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Great Apes
Fans of Will Self's satirical fiction and stunning prose will not be disappointed in the latest from the author who brought readers through the bizarre war between the sexes in Cock & Bull and into the costly world of high-stakes business in My Idea of Fun. With Great Apes, Self takes readers into a sort of "Planet of the Apes" with a twist.
Simon Dykes is a London painter whose life suddenly becomes Kafkaesque. After an evening of routine debauchery, traipsing from toilet to toilet and partaking in a host of narcotics, the middle-aged painter wakes to discover that his girlfriend, Sarah, has turned into a chimpanzee. Simon is also a chimp, but he does not accept this fact—he is convinced that he is still human.
He is then confined to an emergency psychiatric ward and placed under the care of alpha-psychiatrist Dr. Zack Busner. Simon finds chimp behavior a bit unnatural; he can't bring himself to use gestures rather than speech to communicate. He also finds it difficult to mate publicly or accept social grooming. Dr. Zack Busner—also a medical doctor, radical psychoanalyst, maverick axiolytic drug researcher, and former television personality—is prepared to help Simon get used to "chimpunity". It is during Simon's gradual simianization that Self's true satirical genius shines, as he examines anthropology, the trendy art world, animal rights, and much more.
416 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1997
99 people are currently reading
3557 people want to read
About the author
Will Self
172 books995 followersWilliam Self is an English novelist, reviewer and columnist. He received his education at University College School, Christ's College Finchley, and Exeter College, Oxford. He was married to the late journalist Deborah Orr.
Self is known for his satirical, grotesque and fantastic novels and short stories set in seemingly parallel universes.
Self is known for his satirical, grotesque and fantastic novels and short stories set in seemingly parallel universes.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 262 reviews
March 11, 2021
Innovative concept, but maybe overly cerebral… a man wakes up in a world of chimps and is deemed as insane as he claims to be human. Biting, but an overwritten satire, which reads more like Self telling everyone how smart he is than actual genuine social commentary.. in my most humble opinion. 3 out of 12.
March 18, 2016
Great Apes is no small achievement. For one, it takes what most would guffaw away as a cheap gimmick good enough for a barroom joke (or a sequence of five movies, two television series, and two separate remakes with one spawning its very own sequel) but certainly not enough of a creative impetus to carry the heft of a four-hundred page novel atop its shoulders, right? Wrong. Self’s satiric gusto knows no boundaries in Great Apes, which stars a troubled mope of an artist, Simon Dykes, who after a night of bar hopping, drug snorting, and blackout sex, awakes to find himself trapped in a mirror world of late 90’s London, a strangely familiar reality where Chimpanzees have won out in the evolutional gambit. The twist this novel takes (and makes clear on page one) is that Simon Dykes is delusional—delusional that he ever was a human. Fans of Self will welcome the familiar (albeit furry) face of Dr. Zack Busner, the anti- psychiatrist who peoples many of Self’s short stories. Aging Alpha Chimp Busner is determined that he can cure Dykes and restore the artist’s sense of chimpunity, making this clinical breakthrough the final crowning achievement of his somewhat tumultuous medical career. Unfortunately, Busner has a lot of psychological terrain to cover as he comes to realize how ingeniously developed Dykes delusion of being a human clutches at his psyche. I mentioned this book is a sizeable achievement earlier, and it is within the impregnability of Self’s world building that the promised achievement stands. While a world where group gang bangs will break out in public at a moment’s notice; where father and daughter relations is not only not a taboo but are a staple of a caring family dynamic; where most arguments are resolved with a slap and a quick thrashing, followed by friendly difference-resolving grooming; while all of this (and this only names a few instances) at first seems like a horrific satire of human absurdity (which it is), Self does a painstakingly thorough job at presenting this scenario as a completely natural and logical presentation of a chimpanzee-dominated society. As Dr. Busner slowly chips away at Dyke’s deluded perceptions and ingrained revulsion at the world around him, the book becomes surprisingly touching and generous (not exactly what Self is known for) Great Apes chips away at the reader’s own deluded perceptions and ingrained revulsions, reaching a series of profound considerations about what it means to be a sentient being that has hopes, desires, fears, compulsions, lusts, that—because of or in spite of all that emotional baggage—is still able to build meaningful relationships with other sentient beings. It’s a goddamned weird and wild wonder if you think about it.
May 6, 2012
Okay, this one gets a point for concept and one for some nice prose, when the author isn't trying to beat you over the head with how clever he is and introduce you to a new twenty dollar word with each paragraph. However, the ape dialogue, which is a mixture of English with simian grunts and barks, is just plain annoying. There's only so many "Wraaf"s and "Hoo'Graaa"s I can stand. Incest and genitalia-displaying may well be an important part of chimpanzee culture, but I just can't get on board with a book that contains the sentence "Leave your poor aunt alone, can't you see the state of her vagina."
February 14, 2008
I read this book mainly because of that awful picture on the cover, which was also strangely intriguing, and because I'd heard good things about Will Self. I found myself frustrated not twenty pages in, however, by both the language (which was ridiculously over-written) and the gimmicky nature of the plot (a bunch of apes act like people, basically), both of which stood in for any meaningful plot.
I'm giving this book one star, then, because it didn't make me feel anything at all. Yes, I understand the social issues it explores and the juxtaposition of instinctive behavior with civilization -- an issue with which we all wrestle on some level, I suppose -- but an entire novel wasn't necessary to explore it.
This book is a gimmick, then, more than a story, and I really didn't enjoy it at all.
I'm giving this book one star, then, because it didn't make me feel anything at all. Yes, I understand the social issues it explores and the juxtaposition of instinctive behavior with civilization -- an issue with which we all wrestle on some level, I suppose -- but an entire novel wasn't necessary to explore it.
This book is a gimmick, then, more than a story, and I really didn't enjoy it at all.
October 4, 2021
".....human intelligence is by definition what humans naturally do.."
After a night of routine debauchery in London clubland surrounded by sycophants, artist Simon Dykes awakes up one morning from an uneasy dream to discover himself transformed into a giant ape and his world irretrievably altered. Worse, still his attractive girlfriend, Sarah, is now a sex-obsessed chimpanzee. Simon, not unreasonably, assumes that he is suffering a psychotic episode brought on by overdoing the drink and drugs but he finds himself carted off to a secure psychiatric hospital where a team of primate psychiatrists set about 'curing' him of his bizarre delusion; that he is human. Maverick psychiatrist and sometime television personality, Dr Zack Busner, takes an interest in Simon's case and decides to take him under his wing in the hope that here is a case that will finally make his name.
The London of 'Great Apes' is similar to our own. Its adults drive Volvos and are bankers or work in insurance, whilst their delinquent offspring either hang around on street corners, drinking Special Brew and smoking pot, or patrolling the streets looking for casual sex and violence. But at home their social structure is rigorously chimp: polygamous groups(where premature ejaculation denotes sexual prowess) which are maintained by a strict hierarchy and mutual grooming.Communication is by sign-language, supplemented by hoots and growls.
Self is original and very funny; here he satirises human masculinity, drugs, hospitals, academics, psychiatrists and is gruesomely vivid at times. However, the story feels like a long string of clever puns and in-jokes which ultimately don't seem to go anywhere and are overly drawn out. I found the first 300 pages or so of this novel an outrageous roller-coaster of a ride but unfortunately there were still a quarter of it to go.
