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In the beginning there was a thermonuclear war, as a consequence of which the Djanks and Druzhkies "had destroyed themselves and, madly, all other inhabitants of the earth."1 Thus begins Bernard Malamud's allegorically realistic beast fable, God's Grace (1982). What follows is planet-wide Armageddon: tsunami floods, radiation everywhere, and the implosion of the biosphere so catastrophic that even cockroaches perish. Only one man, paleontologist Calvin Cohn, eludes the Bomb by working at the sea bottom. In the afterglow of the holocaust, he and Buz-a young chimp prodigy he discovers on the surface vessel- shipwreck on a tropical island.
Like many other post-apocalyptic protagonists, Cohn takes it as his duty to rekindle civilization from nuclear ashes. But there is a problem. As God rumbles from on high, piqued at finding him alive, he is the only human to survive the Second Flood. Unfazed, Cohn transfers his promethean designs onto Buz and others of his kind who begin to appear on the island. The Lord seems to approve for, equipped with an artificial larynx, Buz miraculously masters human speech. No less miraculously, he teaches it to others (for morphological and anatomical reasons, apes cannot vocalize like humans do).
A new world Adam, Cohn gives names to the newcomers and, displaying a resourcefulness that would make Robinson Crusoe proud, proceeds to engineer a chimpanzee society. Not to replicate the errors of the past, in lieu of a political constitution he lays down seven Admonitions for the post-human age in the hope of steering his communards toward a better life. Daily he lectures to the grooming apes on history, sociobiology, and altruism. Impatient at the pace of progress, he even monkeys with evolution by begetting a child with a "womantically" lisping female, Mary Madelene.
Yet the more he educates the apes under the Schooltree and presses them to obey the dictates of brotherly love, the more nature rears its head, dragging the community towards anarchy. Little by little, the quasi- Edenic garden-on which even insect-pollinated trees get pollinated in the absence of insects-devolves into a primeval jungle. Hostility, racism, and eventually cannibalism write the closing chapters of the communal history. In the final scene, the prodigal son Buz leads captive Cohn up the mountain to slay him in a...