Great Apes in December

Coming Soon!!!!

Another review of Great Apes.......

Review by Charles Wyrick

Years ago a friend of mine described a peculiar sensation he had while reading a book that he didn't like. He felt that he was being watched, that the author was continually peeking around a corner in order to make himself known. This image he created of the overbearing writer stuck. It resurfaced in my mind after reading Will Self's new novel "Great Apes." Self's presence is insurmountable. He gnaws at the pages and cuts peepholes through the spine. Yet unlike my friend I relish this authorial presence. I enjoy being watched.

Ironically enough "Great Apes" revolves around different types of voyeurism. It begins with Simon Dykes staring out a window watching a rowing team. Dykes is a semi-controversial painter just weeks away from exhibiting his newest work. At a midpoint in both his career and his life Simon is beginning to feel restless. Bored with the now predictable nights on the town with his young girlfriend and her friends, Dykes does not know that soon he will be the subject of another's scrutiny. Soon Dykes will be under psychiatric observation. Just as we as readers meet him, Dykes undergoes a dramatic change. After a night of heavy drinking and drug use Simon wakes up as a chimpanzee.

Using Dykes as his Gulliver, Self takes a hilarious romp through modern society. In "Great Apes" the worlds of contemporary art, academics and psychiatry fall quickly as easy prey to Self's mock sociology of chimpanzee culture. Just imagine a popular art opening crowded with chimpanzees dressed in chic chimp evening wear and you can get a peek at the novel's vision. "Great Apes" is literature's Planet of the Apes as author Self plays the role of a funhouse anthropologist, a voyeur into a world of his own warping. On waking to a world modified to satisfy chimpanzee issues, the protagonist Simon Dykes is hysterical. As readers we can only be amused. When Simon Dykes first screeches at the sight of his girlfriend's hairy chest and arms, we know we are witnessing the birth of a strange world.

What I have liked in the past in Will Self's writing is that he is blunt. In this book there is nothing easy about his characters' transformations from humanity to chimpanity. The chimpanzee world thrives on a brutal code of male supremacy. Dykes is astonished by the physicality of this society. Chimps express irritation through violent physical attacks on one another and tenderness through prolonged grooming sessions. Dykes is completely horrified by these practices. With a shrewd wit Self draws a wonderful and acerbic satire out of his character's absurd dilemma. We see chimpanzee society through the eyes of its weakest member, the spiritually weakened Dykes whose case hinges on what his psychologist sees as the completely unnatural delusion that the world should be run by humans.

There is an overreaching sense of Self's presence in these pages. He forces on us his love of the banal and the absurd. His humor is as bawdy as it is bizarre. But these profanities are not without their compliment. Self litters his work with his sublimities -- his playful yet masterful language and his gorgeous literary control. In "Great Apes" he writes with both the assertiveness of a great satirist and the dexterity of a practiced, well-tuned prose strategist. When reading "Great Apes" do not be afraid to look over your shoulder if you feel you are being watched. Try to take comfort in the intrusion because your voyeur wants to see you laugh.



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Charles Wyrick lives in Nashville and plays in the band Stella.

"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.

Great Apes by Will Self.....A Review......

The Ape Who Mistook Himself for a Man
By GARY KRIST
Read the First Chapter | Read Michiko Kakutani's review of "Great Apes" (September 12, 1997)


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More on Will Self from The New York Times Archives
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GREAT APES
By Will Self.
404 pp. New York:
Grove Press. $24.

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r. Zack Busner -- distinguished clinical psychologist, maverick neuropharmacologist, noted television commentator and tooth-clacking, lice-picking chimpanzee -- is a figure of commanding presence. In the world of Will Self's latest novel, ''Great Apes,'' a world in which chimps rather than humans are the species cursed by the gift of advanced civilization, Busner is one of the greatest apes of all. An ''elder stateschimp of the psychiatric fraternity,'' he has achieved an Oliver Sacks-ish eminence in his field, writing about his encounters with various neurological misfits in popular books like ''The Chimp Who Mated an Armchair'' and ''Nestings.'' As a result, he is met wherever he knuckle-walks with a flurry of obsequious groveling from subordinates, reinforcing his position as an alpha male at the very top of the professional hierarchy.

But now Busner is confronted with his most puzzling case: that of Simon Dykes, a celebrated artist suffering from the bizarre delusion that he is human. Indeed, Dykes's psychosis is so comprehensive that he even regards the true reality as one in which -- get this -- humans are the evolutionarily successful primates. Evidently thinking ahead to his next book (''The Ape Who Mistook His Fur for an Overcoat,'' perhaps?), Busner takes on the unfortunate Dykes as a patient. And that's where the trouble begins, for there are subordinate males afoot who, while paying homage to Busner in public, are secretly working to undermine him, and see his handling of the deluded artist's case as just the opportunity they seek.