After a night of routine debauchery in London clubland surrounded by sycophants, artist Simon Dykes awakes up one morning from an uneasy dream to discover himself transformed into a giant ape and his world irretrievably altered. Worse, still his attractive girlfriend, Sarah, is now a sex-obsessed chimpanzee. Simon, not unreasonably, assumes that he is suffering a psychotic episode brought on by overdoing the drink and drugs but he finds himself carted off to a secure psychiatric hospital where a team of primate psychiatrists set about 'curing' him of his bizarre delusion; that he is human. Maverick psychiatrist and sometime television personality, Dr Zack Busner, takes an interest in Simon's case and decides to take him under his wing in the hope that here is a case that will finally make his name.
The London of 'Great Apes' is similar to our own. Its adults drive Volvos and are bankers or work in insurance, whilst their delinquent offspring either hang around on street corners, drinking Special Brew and smoking pot, or patrolling the streets looking for casual sex and violence. But at home their social structure is rigorously chimp: polygamous groups(where premature ejaculation denotes sexual prowess) which are maintained by a strict hierarchy and mutual grooming.Communication is by sign-language, supplemented by hoots and growls.
Self is original and very funny; here he satirises human masculinity, drugs, hospitals, academics, psychiatrists and is gruesomely vivid at times. However, the story feels like a long string of clever puns and in-jokes which ultimately don't seem to go anywhere and are overly drawn out. I found the first 300 pages or so of this novel an outrageous roller-coaster of a ride but unfortunately there were still a quarter of it to go.
June 13, 2011
We asked three pupils in Class 2B at Roswell High what they would do if they woke up as an ape:
Daniel sez:
“I wish I was an ape in the evenings. If I was an ape in the evenings I would hang around the school gates spooking the teachers. I would knuckle-walk up to that sandal-wearing nonce Mr Almott and slap him so hard around the gums he’d need a new set of teeth to learn basic Esperanto. In the evenings I would sip tea on a tyre suspended from a tree and go “Hoo-haa!” while masturbating so hard my legs would snap off.”
Phil sez:
“If I was an ape I would have corrective surgery and become Phil again. I like being Phil because the other kids in the class know my awesomeness as Phil gets them places, gets them into social places where the cool people hang out and share nectar, Dolmio pasta sauces, back copies of New Scientist, and stylish hombergs as worn by Frank Sinatra. I love being Phil and being an ape would crush the essential me-ness that makes me (Phil) great. ”
Nicola sez:
“If I was an ape I would talk to the other apes about how great it is to be an ape. We’d scratch our bums and gurn at tourists and swing from branches and rut without shame and perform basic tasks that make humans think we’re like them only hairier and uglier. Then I’d do a poo in the shade and feel bad about having a zookeeper clean it up but secretly smirk that I’d made a human being mop up my excrement and I’d giggle like this: “Hoo-ooh-ah-ah-ah-ah-ha!”
**
N.B. I READ THIS BOOK AGES AGO. DON'T HASSLE ME AS TO ITS SPECIFICS.
Daniel sez:
“I wish I was an ape in the evenings. If I was an ape in the evenings I would hang around the school gates spooking the teachers. I would knuckle-walk up to that sandal-wearing nonce Mr Almott and slap him so hard around the gums he’d need a new set of teeth to learn basic Esperanto. In the evenings I would sip tea on a tyre suspended from a tree and go “Hoo-haa!” while masturbating so hard my legs would snap off.”
Phil sez:
“If I was an ape I would have corrective surgery and become Phil again. I like being Phil because the other kids in the class know my awesomeness as Phil gets them places, gets them into social places where the cool people hang out and share nectar, Dolmio pasta sauces, back copies of New Scientist, and stylish hombergs as worn by Frank Sinatra. I love being Phil and being an ape would crush the essential me-ness that makes me (Phil) great. ”
Nicola sez:
“If I was an ape I would talk to the other apes about how great it is to be an ape. We’d scratch our bums and gurn at tourists and swing from branches and rut without shame and perform basic tasks that make humans think we’re like them only hairier and uglier. Then I’d do a poo in the shade and feel bad about having a zookeeper clean it up but secretly smirk that I’d made a human being mop up my excrement and I’d giggle like this: “Hoo-ooh-ah-ah-ah-ah-ha!”
**
N.B. I READ THIS BOOK AGES AGO. DON'T HASSLE ME AS TO ITS SPECIFICS.
December 26, 2022
Imagine waking up to a world run by chimps. Highly functional but still retain their chimpy habits, eating constantly, mating constantly and grooming each other non-stop. The book is as funny as it is disturbing. The new world is parallel to the world as we know it, with its greed, racism, back stabbing but adjusted to the fundamentals of being an ape.
5 stars for a great imagination and execution. Full of complicated rarely used words plus made up words to suit the creatures. Chimpunity, signlense, novocal. Its a book that encourages visualising what is on the page and being grateful it's only fiction.
5 stars for a great imagination and execution. Full of complicated rarely used words plus made up words to suit the creatures. Chimpunity, signlense, novocal. Its a book that encourages visualising what is on the page and being grateful it's only fiction.
March 11, 2020
Surprisingly bad!
Read like 200 pages of it before I was like, nah.
Chimps have annoying speech affectations that are added to every "huh huh" thing they say?
Purple sentences you have to read a few times before you realise--they don't mean anything?
Really slow pace.
Loads of bad sex writing.
Unlikeable characters described weirdly. How their perineums feel and stuff. Lol.
DREAM SEQUENCES!
Repeat jokes show signs of incomplete editing? A bunch of chimps looks like a PG Tips commercial. A few times. (Not even that good a joke.)
Will... Oh well. I love The Book of Dave, Umbrella was cool, half of How the Dead Live was amazing. Like, way better than most are capable of. The guy sure takes some swings though!
Read like 200 pages of it before I was like, nah.
Chimps have annoying speech affectations that are added to every "huh huh" thing they say?
Purple sentences you have to read a few times before you realise--they don't mean anything?
Really slow pace.
Loads of bad sex writing.
Unlikeable characters described weirdly. How their perineums feel and stuff. Lol.
DREAM SEQUENCES!
Repeat jokes show signs of incomplete editing? A bunch of chimps looks like a PG Tips commercial. A few times. (Not even that good a joke.)
Will... Oh well. I love The Book of Dave, Umbrella was cool, half of How the Dead Live was amazing. Like, way better than most are capable of. The guy sure takes some swings though!
April 30, 2022
Very funny in the beginning but so long that eventually the laughing washes off. Moreover, often enough the satire is kinda basic, gross in that backstreet teenage style:
Other times the irony is so predictable the readers are trying hard not to roll their eyes at it:
As for the language, even though there are some clever inventions like “chimpunity”, “signlicense”, “suggesture” and so on, there are also too many “Grnn”, H’hooo”, “huu”, “chup-chupp”, “gru-nnn” to keep being funny in the long run.
Overall, I strongly agree with Sam Leith, who says in his review published in The Guardian, that the novel, although “intermittently brilliant”, becomes, at some point, slightly annoying:
“Still, after 300 pages of 'Chimpunity'; 'Grease humans', 'Anton Mosichimp' and so on, faith in the sustained satiric purpose of the fantasy may give way to the view that the main difference between the chimp world and the human consists in an abundance of puns.”
‘Oh, Reverend, if only you were my alpha. Your arseholiness is so beautiful, your spirituality gushes like spunk from your cock.’
