No more monkey business jumping on the bed! (Great Apes - Will Self)

Member Name: sparkymarky1973

Product:	Great Apes - Will Self
Date:	10/10/09 (27 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A very clever idea tackled from a highly unique perspective...

Disadvantages: Lots of long words and very intellectual in style and conception.

From critically acclaimed writer and journalist, Will Self, comes this interesting and satirical tale of psychosis and mental health that takes everything you think you know about our world and turns it on it's head.

Simon Dykes is a prolific artist whose latest exhibition is days away from opening. He is out partying, doing a few lines of Coke and knocking back Ectasy when he finds himself questioning what it might be like to lose one's sense of perspective. The next morning, waking up in his girlfriend Sarah's apartment, he finds out....the world he once knew has gone and in it's place, a world where Chimpanzees are the dominant species has appeared in it's place. What is more, he himself seems to be inhabiting the body of one of these intelligent chimps though he refuses to recognise this and still stubbornly percieves himself to be human. Experiencing a total mental breakdown, he is taken to a mental health indtitution at Charing Cross and sectioned. And it is here that he comes to be examined by Doctors Jane Bowen and Zack Busner; both convinced that a study of this maligned and deluded creature could lead to them both being recognised in the future as potential Great Apes!

Taking a similar stance to the classic novel, Planet Of The Apes, Self's novel expands on the idea of an alternative civilisation that has sprung up in parallel to our own and gives it his own unique slant. Here, for example, Gorillas and Baboons are both classified as part of the inferior Human Race and only Chimpanzees have evolved to intelligence, communicating through a complex sign language but otherwise following pretty much our own history of development. Humans run wild across many of the African continents and are in danger of being wiped out; captive humans are experimented on in labs in a bid to find treatments for CIV and AIDS or exhibited in various zoos. Meanwhile, everything else is pretty much business as normal except that Chimps rule the world and have developed their own version of society.

Self goes to town with his highly derivative ideas and concepts are attempts to throw everything we take for granted completely upsy-daisy! Even the preface at the beginning is written from the perspective that this is is a fictional novel as written by a Simian rather than human author. Quite intellectual in its style, there are lots of long words and no doubt a much deeper, hidden message that Self is trying to convey that no doubt I have missed, it is nonetheless a very clever and enjoyable novel and one I enjoyed reading immensly! The amount of research and study Self has obviously given to Simian societies in our own world and their heirachy structures is impressive and you get a real sense, during descriptive passages of the different mating groups that are featured, that the author is giving a very accurate impression of just what it might be like to live in this imagined world!

Towards the climax of the book, Self begins to lose focus a little bit and the plot begins to slowly unravel around the edges but, knowing his limits, the author quickly ties everything together and brings the story to a close. It is perhaps an unsatisfying conclusion for many but nevertheless a fitting one and this is still, in my mind, the best fictional novel that Self has yet come up with. If you are looking for something completely different from your usual read and don't mind a bit of social satire in the mould of something like Catch-22, then you should probably give this a go. If instead you like your novels to be slightly more conventional and less heavy on the brain, then this is possibly one to avoid! This is a very clever idea wrapped up in high-brow styled writing and should only be tackled by the ambitious or open-minded reader willing to give something different a go from anything else ever read before!

Summary: An artist wakes up to find his whole world has gone bananas!