Issue date: 11/8/02 Section: Entertainment

"Her deranged consort chose that moment to attack. "Fuuuuckoooff!" he screeched, lurching up from beneath the window and slashing at her with claws-for-hands. Sarah recoiled, bracing herself for an impact that never came. For there was something awfully wrong with the way Simon was moving - as if his very limbs were unfamiliar to him. He had even misjudged the distance from where he was slumped to where she stood on the nest's edge. Now his hands uselessly combed the air either side of her head. She caught hold of one arm and felt at once the lack of tensility. She caught the other easily enough as well. The consorts muzzled one another across a divide that was at once two feet of gaily patterned rug, and insurmountably strange." - Will Self

Great Apes, by Will Self. 404 pgs.

Any time a novel is immediately heralded as a further installment in the tradition of Kafka and Swift, as Great Apes has been, one can readily imagine that it will be a very strange and entertaining novel. Great Apes is simply one of the strangest novels I have read. Concisely, the plot line goes something like this: Simon Dykes is a very popular artist living in present-day London, and, after a late night of drug-abuse and licentiousness, he wakes to find his girlfriend has been transmuted into a chimpanzee. He then has a serious mental breakdown and is immediately institutionalized and placed in the home of a radical psychologist named Busner (whom you'll learn is actually responsible, although somewhat inadvertently, for Dykes' illness); the rest of the novel delineates his life under Busner's care and eventual rehabilitation. His illness? He is an ape who believes he is human.

The satire of Great Apes is painfully apparent immediately after beginning the novel. From the title (an obvious aping of a little-read, difficult but nevertheless well-regarded satire, The Apes of God, by Wyndham Lewis) on, the comparison of humanity and chimpanity is extensive, from the trendy and often meaningless realm of the art world to the dominance hierarchies of any bureaucratic structure. Self's recreation of the chimp world, so much like our own, but also slightly distorted, is perhaps this novel's greatest quality. Instead of silence there is signlence, instead of sycophancy there is the presentation of one's ischial crag, and so on, in sometimes unbearable detail. This makes for an interesting read, but one feels throughout a curious void, as if the novel were somehow incomplete. One reason for this is the feeling that one gets that this novel is a full-bodied satire trying to dress itself as a serious work. Consequently, the novel progressively becomes tiresome and overly shallow.

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