Other times the irony is so predictable the readers are trying hard not to roll their eyes at it:
He went to Videocity in Notting Hill Gate and bought the Planet of the Humans videos – all four of them…
As for the language, even though there are some clever inventions like “chimpunity”, “signlicense”, “suggesture” and so on, there are also too many “Grnn”, H’hooo”, “huu”, “chup-chupp”, “gru-nnn” to keep being funny in the long run.
Overall, I strongly agree with Sam Leith, who says in his review published in The Guardian, that the novel, although “intermittently brilliant”, becomes, at some point, slightly annoying:
“Still, after 300 pages of 'Chimpunity'; 'Grease humans', 'Anton Mosichimp' and so on, faith in the sustained satiric purpose of the fantasy may give way to the view that the main difference between the chimp world and the human consists in an abundance of puns.”
September 14, 2013
This book, if book is what you must call it, stank up my life for ten days or two weeks while I dodged all of the chimpshit Self decided to fling at me, the innocent reader. Chimpshit. That's all it was. Four hundred pages of chimpshit.
Oh. I'm sorry. Did I forget to mention that I thought this novel to be nothing but chimpshit? Pure and fruity chimpshit?
Oh. I'm sorry. Did I forget to mention that I thought this novel to be nothing but chimpshit? Pure and fruity chimpshit?
February 25, 2015
Very funny, and much more erotic than I was prepared for (so be comfortable with chimp porn if you're going to read this). It may sound trite (and possibly is lifted from the back cover of the book), but this novel did make me think about what it means to be human. And I was pleased and surprised when I didn't get the ending I hoped for.
Plus I only had to look up definitions for, like, ten words, max.
Plus I only had to look up definitions for, like, ten words, max.
September 28, 2022
This is modern weird satire at its peak. One of the most entertaining books I've read, although the very last scene didn't deliver.
Realise some folk on goodreads are labelling this as too cerebral, but they can always go off and review Mr Men.
If this was written in an earlier era it would be applauded like Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, and Kafka, but on roids.
Clever, meaningful, engaging and very human - especially for Self.
Realise some folk on goodreads are labelling this as too cerebral, but they can always go off and review Mr Men.
If this was written in an earlier era it would be applauded like Virginia Woolf, Angela Carter, and Kafka, but on roids.
Clever, meaningful, engaging and very human - especially for Self.
Read
January 27, 2015One of my very favourite things to do is stay in bed, drinking coffee and reading. This slim hardback was perfect...
... to act as a coaster for my coffee while I read something that wasn't shite...
... to act as a coaster for my coffee while I read something that wasn't shite...
May 10, 2008
I 1st read mention of Will Self in a text by Stewart Home. Home insulted Self as being something along the lines of a rich Oxford junkie who doesn't deserve his reputation as an underground writer. Since I'd never heard of Self before, he had no reputation w/ me at all. Knowing Stewart's tendency to publically degrade anyone who he perceives as competition, I didn't take the negativity as representative of any substantial critical take. After all, it seems that Home's usual intention is to discourage conformists & sycophants from even experiencing the work of the people he puts down by making experiencing such work 'uncool'. Thusly, idiots can automatically hate Self's writing on the basis of Home's word & never discover for themselves whether Self's writing might be more interesting than Home's.
W/ that in mind, when I finally saw this bk by Self I picked it up. Having just finished reading it, I have to wonder whether Self is a pseudonym of Home. However, after doing extremely cursory pseudo-research on the net, this appears to be not the case. The writing style is similarly somewhat simple-minded but I'd give Self credit for being a little more accomplished. Home's use of the same joking repetitive description of sex over & over in his 1st novel "Pure Mania" is somewhat akin to Self's running joke referring to his character Zack Busner's self-inflated self-definitions: "the maverick anti-psychiatrist - as he liked to style himself" eg. I can certainly see why the 2 writers wd be professional rivals.
ANYWAY, I started reading this & at 1st took it to be a sign that the once-great Grove Press had deteriorated from its days as the publisher of William S. Burroughs & Jean Genet. Despite a promising alternate reality premise, I quickly got bored w/ what strikes me as a malaise of post-censorship writing: too much sex & drugs for sensationalism's sake & as a substitute for genuine incisive examination.
HOWEVER, that eventually changed & I became engrossed. "Great Apes" begins w/ an "Author's Note" in wch the author presents himself as a chimpanzee perversely writing about humans as if they'd become the dominant species instead of chimps. Then the main character, Simon Dykes, a British painter, is introduced. We follow Simon's night & sex & art life as a human for awhile until he has a breakdown & finds himself in a world in wch chimps ARE the dominant species & in wch he's one too.
From then on, the world is described w/ many references to modern-day human conditions but w/ chimps substituted for humans. Simon ends up in the doctoral care of Zack Busner & the reader follows the steps he goes thru to regain his "chimpunity". I assume Self did some research into chimpanzee studies b/c it's all fairly convincingly presented. "Arse-Lickers" definitely takes on a highly socially defined meaning here.
In the process, Self manages to give the reader a refreshing take on humanity - esp in relation to hierarchical posturings of the art & scientific worlds. Take this paragraph:
"'Of course, Zackiekins "chup-chupp", I am honored that you acknowledge my ascent up the hierarchy. Now, as I was signing, the reputations of these artists - if that's what they are - are also so arguable, that they require continual interpretation and "gru-nnn" adjustment by a large party of critics "grnn". The critics have their own hierarchy, and the hierarchy that exists between them and the artists' party is also highly fluid - subject to continual flux. That's why "chup-chupp" they're all dressed up, and displaying and presenting and grooming and mating, for all the buggers are worth "h'hee-hee-hee"!'"
In the above excerpt the main text is being signed by Simon & the things like "chup-chupp" are being vocalized - in a sortof reversal of human communication in wch the hands are used gesturally & the voice as the main communicator - something I assume to be accurate in chimps.
All in all, I ended up liking this alot. I've been preoccupied for many a yr w/ humans as animals. As a child, I was raised w/ the common notion that humans are distinguished from animals by various cognitive abilities that supposedly make us superior. As a teenager that seemed like a crock of shit & I've always stated that we ARE animals. Not such a radical idea, of course. I never had a problem w/ being an animal. Oddly, though, these days I DO have a problem w/ being one. Not b/c being an animal is something I consider to be 'bad' but b/c I'm a bit sick of the conflicts between instinctual behavior & intellectual behavior.
Sex between humans is a constant struggle between instincts & thoughts. I use the term BOD (Biological OverDrive) to refer to what propels us into sexual contact. The idea's obvious: we're driven to mate to further our DNA's quest for new forms. Men try to impregnate, women try to be impregnated. Perhaps gays & lesbians try to create a Third Mind. At any rate, the body cooperates w/ this process by making sexual contact a form of pleasure to be lusted for w/ great frequency. Such an acknowledgement of biological drives is almost taboo amongst political activists who prefer to emphasize social hierarchies entirely.
But back to chimps & humans. Chimpanzees have Alpha Males - males who dominate &, therefore, fuck the most females. These males use violence, displays, to maintain this position. This has preoccupied me for a long time. Humans parallel chimps in this & many respects. Alpha Male Humans rule for a while & are eventually overthrown when they get too weak to effectively use violence against the up & coming. This is instinctual. But humans have complex intellectual & social codes that temper this. The male instinctual drive may push toward impregnating as many females as possible, but the intellectual deterrents might include a lack of desire for producing children, & a desire for using sex purely for pleasure. Social deterrents might be that producing children usually carries w/ it the responsibility of taking care of them - a responsibility that the fe/male might abhor.
