Will Self: Great Apes

Will Self
Great Apes
Grove Press

DIG, IF YOU will, a picture: Civilization as we know it has been treated to a freakish turnabout in which chimpanzees have unseated humans at the top of the evolutionary ladder. In addition to their innate specialties--knuckle-walking, gang-banging, spraying their own feces about--the hairy, horny little creatures can drive Volvos, smoke cigarettes, run art galleries, and practice medicine. Such is the satirical otherworld of Brit-lit maverick Will Self's latest novel, turning the streets of modern-day London into a veritable concrete jungle.

Our guide is protagonist Simon Dykes, an artist and everyday homo sapiens who wakes up a chimp in an ape-ridden alternate reality following an evening spent with chemical and social narcotics. Simon, no surprise, is promptly committed. As a team of professionals works (between groomings) to contain Simon's apparent psychosis, Self works up an astute yet predictable context for rethinking human nature. In a realm where citizens swing from trees in Regents Park on lunch hour, and oestrus-bearing females engage multiple partners in the tube station, Dykes is pushed to define and defend his alleged humanity while at the same time assimilating into chimpunity.

Sound like a shallow proposition? It is.

And it isn't. Self's attention to detail in conveying a primate bizarro-world is exacting, and his linguistic tweaks to authenticate this new society are funny and inspired (Simon, we learn, may go "humanshit" at the prospect of seeing his estranged "ex-alpha"). Simon's real-world friends are spun into colorful chimpanzee counterparts, including a consort whose childhood remains haunted by a father who didn't mate her enough. From the start, Self's prose is intrepid and brilliantly tactile.

But the novelty of this Darwinian role reversal wears off more quickly than the author might reckon. Plot twists begin to feel like gratuitous excuses to sustain Self's fantasy for another 50 pages: Imagine Vonnegut and Burroughs conspiring to rewrite Planet of the Apes, with neither allowing the other to make the appropriate cuts. The novel's funneled anticlimax isn't quite the reward we hope for, and its blurry moral is only half-heartedly controversial. For all his well-earned style points, it seems that Self's own self-indulgence is the monkey he can't shake.