Review: Great Apes

Great Apes by Will Self

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



The best critique of footnotes came from the actor John Barrymore (or Noel Coward or I don't know who) who likened footnotes to something "rushing down the stairs every time the doorbell rings on one's wedding night." Well, encountering a twenty-five-cent word the same way with definition not obvious context is like having to leave the honeymoon suite to go to Western Union to send money to bail out a misbehaving friend. Self can't get past himself to do that often and so often he used a shoe horn to wedge in a word like spondee or other artifact of deep literature. Does he wish he was making the high art if not the crude if clever novel? Well, at least he hipped me to a definition of "gloss" that I can use at the day job.

As for the story, in a Planet of the Apes like parallel universe, a chimp artist has a psychotic break and like [b:The Metamorphosis|485894|The Metamorphosis|Franz Kafka|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1359061917s/485894.jpg|2373750] finds himself ostracized by transformation - he thinks he is human. While [a:Franz Kafka|5223|Franz Kafka|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1287463493p2/5223.jpg] explored the possibilities in about 200 hundred pages, Self takes twice that long to repeat his own tropes of his imaginative, mirror world and take us on a long walk to an anticlimactic end making a shaggy dog story out of a good premise seasoned with allusions to pop culture and more.

Don't get me wrong - Self is great. I love is mocking of the academic world, especially psychoanalysis and vain attempts to probe the human mind as well as the shallow affectations of knowledge, like in this quote:

"No, to catch one moiety of the members you’d need a pot or cage, baited with publicity, or gossip, or innuendo, or money, or all four; or combinations thereof: gossip about money, public innuendo, lucrative publicity, and so on. Because this lot were bottom feeders, pure and simple, who came to the club in the unadulterated spirit of undersea exploration, to check out how low they could go.

As for the other moiety, well, you’d have to say that they were even easier to catch, if no better to eat. All that would be required to land them was a low tide — which came twice in the twenty-four, at noon and three in the morning, when the barroom was little more than a muddy flat of wrack — a dinghy which could be maneuvered around the downlights — which were set behind horrid metal basketry — and a long knife-arm, with which to reach down and prise them from the carpeting.

For this box-load were bivalves — to an hermaphrodite. Eyeless in the gloom, de-tentacled by devolution, possessing at most one febrile limb with which to lift a glass or tote a cigarette, they reposed as the currents of conversation flowed through them, extracting sufficient nutriment simply by the act of being. Some argued — and Simon was on occasion among them, there had to be some defence — that if a grain of insight, a granule of originality, were inserted into their cloistered, sharp-edged minds, placed on the mantel where the invitations sat, it might well be cultured, swaddled in a carbonate of some kind until it formed, if not wisdom, at any rate something resembling culture. But Simon only ever said this when he was drunk and full of the world. Drunk, and so full of the world that the world must be good — or at any rate capable of inclusion — for him to be so full of it."



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