I often say that being in bands is just the human form of mating displaying - trying to attract a mate or mates. There's not often a strong musical impetus behind it - even if lip service is pd to music or other purposes the mating display seems like the strong, & usually underacknowledged, undercurrent. Males, esp, have bands when the members are in their 20s & then gradually fade out of the music biz after the attraction factor has served its purpose somewhat.
"Great Apes" is a good exploration of parallels between chimp & human behavior. Throughout it, there are carefully implanted references to such purposes - such as when the use of humans as cute cuddly animals in chimp society representations are alluded to, eg.
W/ that in mind, when I finally saw this bk by Self I picked it up. Having just finished reading it, I have to wonder whether Self is a pseudonym of Home. However, after doing extremely cursory pseudo-research on the net, this appears to be not the case. The writing style is similarly somewhat simple-minded but I'd give Self credit for being a little more accomplished. Home's use of the same joking repetitive description of sex over & over in his 1st novel "Pure Mania" is somewhat akin to Self's running joke referring to his character Zack Busner's self-inflated self-definitions: "the maverick anti-psychiatrist - as he liked to style himself" eg. I can certainly see why the 2 writers wd be professional rivals.
ANYWAY, I started reading this & at 1st took it to be a sign that the once-great Grove Press had deteriorated from its days as the publisher of William S. Burroughs & Jean Genet. Despite a promising alternate reality premise, I quickly got bored w/ what strikes me as a malaise of post-censorship writing: too much sex & drugs for sensationalism's sake & as a substitute for genuine incisive examination.
HOWEVER, that eventually changed & I became engrossed. "Great Apes" begins w/ an "Author's Note" in wch the author presents himself as a chimpanzee perversely writing about humans as if they'd become the dominant species instead of chimps. Then the main character, Simon Dykes, a British painter, is introduced. We follow Simon's night & sex & art life as a human for awhile until he has a breakdown & finds himself in a world in wch chimps ARE the dominant species & in wch he's one too.
From then on, the world is described w/ many references to modern-day human conditions but w/ chimps substituted for humans. Simon ends up in the doctoral care of Zack Busner & the reader follows the steps he goes thru to regain his "chimpunity". I assume Self did some research into chimpanzee studies b/c it's all fairly convincingly presented. "Arse-Lickers" definitely takes on a highly socially defined meaning here.
In the process, Self manages to give the reader a refreshing take on humanity - esp in relation to hierarchical posturings of the art & scientific worlds. Take this paragraph:
"'Of course, Zackiekins "chup-chupp", I am honored that you acknowledge my ascent up the hierarchy. Now, as I was signing, the reputations of these artists - if that's what they are - are also so arguable, that they require continual interpretation and "gru-nnn" adjustment by a large party of critics "grnn". The critics have their own hierarchy, and the hierarchy that exists between them and the artists' party is also highly fluid - subject to continual flux. That's why "chup-chupp" they're all dressed up, and displaying and presenting and grooming and mating, for all the buggers are worth "h'hee-hee-hee"!'"
In the above excerpt the main text is being signed by Simon & the things like "chup-chupp" are being vocalized - in a sortof reversal of human communication in wch the hands are used gesturally & the voice as the main communicator - something I assume to be accurate in chimps.
All in all, I ended up liking this alot. I've been preoccupied for many a yr w/ humans as animals. As a child, I was raised w/ the common notion that humans are distinguished from animals by various cognitive abilities that supposedly make us superior. As a teenager that seemed like a crock of shit & I've always stated that we ARE animals. Not such a radical idea, of course. I never had a problem w/ being an animal. Oddly, though, these days I DO have a problem w/ being one. Not b/c being an animal is something I consider to be 'bad' but b/c I'm a bit sick of the conflicts between instinctual behavior & intellectual behavior.
Sex between humans is a constant struggle between instincts & thoughts. I use the term BOD (Biological OverDrive) to refer to what propels us into sexual contact. The idea's obvious: we're driven to mate to further our DNA's quest for new forms. Men try to impregnate, women try to be impregnated. Perhaps gays & lesbians try to create a Third Mind. At any rate, the body cooperates w/ this process by making sexual contact a form of pleasure to be lusted for w/ great frequency. Such an acknowledgement of biological drives is almost taboo amongst political activists who prefer to emphasize social hierarchies entirely.
But back to chimps & humans. Chimpanzees have Alpha Males - males who dominate &, therefore, fuck the most females. These males use violence, displays, to maintain this position. This has preoccupied me for a long time. Humans parallel chimps in this & many respects. Alpha Male Humans rule for a while & are eventually overthrown when they get too weak to effectively use violence against the up & coming. This is instinctual. But humans have complex intellectual & social codes that temper this. The male instinctual drive may push toward impregnating as many females as possible, but the intellectual deterrents might include a lack of desire for producing children, & a desire for using sex purely for pleasure. Social deterrents might be that producing children usually carries w/ it the responsibility of taking care of them - a responsibility that the fe/male might abhor.
I often say that being in bands is just the human form of mating displaying - trying to attract a mate or mates. There's not often a strong musical impetus behind it - even if lip service is pd to music or other purposes the mating display seems like the strong, & usually underacknowledged, undercurrent. Males, esp, have bands when the members are in their 20s & then gradually fade out of the music biz after the attraction factor has served its purpose somewhat.
"Great Apes" is a good exploration of parallels between chimp & human behavior. Throughout it, there are carefully implanted references to such purposes - such as when the use of humans as cute cuddly animals in chimp society representations are alluded to, eg.
May 10, 2018
I absolutely hated this book. I would have DNFd it if it had not been on the list of 1001 Books to Read Before You Die. I found the writing much too complicated, it felt both messy and over-written. On top of that I felt the story was a joke or a gimmick, and didn't find it at all funny. I know it is satire and fans of this type of story absolutely love this book. I am just not among them. I didn't have any emotional connection to the book. I didn't learn anything. And, I wasn't entertained.
December 11, 2011
I didn't finish this book because it was far too much hard work. Even with an Oxbridge degree (though not in literature), I pretty much found myself opening a dictionary every couple of pages. And the new words used didn't really enrich or enliven the story - or my own vocab. I very much get the impression that the author is very much Self by name... This novel makes me think he writes for self-agrandisement rather than for creativity and the enjoyment of others.
September 9, 2013
Absolutely amazing.
It's shocking when you're realize that EVERYTHING is relative and if we take something as absolute, it's not because we're not subjective. it's because we "humbly" perceive our subjectivity as superior hence we can say it's objectivity just because we can; there is nobody to question that.
This book questions that and that's why it's so striking and deeply disturbing.
Sexually driven and obsessed like everything of Self. Great read.
It's shocking when you're realize that EVERYTHING is relative and if we take something as absolute, it's not because we're not subjective. it's because we "humbly" perceive our subjectivity as superior hence we can say it's objectivity just because we can; there is nobody to question that.
This book questions that and that's why it's so striking and deeply disturbing.
Sexually driven and obsessed like everything of Self. Great read.
