You Shall Know Them

Very early one morning a doctor is called out to attend the corpse of a newborn baby who has been killed, the father freely admits, by a shot of strychnine chlorhydrate which he himself has administered. The police are called, but where is the mother? ‘She was taken back to the Zoo yesterday.’ ‘The Zoo? Does she work there?’ ‘No, she lives there … The mother is not a woman, properly speaking. She is a female of the species Paranthropus erectus.’ So begins Vercors’ classic novel raising the question: What is man?

VERCORS Jean Bruller, who died in 1991, was a French writer and illustrator who co-founded Les Editions de Minuit during the World War II occupation of northern France, publishing his texts under the pseudonym Vercors - an area which was a centre for the Resistance.