"Great Apes" A review by M.Kakutani

'Great Apes:' Life Among Randy Apes Can Be Tough on a Guy
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI
Books of the Times


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GREAT APES
By Will Self
404 pages. Grove Press. $24.

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Will Self is the Dennis Rodman of contemporary fiction.

Like Rodman, he has made a name for himself by specializing in willfully self-conscious outrage and by flirting with sexual transgression. And like Rodman, he possesses a genuine talent -- for writing in his case, not rebounding -- that is often overshadowed by his adolescent high jinks.

As his 1994 novel, "My Idea of Fun," demonstrated, Self is capable of creating genuinely engaging, innovative fiction, of turning his myriad influences -- Kafka, Burroughs and Lewis Carroll -- into something interesting and new. All too often, though, he has squandered his gifts for language and satire on silly, sophomoric stories: tales in which a man grows a vagina, a woman sprouts a penis or the phlegm of sick people coats the streets and contaminates the air. An obsession with bodily functions and the grosser aspects of sex infects all his work, as does a fascination with altered, often drug-induced states of mind.

Self's latest novel, "Great Apes," unfortunately, embodies most of his weaknesses as a writer, and few of his strengths. It is a slender idea for a satire, inflated into a fat, puffy novel, a "Twilight-Zone" episode blown into a full-length feature.

The novel's premise is borrowed, as was the first part of his novellas "Cock & Bull," from Kafka's "Metamorphosis." This time, an eminent artist named Simon Dykes wakes up to find himself turned into a chimpanzee and the world around him transformed into a planet of the apes. Simon is committed to the mental ward of a London hospital and diagnosed as suffering from a terrible delusion: he believes he is a human being.

As delineated by Self, the world Simon awakens to is very much like the human world he remembers: yuppies addicted to computers, would-be artists addicted to cocaine and careerists addicted to competition. The one difference: everyone -- from historical greats like Socrates, Plato and Freud through contemporary not-so-greats -- has become a chimpanzee. As for humans, they are regarded as a pathetic, inferior species; dying out in the wild, they can now be seen in zoos and experimental labs.

"Infants often had stuffed humans as toys," Self writes. "Birthday cards with humans dressed up as chimps on them were available in almost every news agent. There were also the notorious commercials for P.G. Tips tea, with their absurd use of humans mimicking chimp behavior; special effects used to convey the impression that they were signing intelligently and enjoying the beverage."

Although there are occasional moments of wacky comedy in "Great Apes," Self's usually inventive imagination is notably absent in this novel. His chimps tend to be lewd, pretentious sycophants: they are constantly saying things like "I admire your beautifully effulgent ischial scrag, your rump is like the morning star, and your maverick philosophy is a beacon of intrigue in a dull world." In fact, his planet of the apes turns out to be an even less surprising place than the one in the Charlton Heston-Roddy McDowall movie, a highly predictable place, mechanically constructed to allow the author to indulge in his sophomoric fascination (and disgust) with sex.

Self's chimps differ from humans in several respects: they greet one another with elaborate grooming rituals (involving fondling, petting and nit-picking); they do not wear clothes on the lower parts of their bodies (the better to display their genitals to others), and they routinely take part in public, and often incestuous, sex. This leads Self to go on, and on and on, at wearying length about an individual chimp's sexual endowments and about chimpanzee sex in all its varieties: sex between fathers and daughters, sex between doctors and patients, sex between dozens of strangers linked in a copulatory conga line in a public park.

All this chimp sex, of course, is supposed to make a satiric point: that humans, too, can be promiscuous and unfaithful to their spouses; they're just more hypocritical in pretending to be monogamous. This is a pretty banal point for a 400-plus page satire to make, and the book's other points are equally familiar: that human beings can act like beasts when competing for prestige, fame and money; that they can grovel and betray one another like chimps; that humans and animals actually have quite a lot in common.

The lumbering plot of "Great Apes" hardly makes up for the novel's flimsy satire: a long, meandering story line about Simon's efforts to come to terms with his "chimpunity," the efforts of a doctor to help him, and the suggestion that Simon's delusion may stem from his participation in an experimental trial of a drug called Inclusion (first mentioned in an earlier Self story, "Gray Area").

"Great Apes" may push Self's favorite theme of alienation (from family, friends, self) to a new extreme, but in doing so, it sorely tries the reader's patience. Like Rodman's recent antics, "Great Apes" is all juvenile calculation: meant to be provocative, it ends up being merely boring.