December 17, 2017
Simon Dykes is an artist on the rise, living large in 1990s London, with a flat and a girlfriend of his own, with previous work hung in the Tate Modern and an important gallery show coming up, with a new direction for his paintings that promises to provoke the best kind of outrage, the kind that cements reputations. Simon doesn't really have time to party all night at the Sealink Club, mixing that dodgy coke and Ecstasy... but he does so anyway. Simon and Sarah quit the club close to dawn, go to his flat and try to fuck, then fall asleep... perchance to dream. To dream—as I have too—of being an ape...
Simon promptly goes barking mad, of course. Literally—barking, hooting, panting... so of course Sarah has no choice but to call the hospital: poor Simon's gone humanshit.
Enter Zack Busner, the "eminent natural philosopher" (self-styled, repeatedly) who appears, repeatedly, in Will Self's oeuvre. I'd already encountered Busner once, in fact, as well as his swinging Sixties psychosocial experiment, Concept House, in a much later book—Shark, which came out some seventeen years after Great Apes. From apes to sharks (or is it vice versa?)...
This time, Busner is an aging alpha chimp, swinging precariously from the tail end of a long and not always admirable career, a celebrity psychologist to whom Simon presents (arse first—heh) one last great opportunity: the chimp who thinks he's a human!
Great Apes is not all high-minded Swiftian social satire, though. It's graphic—sordid, even—depicting an upside-down British society that teems with feces-flinging, swiftly violent, frequently rutting chimpanzees, who go tootling around London in multi-geared Volvos driven with their prehensile feet while they sign to each other with both hands. Self's novel has to be read with a certain amount of clinical dispassion, it's true—but the reader must be attuned to the humor inherent in its topsy-turvy situtation as well.
Great Apes evokes a host of literary antecedents and fellow-travelers, not least the aforementioned shade of Jonathan Swift—but it's a book that resists facile comparisons.
Great Apes doesn't bear much resemblance to Planet of the Apes, for example, much as one might want to force the comparison. In Pierre Boulle's novel and its cinematic successors, apes that were uplifted by humans supplanted them, but the simians were never really their own creatures. Boulle's apes are forever doomed to be just clumsy imitators of a borrowed civilization. In Great Apes, chimpanzees evolved independently, instead of homo sapiens, however weirdly congruent the results might be. This is satire, after all, and it doesn't always have to make sense, but I do think it's telling that while Simon becomes fascinated with the "Planet of the Humans" films during his treatment by Busner, there is no mention at all of the book by the simian Boulle from which those films must have sprung.
Great Apes is not really much like Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," either, despite the comparison on the cover. While Kafka's story starts with the same shock of awakening as a different species, Self's novel delays the shock for several chapters, muting that impact, and goes on at much greater length.
Not that Great Apes is altogether without impact... but the effect lies elsewhere. Great Apes certainly had an effect on me—I started grooming my family more, and vocalizing more hoots and grunts, though I stopped far short of complimenting their ischial scrags...
One of the other works of literature that Great Apes brought to my mind was one of Walker Percy's later works, a novel called The Thanatos Syndrome, with its tragic tone and scenes of simian degradation. However, the closest comparison I can think of is actually to a much more recent book: Jo Walton's Austenesque Tooth and Claw, with its civilized dragons in a Victorian setting—although Walton's dragons try to repress their savage natures in a way that Self's chimpanzees never do. But then... why is Walton's book categorized as mere fantasy, while Great Apes is treated as serious literature? Is it because of the fantastical nature of the creatures in Walton's novel? Or is there a more significant divide? The two books certainly differ in tone, however similar they may be in high concept, but they're both speculative fictions—sf, that is, as opposed to mimetic fiction—and if I were doing the categorizing, they'd both go on the same capacious shelf.
Despite being framed as one, the novel-within-a-novel that tells Simon Dykes' story is not at all what an ape would have written. Whatever shelf you put it on, Great Apes still comes across very much as a Will Self novel—deeply, bloodily, messily, uniquely and entirely human.
Jane is not entirely safe for the sensitive either, by the way—the footage of chimps dying of polio is especially heartwrenching.
Great Apes isn't exactly heartwrenching, perhaps... but the mirror it holds up to our short-muzzled, goofily grinning faces is one we all need to look into—if only now and then.
Such a liberating feeling. I let myself become an ape, using my incredible upper-body strength to climb hanging straps and ropes in this large and cluttered basement hall, as she looks on. I've got one hell of an erection. I feel light and airy, brachiating almost without effort, but my clothes are in the way, and I don't care who's watching—I'm an ape! So while I'm climbing ever higher, I use my legs and feet alone to work my way out of my shoes, my shorts and underwear, letting them fall with dull plops like unwanted turds to the floor far below. I awaken breathing heavily, aroused...When I awoke from that dream, though, I was still human, and so were those around me. When Simon wakes up, the girlfriend lying next to him is a chimp. His friends are chimps. His agent's a chimp. Everyone in London is now a chimpanzee—and they all think he's one too.
—A dream log entry I called "Ook, Ook," from 10/24/2003
Simon promptly goes barking mad, of course. Literally—barking, hooting, panting... so of course Sarah has no choice but to call the hospital: poor Simon's gone humanshit.
Enter Zack Busner, the "eminent natural philosopher" (self-styled, repeatedly) who appears, repeatedly, in Will Self's oeuvre. I'd already encountered Busner once, in fact, as well as his swinging Sixties psychosocial experiment, Concept House, in a much later book—Shark, which came out some seventeen years after Great Apes. From apes to sharks (or is it vice versa?)...
This time, Busner is an aging alpha chimp, swinging precariously from the tail end of a long and not always admirable career, a celebrity psychologist to whom Simon presents (arse first—heh) one last great opportunity: the chimp who thinks he's a human!
On learning from his protégé researcher, the celebrated anthropologist Dr. Jane Goodall, that she had observed wild humans fashioning twigs and then using them to probe termite mounds, Dr. Leakey remarked, "Now we must redefine tool, redefine chimpanzee—or accept humans as chimps!"Dr. Goodall goes on to argue for the preservation of endangered humans, just as our own human scientist has argued so eloquently on behalf of her beloved chimpanzees in Tanzania. The coincidence was compelling. Will Self's 1997 novel Great Apes was already on my to-read pile, but it rose straight to the top as soon as I watched the excellent documentary Jane, in which our world's version of that very line appears.
—"Author's Note," p.vii
Great Apes is not all high-minded Swiftian social satire, though. It's graphic—sordid, even—depicting an upside-down British society that teems with feces-flinging, swiftly violent, frequently rutting chimpanzees, who go tootling around London in multi-geared Volvos driven with their prehensile feet while they sign to each other with both hands. Self's novel has to be read with a certain amount of clinical dispassion, it's true—but the reader must be attuned to the humor inherent in its topsy-turvy situtation as well.
Great Apes evokes a host of literary antecedents and fellow-travelers, not least the aforementioned shade of Jonathan Swift—but it's a book that resists facile comparisons.
Great Apes doesn't bear much resemblance to Planet of the Apes, for example, much as one might want to force the comparison. In Pierre Boulle's novel and its cinematic successors, apes that were uplifted by humans supplanted them, but the simians were never really their own creatures. Boulle's apes are forever doomed to be just clumsy imitators of a borrowed civilization. In Great Apes, chimpanzees evolved independently, instead of homo sapiens, however weirdly congruent the results might be. This is satire, after all, and it doesn't always have to make sense, but I do think it's telling that while Simon becomes fascinated with the "Planet of the Humans" films during his treatment by Busner, there is no mention at all of the book by the simian Boulle from which those films must have sprung.
