Great Apes [Hardcover]

Will Self (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1997

After a night of routine debauchery in London's clubland, the artist Simon Dykes falls asleep - only to wake up to find his girlfriend has been transmogrified into a chimp. Indeed the whole of London, though functioning normally, is run and inhabited by chimps. Can the great chimp-doctor, Zack Busner, cure him of his illusion that he's human? A wonderfully funny and clever novel that manages too to evoke great feelings of pity and sadness in the reader, this is in effect a meditation on how we treat animals.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Like Kafka's Gregor Samsa, London artist Simon Dykes has suffered a surprising transformation?he's become a chimpanzee. So has everyone else around him, but he doesn't realize it. Dumped in a mental hospital for his delusional thinking, Simon comes under the care of Dr. Busner (an alpha male) and tries to understand the strange new world around him. Chimpanzees are indeed the ascendant primates; humans are a fading offshoot that have simply failed to learn how to sign or vocalize properly. As one might expect from Self (Cock & Bull, LJ 3/1/93), this situation provides ample opportunity for a lacerating send-up of contemporary human society, and Self can be very funny. But as a whole it doesn't really work. The alternative chimp society is not persuasive, and Self is too busy with bad-boy langauge and obsessive sex to get at deeper issues. Buy where Self is popular.?Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Simon Dykes is a successful London painter who arrives at a point where he ponders the futility of life: he's in the throes of serious angst, particularly his corporeal self is weighing him down. His latest apocalyptic paintings are disturbing and reflect his narcissistic fixation on the body. So he decides to forgo drugs on the fateful evening that he is to meet his lady, the lovely Sarah Peasenhulme, and the rest of their clique; but then the evening assumes its own momentum and drugs flow bountifully. After a night of halting lovemaking, Simon awakens to find himself in bed with an ape, a chimpanzee. Soon he discovers he is in a world dominated by chimpanzees. Despite appearances, Simon maintains that he is a human and hovers on the brink of madness until Dr. Zack Busner, clinical psychologist, maverick drug researcher, former television personality, and alpha male at the top of his reign, decides to take on the case and bring Simon to an understanding of his "chimpunity." Self creates a fully realized chimp world with this Kafkaesque, or Swiftian, satire that hypnotizes with its comic romps, existential posturings, and Shakespearean intrigues. Certain to find a readership beyond Self loyalists. Bonnie Smothers

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 404 pages
• Publisher: Grove Pr (September 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802116175
• ISBN-13: 978-0802116178
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (50 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #725,486 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hoooo'Graah, February 27, 2003

By 

Alex (Denver, united States of America) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Great Apes (Will Self) (Paperback)

This is one of the funniest books I have ever read and I've been reading since 1964. What it lacks in profundity if makes up in snobery. I first stumbled across this author with an engaging story called "The Quantity Theory of Insanity" so I knew he had a sense of humor. But "Great Apes" is unequaled. If you have a scientific education or you enjoy a good vocabulary and convoluted parody I couldn't recommend a better book. Get a used copy and laugh your scrag off. You won't be dissapointed. You might also like "Jesus Mary Delahunty" by David MacSweeney.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not great, just good, October 7, 2000

By 

Mike Stone - See all my reviews

This review is from: Great Apes (Will Self) (Paperback)

I don't think that this book's satire is its strongest suit. Sure, Mr. Self manages to poke fun at humanity's romantic notions of love, relationship, and affection, by pointing a giant ape-sized mirror up to us. But that is really just a minor part of the book. He's really involved in a drawn out discussion of semiotics. By giving his ape-society an entirely different form of communication (signing), he's able to call attention to the way that we communicate with each other. Okay, I've said my piece.

The descriptions and displays of the ape society are nearly perfect. The constant grooming, "arse-kissing" (literally; it's a display of respect), physical recriminations, and especially the wall-to-wall copulating ("mating") are jarring at first, but eventually become routine for the reader. If there's any satire here, it's in Self trying to elicit a horrified response from his more prudish readers. I found the rules and regulations of his ape society fascinating and very well drawn.

I also enjoyed the fact that he took human cultural items (O.J. Simpson, HIV/AIDS, The Planet of the Apes movies) and hypostatized them, as they would appear in the ape world. He also had much fun substituting human for chimp/ape and chimp/ape for human whenever he could ("chimpanity", going "human sh*t", etc.)

My complaints about the novel are thus:

The secondary plot, in which several ape underlings conspire to form an alliance against Dr. Busner, felt tacked on. It never went anywhere, and hardly affected the plot. The one revelation that it provided had literally no dramatic effect at all. Pity, because it could have provided a much-needed narrative shake-up, to move the story along.

His characters all talk as if they are the offspring of Umberto Eco and Sigmund Freud. Everyone appears extremely well versed in the teachings of semiotics and clinical psychology. Even Simon (simian?) Dykes, the schizoid human-turned-ape, showed vast amounts of knowledge, so much so that I wondered why he didn't just up and cure himself! It became mighty frustrating, especially for the layman with only a cursory understanding of each, and a desire to read dialogue that doesn't sound like it's being copied from a textbook. Maybe that was that point? If it was, then it wasn't made clearly enough.

Self's prose -- the non-clinical portions -- was very inconsistent. At first, it felt very verbose, as if the author was paid per fifty-cent word. And at times it felt almost taciturn, preferring to make his points through the grunts that peppered the apes signing. I preferred the instances of the latter, purely for the fact that they contributed more to setting up his ape society, to the former, which only confused my sweet, little brain.

Overall, I enjoyed the novel for the alternate society it portrayed, and was more than a bit annoyed that it never really used it to say anything of interest.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars clever and entertaining, December 19, 2002

By 

James J. Lippard "skeptic" (Phoenix, AZ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Great Apes (Will Self) (Paperback)

My wife bought this book for me because she liked the cover. I like it too, and think it looks rather like a simian Duane Gish (of the Institute for Creation Research)--do a Google image search and you'll see what I mean.

I don't think, as one reviewer wrote here, that the Zack Busner character is particularly based on Freud. There is evidence early on that he is at least partially based on Oliver Sacks (his list of publications in the world of chimps has titles very much like those of Sacks' books, and his intimate relationships with his patients are similar to Sacks' style).