Subject: Review: Will Self's _Great Apes_

From: [email-masked] (Paul S. Jenkins)
Date: 09 Aug 1999 13:16:48 -0400

_Great Apes_ by Will Self
	Review Copyright (c) 1999 Paul S. Jenkins

This is a maddening book -- sharply written, of course, as one would
expect from Will Self -- but maddening nonetheless, in more ways than one.

For a start we're never sure which of Self's alternatives is supposed to
be the real one. Is the blocked artist Simon Dykes a man who experiences a
vivid dream of being a chimpanzee? Or is he _actually_ a chimp who's had a
singularly lucid nightmare of being human?

Here's the premise: Dykes wakes up one morning after a more than usually
extreme binge of alcohol, drugs and sex, to discover that his girlfriend
has turned into a chimpanzee, as has the rest of humanity.  Everyone else
is convinced Dykes is a chimpanzee under some kind of psychotic
drug-induced delusion of being human. Who's right?

Self's novel never gives it away -- he uses a twist of narrative
convention for his dialogue, allowing his chimps to 'sign' with their
hands rather than speak, but this truly digital communication is
constantly interspersed with the chimps' vocalizations. Unfortunately,
human readers won't know what the vocalizations mean, so these
interactions are always log-jamming the dialogue.

The problem with _Great Apes_ is that Self is proposing his alternative
society as very little different from our own, with Volvos, PG Tips
commercials and product-branded London life in general much as we know it.
But the substitution of chimps for humans seems to be a _minor_
difference, despite their utterly different attitude to sex.

It's a convention in speculative fiction that an author 'writes in
translation', so that if the world depicted is different from our own, the
language will be different too, but the author 'translates' it to English
for our benefit. Self's chimps 'sign' in English. We know this because
brand names are the same ones we're familiar with. The PG Tips TV
commercial features humans dressed up as chimps. Roddy McDowell stars in a
series of _Planet of the Humans_ films. Etcetera. Frankly, this is crass.
The chimps themselves wear conventional clothes, but only on the top half
of their bodies, brachiating and knuckle-walking around naked from the
waist down, the better to copulate with any other passing chimps as they
go about town.

The sex and gender thing is so fundamental to society that it would have
created something unrecognizable to us -- not this (excuse the pun) barely
differentiated urban milieu.

Of course, Self treats it all as a joke, but one gag can't sustain a novel
this long. The writing is at times very fine -- at others simply
self-conscious (if you'll excuse another serendipitous pun).

Where authors of other alternate history stories extrapolate big changes
in subsequent events from a fairly small 'alternative', Self suggests that
everything would be mostly the same if chimps rather than humans were the
dominant race. He's not serious, of course, but his novel is written as if
the reader is expected to believe it.

In telling this odd story, Self is commenting on human attitudes to life,
relationships, sex, drugs, medical and commercial ethics and a host of
other issues of concern to contemporary people. His points aren't badly
made, but as speculative fiction _Great Apes_ doesn't work.

%A   Self, Will
%T   Great Apes
%I   Penguin
%C   London
%D   1998 (copyright 1997)
%G   ISBN 0 14 026800 6
%P   404 pp.
%O   paperback GBP 6.99

Paul S. Jenkins | More reviews at: 
Portsmouth   UK | http://www.cix.co.uk/~willowsoft/revup/