Great Apes is not really much like Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis," either, despite the comparison on the cover. While Kafka's story starts with the same shock of awakening as a different species, Self's novel delays the shock for several chapters, muting that impact, and goes on at much greater length.
Not that Great Apes is altogether without impact... but the effect lies elsewhere. Great Apes certainly had an effect on me—I started grooming my family more, and vocalizing more hoots and grunts, though I stopped far short of complimenting their ischial scrags...
One of the other works of literature that Great Apes brought to my mind was one of Walker Percy's later works, a novel called The Thanatos Syndrome, with its tragic tone and scenes of simian degradation. However, the closest comparison I can think of is actually to a much more recent book: Jo Walton's Austenesque Tooth and Claw, with its civilized dragons in a Victorian setting—although Walton's dragons try to repress their savage natures in a way that Self's chimpanzees never do. But then... why is Walton's book categorized as mere fantasy, while Great Apes is treated as serious literature? Is it because of the fantastical nature of the creatures in Walton's novel? Or is there a more significant divide? The two books certainly differ in tone, however similar they may be in high concept, but they're both speculative fictions—sf, that is, as opposed to mimetic fiction—and if I were doing the categorizing, they'd both go on the same capacious shelf.
Despite being framed as one, the novel-within-a-novel that tells Simon Dykes' story is not at all what an ape would have written. Whatever shelf you put it on, Great Apes still comes across very much as a Will Self novel—deeply, bloodily, messily, uniquely and entirely human.
Jane is not entirely safe for the sensitive either, by the way—the footage of chimps dying of polio is especially heartwrenching.
Great Apes isn't exactly heartwrenching, perhaps... but the mirror it holds up to our short-muzzled, goofily grinning faces is one we all need to look into—if only now and then.
September 8, 2018
... an infinite number of chimpanzees ... would probably form a committee to ensure they never randomly produced the rubbish that is Great Apes.
20 pages into this, you'd be forgiven for thinking Will Self was a meaningful pseudonym. Pretty much from the get go, this seems to be all about convincing us how clever the author is. As Lyn Gardner writes in her Guardian review of the Great Apes stage play,
... the show always seems keener on showcasing its larky cleverness than on creating real feeling.
Replace "the show" with "the novel" and my job here is done.
But for those of you expecting some sort of synopsis, Simon Dykes wakes up from what is effectively a Self-ian version of life to find that he is, not a beetle (cf Kafka), but a chimpanzee.
Or at least everyone else thinks he is. Simon remains convinced for pretty much the rest of our tedious literary journey that he is human. This is quite patently not the case at least from his affinity for touching other chimpanzees genitalia, copulating in a matter of seconds and feeling urges to swing through trees.
There's very, very little here that hasn't been done before unless you want to argue that Gulliver failed to include the London borough of Finchley in his travels. What is unique is probably best left in darkness between the covers.
Suffice to say, if you left an infinite number of chimpanzees in a room with an infinite number of typewriters, they might come up with the complete works of Shakespeare, but they'd probably form a committee to ensure they never randomly produced the rubbish that is Great Apes.
Read
June 15, 2009Read the STOP SMILING interview with author Will Self.
ABUSE OF SELF
The Stop Smiling Interview with Will Self
By Sally Vincent
(This interview originally appeared in the STOP SMILING Photography Issue)
The first time I laid eyes on Will Self, he was monologuing about flying buttresses to a startled and ever-increasing audience of slack-jawed strangers, seemingly dumbstruck by his magniloquence. It was as though he couldn’t help himself. As though all this passion about architecture had been building up in his brain, to be unleashed at this moment simply because someone (I can’t remember who) was having their book launch in this vaulted, elegant old building and the sheer grandeur of it all had broken a dam in his corpus callosum. It was, I have to say, an entirely beguiling experience. Later that evening, my best friend introduced me to this loomingly tall bloke with a face like the Turin Shroud, and I knew instantly she was going to marry Will Self and I’d have to find a new best friend. I must have been a bit standoffish because he asked her, most intently, if my accent was posher than his, and she replied instantly, “Yes. No contest.”
Read the complete interview...
ABUSE OF SELF
The Stop Smiling Interview with Will Self
By Sally Vincent
(This interview originally appeared in the STOP SMILING Photography Issue)
The first time I laid eyes on Will Self, he was monologuing about flying buttresses to a startled and ever-increasing audience of slack-jawed strangers, seemingly dumbstruck by his magniloquence. It was as though he couldn’t help himself. As though all this passion about architecture had been building up in his brain, to be unleashed at this moment simply because someone (I can’t remember who) was having their book launch in this vaulted, elegant old building and the sheer grandeur of it all had broken a dam in his corpus callosum. It was, I have to say, an entirely beguiling experience. Later that evening, my best friend introduced me to this loomingly tall bloke with a face like the Turin Shroud, and I knew instantly she was going to marry Will Self and I’d have to find a new best friend. I must have been a bit standoffish because he asked her, most intently, if my accent was posher than his, and she replied instantly, “Yes. No contest.”
Read the complete interview...
July 28, 2010
one line joke in 404 pages. The reader may get a minor positive feeling when the figure out some of the made-up words 'chimpunity' = humanity. There are major or minor levels of shock and disgust depending on your personal threshold for grossness when the 'apes' do the things you may have seen monkeys do at the zoo as part of acceptable everyday culture. And then there is the redundancy of having these two tricks expended and repeated to pad out the story. I am not sure why I forced myself to continue reading after chapter four. I am hoping the images left by this book will fade soon.
October 22, 2019
Will Self's book "Great Apes" is a funny idea that gets dragged out into a full length novel for no particular good reason. A man wakes up and finds all the world has transformed into chimpanzees. Cue a whole lot of furry copulation and poop flinging. I found it tedious after about 50 pages.
Read
August 19, 2023DNF, i just couldnt take it any longer
October 14, 2021
Great Apes features Will Self’s psychiatrist, Zack Busner, first introduced in The Quantity Theory of Insanity. This time he is older, near the end of his career … and a chimpanzee. For this is the premise of Self’s novel. Great Apes is set in an alternate reality which really is a ‘planet of the apes’. In this world, Simon Dykes, Self’s protagonist, wakes up after days of indulging in drugs and sex, to find everyone around him is a chimpanzee. He even looks like a chimpanzee, although he is convinced he is essentially human. Yet Self leaves little room for doubting the reality of this world over Simon’s human delusion, of a world where humanity rules. Self establishes this conceit through a preface by ‘W.W.S.’ (an obvious nom de plume for the human author, William Woodford Self) who celebrates ‘chimpunity’ and discusses issues relating to humans, including the need to continue experiments on humans to find a cure for CIV (Chimpanzee Immunodeficiency Virus), human mating behaviour, animal rights and the likelihood of humanity’s survival in the wild. In doing so, Self signals that the world we are about to enter is not a delusion, as far as Simon should be concerned –the book is written by a chimp , after all – making its satirical import is far-ranging.
