to the cave in a van full of devout Christian teenagers, lead by his "favorite Creationist" was so full of acid descriptions. And the actual cave trip...

I expected a big yawning mouth with a souvenir shop to one side. I thought we'd plod dutifully within, along well-defined paths until it was almost dark - and then turn around an exit, going "Boy, was that something or what?" [ed. note- that's been my cave experiences] But clearly this is to be an experience of an altogether different order and magnitude.

It's a slit!

The entrance to the cave is a ragged horizontal slit, like a mouth clumsily hacked into a pumpkin at Halloween. Even more alarming, it's at ground level. Doughty Christians insert themselves into it with difficulty, slither down in steep descent - and disappear. This is not for tourists. This nasty, malevolent gash which at its highest is no more than three feet, can only be an invitation to something worse. There's no souvenir shop and not a single reassuring sign saying 'Mind Your Head' or 'Don't Touch The Stalactites'. It's a real cave, one of those narrow, lethal warrens into which children fall and emerge alive only when the TV movie lies about it a year later. It's a perfect cave for adrenaline deficient professional spelunkers with miners' helmets, ropes and pitons. It's not a cave for a gang of infantile Christians and a middle-aged atheist with a panic attack.

And it just gets funnier. There's a bit of a twist at the end, but it wraps up nicely and he seems to have been better off having written the book. Combined with Judgement Day (and some of the grotesque polls that have come about, like how many people still prefer creationism to evolution), it was a real eyeopener and made me quite sad for the state of education here. One thing that really struck home was the remarkable similarities between the Scopes Trial and the Dover Trial. Here it is, over 80 years later, and the evolution side still has to bring on scientists to point out just how solid and beautiful a theory evolution truly is. Nearly the exact same testimony, showing the power of evolution and how, over the intervening years, it has become even more of a bedrock theory, was brought out for the Dover Trial. And still, perhaps due in part to the guilty finding at the Scope Trial, education is so lacking in some areas they just have never been exposed to the grace of evolution. Sad and disheartening.

But read this book. Trials of the Monkey is incredibly funny and enlightening. Chapman's story is a little less so, as he seems like a odd duck (a fact of which he seems to find truly ironic, given his heredity!). But solid writing and wonderful insights have me penciled in for his next book, which is on the Dover trials.

Trials of the Monkey: An Accidental Memoir

Matthew Chapman