Brazzaville Beach: A Novel (P.S.) [Paperback]

William Boyd (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 29, 2009 | Series: P.S.

In the heart of a civil war–torn African nation, primate researcher Hope Clearwater made a shocking discovery about apes and man. . . .

Young, alone, and far from her family in Britain, Hope Clearwater contemplates the extraordinary events that left her washed up like driftwood on Brazzaville Beach. It is here, on the distant, lonely outskirts of Africa, where she must come to terms with the perplexing and troubling circumstances of her recent past. For Hope is a survivor of the devastating cruelties of apes and humans alike. And to move forward, she must first grasp some hard and elusive truths: about marriage and madness, about the greed and savagery of charlatan science, and about what compels seemingly benign creatures to kill for pleasure alone.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Though Boyd made his reputation with novels of larky humor, his new work is a literate tale of romantic suspense that eschews comic relief and holds the reader's attention with effective foreshadowing. Like his last novel, The New Confessions , this highly readable tale is primarily a first-person narrative. Here Boyd's storyteller is Hope Clearwater, who has fled marital difficulties back in England to study chimpanzees in Africa. Through her eyes the reader is introduced to a bevy of English and American eccentrics, some benign, others malevolent in their effects on one another and on the chimpanzees. As a nonexpert, Hope observes the chimpanzees from an unusual perspective (which mirrors her refreshing and deeply felt attempts to understand her idiosyncratic estranged husband, a mathematician), and her discovery of warring factions among the supposedly peace-loving chimps roils academic and emotional waters for everyone. The novel, contradictorily, is both rambling and tightly woven, with Boyd inserting insightful, third-person commentary on the characters' inner lives. As befits a protagonist telling her own story, Hope often doesn't know where she's going until she gets there, but Boyd's skill in developing her character overrides some slight confusion about the more picaresque aspects of her adventure. Boyd should widen his audience with this adroitly written, accessible tale.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Hope Clearwater lives alone in a beach house in an unnamed African country, trying to patch together her shattered life. An ecologist, she had come to Africa to participate in primate research and to heal the deep wounds of her marriage to a brilliant English mathematician; but she soon found herself plunged into another crisis, one that threatened not only her career but also her life. In a book packed with scientific and mathematical metaphors, Boyd explores how people create, defend, ignore, or subvert the belief systems that govern their lives. If on one level this is an intellectual thriller, on another it is very much an exciting and riveting adventure story, and on yet another a subtle examination of the power grid of personal relationships. Highly recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/91.
- Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; Reprint edition (December 29, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0061956317
• ISBN-13: 978-0061956317
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #328,988 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

William Boyd is the author of ten novels, including A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice-Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Brazzaville Beach, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; Any Human Heart, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet; and Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Suspenseful and intelligent - I loved it!, September 27, 2001

By 

Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Brazzaville Beach (Paperback)

I adored this book from start to finish. Hope Clearwater is in worn-torn Africa observing chimpanzee behavior when she notices a startling trend that conflicts with everything her boss and mentor believes. Her integrity - and perhaps much more - is threatened when everyone at the camp seems to turn against her. Interwoven with flashbacks to her previous life in England with her bizarre but brilliant mathematician husband and the story of her Egyptian mercenary lover who flies a Mig for one side of the civil war, the story draws powerful parallels between the two primate societies, human and chimp.

How can a novel that discusses the difference between turbulence and topology in mathematics be a page turner? You'll have to read this book to believe it. Other than the name of Hope Clearwater - a bit too much in this otherwise subtle tale - Boyd writes deftly and passionately, sometimes with horrifying precision as he describes what is happening among the chimps.

This suspenseful and intelligent novel deserves a wide readership. I only wish I had learned of it sooner!

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars enjoyably contrarian, June 18, 2001

By 

Orrin C. Judd "brothersjudddotcom" (Hanover, NH USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Brazzaville Beach (Paperback)

Hope Clearwater sits on Brazzaville Beach, contemplates her past, and narrates the events of this novel. One strain of the story concerns her failed marriage to a mathematician whose unquenched thirst for revolutionary discoveries and their attendant fame drove him to madness. The second strain concerns the animal research that Hope had fled to Africa to participate in. Grosso Arvore Research Center is run by the renowned chimpanzee expert Eugene Mallabar, who was just putting the finishing touches on his master work, describing the peaceful ways of our close animal relatives, when Hope's own observations seemed to indicate that all was not quite as idyllic as had previously been supposed among these primates. But the evidence of aggression that she finds between two competing colonies of chimps threatens the carefully constructed image that Mallabar has built up over the years, and, most importantly, threatens to make the animals less attractive to charitable organizations which fund the project. Meanwhile, thrumming in the background is a guerilla war which threatens to swamp this African nation at any moment.

William Boyd takes these various threads and weaves them together, along with a variety of brief comments on scientific and mathematical ideas and issues, into an exciting and intellectually compelling novel. With its Edenic setting and themes of Man's search for knowledge--and the madness the search can bring--the book taps into our primordial myths and some of the core questions of our existence. If it sometimes seems to be almost too consciously striving to be a serious novel of ideas, that ambition is justified, if not always realized, and the philosophical failures are more than offset by the good old-fashioned African adventure story that unfolds simultaneously.

The shelves fairly groan beneath the weight of books warning that when a little of the veneer of civilization gets stripped away in the jungle, Man must face the fact that he has a dark heart. And there are elements of that here, particularly in the way that Mallabar treats Hope and her discovery, but Boyd has much more to say besides just this. Perhaps the most exciting message of the book lies in the contrarian stance it takes to the modern age's tendency to romanticize Nature. It is always well to recall Thomas Hobbes's famous description of Nature as "red in tooth and claw." The reader of this book will not soon forget it.

GRADE : A

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Good Story is Timeless, October 31, 2004

By 

Tracy Oshima (Long Beach, California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Brazzaville Beach (Paperback)

This intriguing story is told in three parts, two by first person narrator, anthropologist Hope Clearwater and one about her in the third person. It is the early '60s and the stories alternate between Hope in Brazziville Beach, somewhere on the edge of post colonial Africa; Hope studying a break away colony of African chimpanzees; and Hope's pursuit of the man she eventually marries back when she was in university in England.

Before she goes to Africa Hope chased and caught genius mathematician John Clearwater and we are given a glimpse of her marriage as her husband descends into despair, eventually seeking another woman before he descends even deeper into a kind of madness, seeking the cure that only suicide can bring.

Hope accepts a position in Africa observing and being accepted by African primates. She is working for Dr. Mallabar, the undisputed expert in chimp research, however when she discovers that chimps can be cannibalistic and violent, Mallabar refuses to believe her, then her tent burns down and all her research is lost. It seems her famous boss does not want his findings questioned by newcomer Hope, or anyone else for that matter. Then when she gives him undisputed evidence, he attacks her. She flees the camp and is captured by a guerrilla faction that is fighting to overthrow the government and now Hope has much bigger problems than whether or not she is going to be credited with the discovery that chimps are more human-like than was previously thought.

This is a captivating book and without out a doubt Boyd, who was born in Ghana, knows his stuff. I did find some of the going, like the math discourses a bit heavy, but that didn't take away from the story. It took a few chapters before I was comfortable with the shift in time that came with the shifts in point of view, but once I was all right with that, Hope's story grabbed me and wouldn't let go. This book may be over a decade old, but like fine wine or Hemingway, it holds up. There is just something about a good story that is timeless.