Simon begins the novel as a human. At least, he thinks he does. There are a lot of hints that foreshadow for the reader that Simon’s impending change may be delusory. When Sarah, Simon’s girlfriend, is propositioned at a bar, she disparagingly thinks of her suitors as apes. Of course, the chimpanzees of this world refer to other primates as apes, just as we do, so her comparison is just as likely to support the reality of W.W.S’s reality in hindsight (In fact, later in the novel Simon is promised he can view a human at the zoo, only to be shown a gorilla. Chimpanzees see little difference in them.) When Sarah and Simon have sex, he begins to groom her, a social activity extremely important in the chimp world, and he whispers "Monkey, Monkey" to her. When Simon sees children on a jungle gym, he silently thinks to himself that they look like chimpanzees. There are many allusions embedded in the story before Simon’s putative conversion. But when Zack Busner appears, he is a chimpanzee from the start. That’s the reality that the novel will not let you dismiss.
Apart from that, the story is relatively simple. It follows Simon’s mental breakdown. He insists he is human, and Zack Busner mentors and treats him, hoping to rehabilitate Simon and overcome his delusion. Set against this is Busner’s own story. He is a chimp in the twilight of his career beset by challenges from younger professional chimps like Gambol, who want to assume his social and professional position as alpha male. The threat of legal action over ‘Inclusion’, a drug Busner illegally tested on unsuspecting chimps like Simon, and which may have caused Simon’s delusion, also threatens his career. Simon’s case may be his last.
While Self’s novel is a brilliant satire of modern humanity, I suspect it would offend as many people as it might please. Darwin’s theory of evolution, which placed humans in the family of primates and offered an alternative understanding of the world to religious narratives, is still highly controversial. Self’s narrative doesn’t change much concerning evolution’s narrative, except that it places chimpanzees as the winners in the evolutionary race. Self weighs in on the matter of evolutionary fitness through the issue of human vocalisation and chimpanzees’ preference for signing. In this world, vocalisation is judged to have been a disadvantage to humans. Chimpanzees have developed a complex system of signing mixed with basic vocalisations – pan-hoots – derived, they believe, from the socialising aspects of peer grooming. Humans, on the other hand, have become "bogged down in a perverse and clamorous sound garden; its capacity for effective gesticulation as stunted and atrophied as its stunted and atrophied fingers and toes." As is often the case, Self taps the comic potential of this situation. Simon reasons to Busner that in this world it would have made more sense for television to be invented before radio; in fact, there would be little reason for radio to have developed at all. Busner agrees. Television did come first while radio was invented by Logie Baird (who invented television in our human world). Simon asks how he invented the radio. "By accident," Busner tells Simon, "completely by accident. One day he went into his laboratory and his research assistant had left a television on inside a cupboard. All Baird did was shut the door."
While Self’s premise offers the opportunity for many comic moments like this, it also offers the opportunity to step outside a human perspective and view our world anew, as W.W.S’s preface anticipates. The treatment of animals in zoos, the efforts to protect animals in the wild and to understand them are all given new light through Simon’s changed perspective ......
Read my full review of Great Apes by Will Self on the Reading Project
Simon begins the novel as a human. At least, he thinks he does. There are a lot of hints that foreshadow for the reader that Simon’s impending change may be delusory. When Sarah, Simon’s girlfriend, is propositioned at a bar, she disparagingly thinks of her suitors as apes. Of course, the chimpanzees of this world refer to other primates as apes, just as we do, so her comparison is just as likely to support the reality of W.W.S’s reality in hindsight (In fact, later in the novel Simon is promised he can view a human at the zoo, only to be shown a gorilla. Chimpanzees see little difference in them.) When Sarah and Simon have sex, he begins to groom her, a social activity extremely important in the chimp world, and he whispers "Monkey, Monkey" to her. When Simon sees children on a jungle gym, he silently thinks to himself that they look like chimpanzees. There are many allusions embedded in the story before Simon’s putative conversion. But when Zack Busner appears, he is a chimpanzee from the start. That’s the reality that the novel will not let you dismiss.
Apart from that, the story is relatively simple. It follows Simon’s mental breakdown. He insists he is human, and Zack Busner mentors and treats him, hoping to rehabilitate Simon and overcome his delusion. Set against this is Busner’s own story. He is a chimp in the twilight of his career beset by challenges from younger professional chimps like Gambol, who want to assume his social and professional position as alpha male. The threat of legal action over ‘Inclusion’, a drug Busner illegally tested on unsuspecting chimps like Simon, and which may have caused Simon’s delusion, also threatens his career. Simon’s case may be his last.
While Self’s novel is a brilliant satire of modern humanity, I suspect it would offend as many people as it might please. Darwin’s theory of evolution, which placed humans in the family of primates and offered an alternative understanding of the world to religious narratives, is still highly controversial. Self’s narrative doesn’t change much concerning evolution’s narrative, except that it places chimpanzees as the winners in the evolutionary race. Self weighs in on the matter of evolutionary fitness through the issue of human vocalisation and chimpanzees’ preference for signing. In this world, vocalisation is judged to have been a disadvantage to humans. Chimpanzees have developed a complex system of signing mixed with basic vocalisations – pan-hoots – derived, they believe, from the socialising aspects of peer grooming. Humans, on the other hand, have become "bogged down in a perverse and clamorous sound garden; its capacity for effective gesticulation as stunted and atrophied as its stunted and atrophied fingers and toes." As is often the case, Self taps the comic potential of this situation. Simon reasons to Busner that in this world it would have made more sense for television to be invented before radio; in fact, there would be little reason for radio to have developed at all. Busner agrees. Television did come first while radio was invented by Logie Baird (who invented television in our human world). Simon asks how he invented the radio. "By accident," Busner tells Simon, "completely by accident. One day he went into his laboratory and his research assistant had left a television on inside a cupboard. All Baird did was shut the door."
While Self’s premise offers the opportunity for many comic moments like this, it also offers the opportunity to step outside a human perspective and view our world anew, as W.W.S’s preface anticipates. The treatment of animals in zoos, the efforts to protect animals in the wild and to understand them are all given new light through Simon’s changed perspective ......
Read my full review of Great Apes by Will Self on the Reading Project
January 7, 2025
do i love a book that tows the line between diabolical and sound, even thoughtful
January 26, 2022
Well, I have to say - I really tried.
June 22, 2020
The initial premise in this novel is a Twilight Zone scenario: the human protagonist wakes to find a world populated by chimps, then discovers to his horror that he is himself a chimp.
After a blow-out night of drugs, alcohol, and sex, Simon Dykes wakes next day to find the civilized world is “peopled” by chimpanzees, not humans. Dykes’ physical surroundings appear the same (though buildings and cityscape are 25% smaller), but chimp history replaces human history with chimps in place of humans, so that notable human figures (past and present) all have their chimp correlates. Dykes is slow to see himself as a chimpanzee, and he’s initially hysterical, then catatonic, then paranoid, until he finally submits himself to a gradual re-incorporation into chimpunity, a process that also slowly erodes his memories of humanity and human social connections.
To guide him through his recovery is the anti-psychiatrist Dr. Zack Busner, a character that is featured in several other Self novels. As a maverick psychiatrist who bills himself an eminent social philosopher, Busner is largely sympathetic/empathetic in his treatment of Dykes, and there is more reliance on conscious and behavioral modifications than on a pharmacopeia to bring Dykes back from his delusional breakdown.
Two aspects of chimpunity dominate in this story: the chimps’ social hierarchical behaviors and their intimate and familial sexual relations. Secondary aspects of interest are the chimps’ half-nakedness (wearing only upper garments so their pudenda are always visible for display) and their limited vocalizations which make them more reliant on signing, arguably a more plenary medium, since it is both visual and tactile, associated with their almost constant need to be in touch with others, usually in hispid huddles, ie, grooming groups of two or more. There’s much humor in observing the way chimps will establish their respective social standing with one another, which entails overt reference to and displays of genitalia and anus.