Such, believe it or not, is the story line of ''Great Apes,'' and if it doesn't sound like your idea of literature, you're probably not alone. In earlier books, like ''My Idea of Fun'' and the story collection ''Grey Area'' (in which both Zack Busner and Simon Dykes previously appeared, though in human form), Self made a name for himself as a defiant satirist with a peculiar mastery of the vocabulary of modern neurosis. Cultivating controversy in his life as well as in his work (during his stint as a reporter in the recent British election campaign, he was thrown off John Major's plane, accused of shooting heroin in the bathroom), he has polarized the reading public both here and in England, earning the usual iconoclast's reward of rabid denunciations and hyperbolic praise.

In ''Great Apes,'' his seventh book, Self carries this outrageousness into new realms. Taking a device that most comic writers would have dared to employ only over the space of a four-page satirical piece, he instead develops it into a 400-page novel. And although that may sound like a recipe for disaster -- like deciding to make an animated all-Simpsons version of ''Long Day's Journey Into Night'' -- the real surprise here is not only that the device works but that it works so brilliantly. What should have been the literary equivalent of a parlor trick turns out to be an utterly absorbing and affecting work of fiction.

The success of Self's feat is due in large part to the completeness with which he has imagined his alternate universe of ascendant ''chimpunity.'' Though much of the civilization depicted in ''Great Apes'' will be recognizable to human readers (there are chimp versions of Freud, O. J. Simpson and even Jane Goodall -- who, of course, has spent her career studying the wild humans of Gombe), it is the differences that are most telling. For instance, since chimps lack the vocal range necessary for complex spoken language, Self's primates have instead developed an eloquent vocabulary of hand signs punctuated by generic vocalizations. Thus the cry ''HoooGraaa!'' is the all-purpose attention getter, while ''H'huuu?'' is the question signifier and ''chup-chupp'' the inevitable accompaniment to all palliative gestures. Similarly, the human idea of the family has been replaced here by the hierarchical grouping of chimpanzees, where promiscuous copulation (even among blood relatives) is warmly encouraged and the major antisocial act is to upset the group structure by failing to groom with sufficient deference or mate with appropriate frequency and abandon. Self's grip on his extended trope is so tight, in fact, that I found only a few transmogrification errors in the entire book -- instances, for example, in which a ''bed'' is referred to instead of the more proper ''nest.'' (But then, as Alexander Pope once wrote, ''To err is chimp,'' and so on.)

What's more, all of this literary skylarking is grounded in a lush, scrupulously exact prose that can vault from the poignant to the grotesque to the ridiculous with vertiginous ease. Here, in a typical passage, Self riffs on the emotional consequences of Simon's recently failed marriage and his relationship with his children:

''No matter how much he saw them now, how many times he picked them up from school, how many times he made them oven chips and fish fingers, how many times he petted them, kissed them, told them he loved them, nothing could assuage this sense of wrenching separation, their disjunction from his life. He may not have snacked on the placenta, but somehow the umbilici still trailed from his mouth, ectoplasmic cords, strung across summertime London, snagging on rooftops, car aerials, advertising hoardings, and tied him to their little bellies.''

A few pages later, Self reprises the snacking imagery in an entirely different tone, when Simon idly imagines the crowds in Oxford Circus being ravaged by a ''post-imperial Kong'': ''These people were finger food to the god, sushi for the divinity. He disentangled them from his fur, eyed their knotted faces, and then popped them between his teeth, each of which was the size of a dentist. Mmmm . . . ! Crunchy . . . and yet chewy.''

With such reckless bravado, Self manages to turn his novel into a high-powered satirical weapon capable of blasting a wide range of targets. The circus of celebrity psychiatry, the jungle of hospital politics, the Vanity Fair of the London art scene -- all are brutally sent up in their apish reincarnations. But Self is also after bigger game. In scope, his book's obvious predecessor is ''Gulliver's Travels,'' which made similar use of anthropomorphized beasts to point up the general corruption and foolhardiness of Homo sapiens. And like Swift's book, ''Great Apes'' can be unexpectedly moving in its more ambitious moments, as in this passage, where Simon's human mind/chimp body problem takes the form of a drug-induced fever dream:

''He identified the lost infant as himself -- or to be more precise his lost body. He saw his infant's body, standing, shivering, naked of its protective coat. Little Simon, as gracile as a young bonobo; head fur blond and cropped at the back, features refined and serious. . . . Simon turned towards the lost infant, wafted across the grassy floor to get him. But as he drew nearer the infant's blue eyes widened, and his red red lips parted, and the sapling body bent in an afflatus of anguish. Then Simon heard the awful, meaningful vocalizations; so guttural -- but so just. 'Get away! Get away, Beelzebub! Foul beast! Ape man!' ''

It's in moments like this that Simon's situation -- the radical alienation he feels from his environment, his family, his own nature -- becomes more than just a clever comic device. Simon, the human-minded ape, could at times be speaking for all divided souls of the modern urban savanna, where the demands of everyday life in society often seem at odds with the inclinations of our animal selves.

