Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #131815 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Review
'Exultantly hallucinogenic ... achieves the rare feat of temporarily altering the reader's perspective' Guardian 'Prodigiously original and very funny' Observer 'Excellent ... as in the best satires, this journey through the alien world of chimps is at heart a deeply serious (and even moving) call for us to reconsider the shortcomings of the human world' Alain de Botton, The Times 'His most daring and ambitious work ... genuinely provocative and entertaining' Brian McCabe, Scotsman

New Statesman
`A brick dropped into the stagnant pond of contemporary English
prose'

New York Times Book Review
`An utterly absorbing and affecting work of fiction ... with Great
Apes Will Self establishes himself as an alpha male in the British literary
hierarchy'

Customer Reviews

Funny, rude, disturbing, rude...and funny
The book starts with the preparations for the central character, Simon Dyke's, latest exhibition. Dyke is a young London artist who lives in a world of rubbish drugs, socialising in shallow artistic circles, with life punctuated by meaningless and tawdry acts of copulation, the latter being described in really unpleasant and almost medically graphic language. We assume at the start of the book that we are dealing with a regular London, populated by human beings. After a night of low grade cocaine, slightly better Es and the inevitable unthinking intercourse, followed by lurid dreams where he and his girlfriend are chimps violently mating, Dykes awakes to find that he really is a chimp...and London is now populated with chimps. He is hospitalised at Charing Cross and his condition becomes the clinical case for the consultant in neurology and an eminant psycho-physiologist - both of course chimps. There Dykes mental breakdown and belief that he is human are investigated.

Once you get over the opening of the book - which will put you off enjoying sex for a goodish while - and move into the London of the chimps, the humour really kicks in. Really the joke is no deeper than a PG Tips commercial - the juxtaposition of putting chimpanzees in human clothing in a human world - but it is superbly realized. You'll come to love the terms 'pant-hoot', 'knuckle-walk' and 'go bipedal'. The way Self handles this anthropomorphising of chimps, and primatomorphising of humans, is just genius. The chimps are civilised in all ways, but their chimpness is retained and manifested is hilarious ways; sub-adults (teenage youths) are still sullen and insolent, the eminent professor will arrive home to his Group and discuss his day at the office whilst all around is vigorous inter-generational incestuous mating and casual displays of swollen anuses (perhaps the unpleasant human sexual behaviour at the start of the book was intended to contrast with the innocent and functional mating of the chimps, to show what dark shadows we humans throw on what is essentially the same act).

When Professor Busner visits Charing Cross to meet Dr Bowen to see the patient for the first time, there are primal displays of professional respect for the visiting clinician amongst the hospital staff, namely barking, horripilating and kicking of inanimate objects, immediately followed by regular discussion of the case...it's laugh-out-loud funny. When travelling by train, first class, Busner is infuriated by the use of mobile phones and so decides it's time for a 'display' as Alpha to get them to put the phones away.

The sub-plots are nicely developed and neatly resolved. This is my first Self book, but will definitely not be my last.

Thought-provoking and gripping
I'm disappointed with a number of the reviews of this book. It really is a case of perseverance paying off, and I ended up reading this book in just a few days. But it has to be said that the opening couple of chapters are like swimming in treacle as Self lets rip with his penchant for complex vocab and lurid description. I was tempted to give up myself, but I'm so glad I didn't. Once Dykes wakes up in the comical world of the chimps, this book really does come into its own. It hurtles along at a terrific pace, taking side-swipes at all sorts of facets of modern society. The whole enterprise is funny, gripping, thought-provoking and ultimately a plain good read. Modern society IS full of lurid, unpleasant things - and I think Self has some important things to say about it.

Stand back and look at humanity from the outside!
Simon, the "hero" of the book, awakes from an over indulgance in drink and drugs to find that all humanity has apparently metamorphosed into chimpanzees. And so everybody behaves very differently. Sexual etiquet, family relationships, social interaction and communication are all very different from the way they are in human society. And yet in many ways the basic motivations and predjudices are so similar, especially in the chimps' attitudes to other great apes. The book describes how friends and family try to cure him of his delusion that he is human, and how he struggles to decide whether he really is drug-damaged human or deluded chimp. Thus it presents humanity through a slightly distorting mirror. Although slightly too long, it is a fascinating account of both human and chimp behaviour. I though it was a very original and refreshing read.