While detailing the initial transformation of Simon Dykes from human to chimp and then the necessity of jettisoning lingering residual thoughts and affects surrounding humanity in order to acquire the well-adjusted behavior of a proper chimp, Self devises a loose dramatic narrative with subplots about conniving colleagues (of Busner) and concerned cohorts (of Dykes). These dramatic/narrative elements are sufficient to keep things perking along, and they provide occasions for more revelations about chimpunity and its social customs.
While entertained throughout, I was nagged by the superficiality of the transformation of humanity to chimpunity. What is the point of simply replacing all human history with a chimp history, if the outcome is still the same? There seems little reason to believe in such a historical one-to-one correspondence, except for Self to conclude, as do Dykes and Busner in their different ways, that civilization entails an alienation of the species from its nature, that the preservation of instincts will result in a clash with the demands and constraints imposed by greater social concentrations in urban environments.
Littered throughout the novel are many allusions to contemporary events and persons, and these are given a chimp-omorphic spin, which leads variously to immediate chuckles or some subvocalized hmms of speculative thought. The novel’s resolution did not satisfy, except technically, as its conclusion jibed with the framing premise that the “story we are about to read” is a work of fiction by a chimpanzee author. I had the sense the frame came after the novel was completed, since the early chapters with Dykes as human were done in the most arch, Martin Amis fashion, a style so wrought in self-loathing that I thought no self-respecting chimp could/would possibly ape it…
After a blow-out night of drugs, alcohol, and sex, Simon Dykes wakes next day to find the civilized world is “peopled” by chimpanzees, not humans. Dykes’ physical surroundings appear the same (though buildings and cityscape are 25% smaller), but chimp history replaces human history with chimps in place of humans, so that notable human figures (past and present) all have their chimp correlates. Dykes is slow to see himself as a chimpanzee, and he’s initially hysterical, then catatonic, then paranoid, until he finally submits himself to a gradual re-incorporation into chimpunity, a process that also slowly erodes his memories of humanity and human social connections.
To guide him through his recovery is the anti-psychiatrist Dr. Zack Busner, a character that is featured in several other Self novels. As a maverick psychiatrist who bills himself an eminent social philosopher, Busner is largely sympathetic/empathetic in his treatment of Dykes, and there is more reliance on conscious and behavioral modifications than on a pharmacopeia to bring Dykes back from his delusional breakdown.
Two aspects of chimpunity dominate in this story: the chimps’ social hierarchical behaviors and their intimate and familial sexual relations. Secondary aspects of interest are the chimps’ half-nakedness (wearing only upper garments so their pudenda are always visible for display) and their limited vocalizations which make them more reliant on signing, arguably a more plenary medium, since it is both visual and tactile, associated with their almost constant need to be in touch with others, usually in hispid huddles, ie, grooming groups of two or more. There’s much humor in observing the way chimps will establish their respective social standing with one another, which entails overt reference to and displays of genitalia and anus.
While detailing the initial transformation of Simon Dykes from human to chimp and then the necessity of jettisoning lingering residual thoughts and affects surrounding humanity in order to acquire the well-adjusted behavior of a proper chimp, Self devises a loose dramatic narrative with subplots about conniving colleagues (of Busner) and concerned cohorts (of Dykes). These dramatic/narrative elements are sufficient to keep things perking along, and they provide occasions for more revelations about chimpunity and its social customs.
While entertained throughout, I was nagged by the superficiality of the transformation of humanity to chimpunity. What is the point of simply replacing all human history with a chimp history, if the outcome is still the same? There seems little reason to believe in such a historical one-to-one correspondence, except for Self to conclude, as do Dykes and Busner in their different ways, that civilization entails an alienation of the species from its nature, that the preservation of instincts will result in a clash with the demands and constraints imposed by greater social concentrations in urban environments.
Littered throughout the novel are many allusions to contemporary events and persons, and these are given a chimp-omorphic spin, which leads variously to immediate chuckles or some subvocalized hmms of speculative thought. The novel’s resolution did not satisfy, except technically, as its conclusion jibed with the framing premise that the “story we are about to read” is a work of fiction by a chimpanzee author. I had the sense the frame came after the novel was completed, since the early chapters with Dykes as human were done in the most arch, Martin Amis fashion, a style so wrought in self-loathing that I thought no self-respecting chimp could/would possibly ape it…
February 28, 2008
Bought a second copy from the bargain bin at Hasting's. My first reading was courtesy of a girlfriend with a library card - I strongly advise that, whenever possible, hook up with somebody who has a valid library card.
The first copy I owned, cash-in-hand, was from a bookstore that also had the 12" single of R.E.M.'s "Wendell Gee". But somebody had drawn on the cover with a crayon.
There wasn’t even time to sign/Goodbye to Wendell Gee/
So HoooRAHAaaH'ooo as the wind blows/H'ooHOOOraHAHA as the wind blows, with me
You know, the only people who want to deny apes legal personhood are the folks who want to eat apes without the "cannibal" label. I guess it's a debate that opens a whole "cannibal" of worms. They have no remorse for their morsels.
If they're not people, then what have we been shooting into space - Potatoes?
The first copy I owned, cash-in-hand, was from a bookstore that also had the 12" single of R.E.M.'s "Wendell Gee". But somebody had drawn on the cover with a crayon.
There wasn’t even time to sign/Goodbye to Wendell Gee/
So HoooRAHAaaH'ooo as the wind blows/H'ooHOOOraHAHA as the wind blows, with me
You know, the only people who want to deny apes legal personhood are the folks who want to eat apes without the "cannibal" label. I guess it's a debate that opens a whole "cannibal" of worms. They have no remorse for their morsels.
If they're not people, then what have we been shooting into space - Potatoes?
March 1, 2018
The author was clearly intelligent, the premise clever and unique, the book well-written... and I hated it. I hated every dragging minute of it. If I never read one more paragraph about simian genitalia, I will die a happy woman. And I'm far from a prude, which was perhaps the problem? If the author was trying to make his point via shock-value, then I wasn't shocked at all, just deeply bored by the 80th reference to "anal scrag" or frenzied mating. It seemed as though he was trying to make sure he didn't miss a single chance to reference penises and what they could be used for, like if a 12-year-old was allowed to write as much as he wanted about poop and butts and sex.
It was one long, agonizing, drawn-out comment on human nature except it was clear from the first 20 pages in what the author was saying, so it just became a chore to slog through.
It was one long, agonizing, drawn-out comment on human nature except it was clear from the first 20 pages in what the author was saying, so it just became a chore to slog through.
August 9, 2021
Praiseworthy and annoying in almost equal measure. A satirical fantasy in which Simon Dyke, artist, after a night of alcohol, sex and copious drugs wakes to find his girlfriend (and everyone else) is now a chimpanzee. Worse still, everyone believes him to be a chimp too. Protesting his imagined humanity too much lands him in the care of Dr Zack Busner, maverick anti-psychiatrist. The imaginative construction of a society in which humans and chimps are in reversed evolutionary positions is brilliantly done, resplendent with enough Alpha-male hierarchy, slapping, turd throwing, genitalia displaying and casual mating to satisfy any primate, even if the signing/speaking rendition on the page becomes tedious and the etymology of the admittedly euphonic "chimpunity" defies logic.
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