The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Great Apes by Will Self
Paul Maliszewski

Will Self. Great Apes. Grove/Atlantic, 1997. 416 pp. $24.00

In Self’s new book, chimpanzees are the superior species. They drive the cars, paint the pictures, and act as agents and therapists. In the evolutionary game of strategy, teeth and nails, chimpanzees, not humans, are dominant. Humans live pathetic, indolent lives in zoos or endangered, contingent lives on animal preserves in Africa.
Enter Simon Dykes, painter. At the novel’s start, Simon is a human in a recognizably human world. One morning he awakes face to snout with Sarah, his girlfriend, held in her long, furry arms. Sarah is a chimp. Actually, Simon is too, but he doesn’t easily cope with his metamorphosis and the overthrow of the world’s order. The past was rewritten while he slept: Planet-of-the-Humans movies play on TV, Jane Goodall studies wild humans, and Stephen Jay Gould writes about Darwin, though Darwin is a chimp now.
The story of Great Apes is the story of Simon trying to describe his perception of the world to others; this novel is about boundaries and the perception that creates them. How can Simon convey his predicament in the language of chimps? The circumscribed language of chimps who practice psychology is even less helpful to Simon. What interests Self about Simon is not whether or not he’s crazy. Instead his subjects are the satirist’s trusty targets: social manners, behaviors exhibited by groups of people, and the politics of everyday social gatherings. These concerns are not new to Self. In a story in The Quantity Theory of Insanity, he writes, “Jane Bowen extended her hand with an overarm gesture that told me she couldn’t have cared less about me, or my antecedents.” The world is rigidly taxonomic. In Great Apes, a chimp “drags himself backwards across the yard arse aloft, ischial scrag nervously puckered” to greet another. The difference between the two is one of perspective.
What the world of chimps grants Self is a new perspective on the human behavior that has interested him all along. Where a human character in a more realistic story requires an author to be subtle, to show how deference quietly affects the meeting of an all-star psychologist and his assistant, the world of chimps makes all this loud, physical, and cruel. Self takes the imaginative leap that Gould suggests would be valuable though not possible scientifically: that is, a mammal’s perceptions reveal its mentality, and it is Self’s wonderful turn to mine this understanding for satire. Great Apes is a novel about psychology in which the characters are turned inside out, all the raw innards and secret hypocrisies revealed, bald motives and base desires on the outside for all to see. [Paul Maliszewski]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Great Apes by Will Self Paul Maliszewski Will Self. Great Apes. Grove/Atlantic, 1997. 416 pp. $24.00 In Self’s new book, chimpanzees are the superior species. They drive the cars, paint the pictures, and act as agents and therapists. In the evolutionary game of strategy, teeth and nails, chimpanzees, not humans, are dominant. Humans live pathetic, indolent lives in zoos or endangered, contingent lives on animal preserves in Africa. Enter Simon Dykes, painter. At the novel’s start, Simon is a human in a recognizably human world. One morning he awakes face to snout with Sarah, his girlfriend, held in her long, furry arms. Sarah is a chimp. Actually, Simon is too, but he doesn’t easily cope with his metamorphosis and the overthrow of the world’s order. The past was rewritten while he slept: Planet-of-the-Humans movies play on TV, Jane Goodall studies wild humans, and Stephen Jay Gould writes about Darwin, though Darwin is a chimp now. The story of Great Apes is the story of Simon trying to describe his perception of the world to others; this novel is about boundaries and the perception that creates them. How can Simon convey his predicament in the language of chimps? The circumscribed language of chimps who practice psychology is even less helpful to Simon. What interests Self about Simon is not whether or not he’s crazy. Instead his subjects are the satirist’s trusty targets: social manners, behaviors exhibited by groups of people, and the politics of everyday social gatherings. These concerns are not new to Self. In a story in The Quantity Theory of Insanity, he writes, “Jane Bowen extended her hand with an overarm gesture that told me she couldn’t have cared less about me, or my antecedents.” The world is rigidly taxonomic. In Great Apes, a chimp “drags himself backwards across the yard arse aloft, ischial scrag nervously puckered” to greet another. The difference between the two is one of perspective. What the world of chimps grants Self is a new perspective on the human behavior that has interested him all along. Where a human character in a more realistic story requires an author to be subtle, to show how deference quietly affects the meeting of an all-star psychologist and his assistant, the world of chimps makes all this loud, physical, and cruel. Self takes the imaginative leap that Gould suggests would be valuable though not possible scientifically: that is, a mammal’s perceptions reveal its mentality, and it is Self’s wonderful turn to mine this understanding for satire. Great Apes is a novel about psychology in which the characters are turned inside out, all the raw innards and secret hypocrisies revealed, bald motives and base desires on the outside for all to see. [Paul Maliszewski]

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