Obviously, ''Great Apes'' is not a book that will delight everyone. In places, its humor caroms toward the sophomoric (not to mention the scatological), and there are times when Self's readers may feel as if they're trapped in a windowless room with a monstrously intelligent, diabolically articulate adolescent. Moreover, like some of Self's earlier work, this book ends lamely, with a reductive conclusion that seems almost intentionally to trivialize what has come before. But the value of the novel shouldn't be obscured by the inevitable skirmishes it will inspire on the battlefield of taste. With ''Great Apes,'' his most satisfying book so far, Will Self establishes himself as an alpha male in the British literary hierarchy. He deserves every thunderous ''HoooGraaa!'' we can offer him.



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Gary Krist is the author of two story collections, ''The Garden State'' and ''Bone by Bone.'' His first novel, ''Bad Chemistry,'' will be published this winter.




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More on Will Self
From the Archives of The New York Times
REVIEWS:


Cock & Bull (1993)
"[Will Self] possesses all those gifts a satiric writer might want....Unfortunately, in this volume, these copious gifts are all too frequently put in the service of a misogynistic and ridiculously sophomoric vision."
My Idea of Fun: A Cautionary Tale (1994)
"Although he is British and this novel is set in England, it has family resemblances to the work not only of Nabokov, but also of Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis and Don DeLillo....Will Self belongs in their company."
The Quantity Theory of Insanity (1995)
"Mr. Self was fired as a cartoonist for The New Statesman because he was "too depressing." And he does seem very fond of that word."

Here's a review I saw on the internet of Great Apes

Will Self has always had an ambivalent relationship with the novel. He doesn't write about character and admits that he finds plot 'boring', as a result his novels usually work off a single comic device or absurd concept, stretched to the limit through a vast vocabularly, endless metaphors and a scatological humour. Self's is a style that can be very visceral, funny and incisive, however, over the course of an entire novel it can become nauseous, tedious and dull. Self is better suited to short stories and journalism, forums where his flamboyant, potent prose and wild premises still have the ability to be shocking rather than tired and worn.
'Great Apes', Self's 1997 work released shortly after the scandal over the author taking heroin on John Major's private jet, combines both these aspects of his work into a great, fierce piece of satire.
Taking the Kafkaesque premise of a London artist, Simon Dykes waking from a night of bad coke and worse sex to find himself in a world where chimps have reversed roles with humans, the novel works best when describing the social hierachy of the chimps and their bizarre behaviour, using it as a device to show how similar the two species are.
Dykes finds himself in a secure unit under the supervision of emenient primate psychiatrist Zack Busner, the titular 'great ape'. Self goes to great lengths to describe Dykes' anguish and how insane he seems in contrast to the rest of the world. As the book progresses Dykes' belief in his own humanity is shown to be nothing more than the workings of delusional mind- chimps do indeed have global supremacy.
Mental illness and the problems of medicine are common Self themes and the book does raise interesting questions about the nature of madness and drug abuse, but here they feel thinly developed, as if Self is writing for his own amusement. For every funny line or comic invention there are vast amounts of unecessary and flabby writing, either concerning psychiatry, sex or divorce, that just come across as dull. Self has an incredible mind, at his best recalling, all at once, Martin Amis, Celine, Kafka and Carroll, but here he comes across more as a man writing really just to waste time, as if the novel was a bit of filler between magazine assignments and taking drugs. The satirical comment Self hoped to make, on modern art, on coke, on humanity, on whatever, never fully translates or is fully concluded. Self started writing, kept going and then finished, whether what he wrote was of real substance wasn't obviously of much concern to him.

Will Self

For anyone wanting to discover more about Will Self [Author of Great Apes] please click on the following link:

http://www.will-self.com/

Member of Book Club regrets recent ban!!!!!!

New book club member, Monsieur Pongo Busner, 25, states his regret at the temporary banning of the book "The Great Apes" by going ape**** all over St Yrieix.

A club official was not available for comment.

Revised Book Club Choices.......2008

Hi ALL members of the Book Club.

Recently we made our choices for the books to be read this year and produced a very good and challenging list.

The list has been revised slightly.

The choice of "The Great Apes" Will Self, has been put back for later in the year, dependent on further discussion and clarification.

Please bring the rest of the monthly choices forward one month.

Thanks......more on this at the February meeting when we will be tackling "The Zahir".

Good reading everyone.

Vernon.