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One nation, undercover
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g r e a t_A p e s________
BY WILL SELF
BY ANDREW O'HEHIR | In a surprisingly sober author's note introducing his new novel, the British satirist Will Self complains that his work "has been much attacked for its apparent lack of sympathy" and for his perceived tendency to treat his protagonists with "diabolic disregard." These "idiotic objections," Self insists, are "the fruit of a chronic misunderstanding of the meaning and purpose of satire," and he has written "Great Apes" as a riposte to such critics. Of course, the Will Self who authored this screed is a chimpanzee -- a noted writer and member of the dominant primate species on Earth -- who greeted us at the outset with a hearty "HoooGraa!" Somewhere behind this earnest ape, we assume, is the human Self himself, who has not only created a hilariously reordered universe in "Great Apes" but also pulled off something precariously close to genuine novelistic magic. After a night of especially grievous drug intake, Simon Dykes, a successful middle-aged London painter (and a human), awakens to discover that he, his girlfriend, Bill Clinton, O.J. Simpson and the rest of the human world have turned into chimpanzees. Simon, however, remains convinced of his humanity: He cannot climb trees or knuckle-walk like other chimps, has little command of the complex combination of hand-signals and vocalization that constitute chimp language and is uniquely distressed by ordinary elements of chimp society, such as ritual grooming, routine anal presentation and random public copulation. Naturally, Simon is understood to be suffering from an acute psychotic breakdown. He is hospitalized and his unusual delusion soon draws the attention of Dr. Zack Busner, an eminent chimp psychiatrist and self-styled "natural philosopher" (and author of "The Chimp Who Mated an Armchair" and other best-sellers). While such parodic characters abound in "Great Apes," Self's meticulously loony construction of a chimpanzee-centered universe is a far more rewarding accomplishment. These apes drive Volvos, eat in overpriced restaurants, snort cocaine and overdress foolishly for gallery openings, but they also behave like, well, apes. Suffice it to say there is a great deal more attention paid to the excretory organs than some readers will enjoy; when encountering an alpha male -- the leader of a dominance hierarchy -- a subservient chimp will generally say/sign something like, "I acknowledge your suzerainty, I admire your eminence, your anal scrag enfolds us all."
But more is going on in the consistently hilarious "Great Apes" than quantum cleverness, something I have never felt certain of in Self's thesaurus-busting earlier work. As Simon and Dr. Busner together begin to explore the philosophical and anthropological limits of "chimpunity" (Self creates many marvelous neologisms here, which I won't spoil for you), we feel ourselves, with Simon, looking afresh at the flabby, awkward hypocrisies of human civilization. Paradoxically, Self's ape mask allows him to become more human, to view with great compassion a world not unlike ours, a world where fur-covered quadrupedal Oxford dons, sipping liquor derived from unmentionable sources, pant-hoot at the sun from the rooftops of the venerable campus.
Andrew O'Hehir is a New York writer and a frequent Salon contributor. |
