igotamatch

When Simon Dykes awakes one morning from uneasy dreams, he finds himself transformed in his bed into a giant ape. Worse, the young artist's attractive and sexually voracious girlfriend, Sarah, is now a well-upholstered and no less sexually voracious chimpanzee. Simon goes, as Self would have it, 'humanshit'. He spent the previous night swilling, snorting and pilling among a crowd of tatty media whores in a London clubland familiar from Self's novella, The Sweet Smell of Psychosis. So Simon, not unreasonably, assumes that he is suffering a psychotic episode brought on by overdoing the 'crap bar-room cocaine'. No such luck. He is carted off to secure accommodation, and a team of primate psychiatrists set about 'curing' him of the inexplicable delusion that he is human.

---

Here, as the first half of the book promises, the prolific and intermittently brilliant Will Self is doing what he does best. His special genius is for taking the sort of whimsical insight that powers five minutes of pub conversation and making deadpan the guiding principle for an entire version of reality: a sort of extensio ad absurdum. Many of his best stories work like this, including the wonderfully deranged Quantity Theory of Insanity.

---

The London of Great Apes is more or less our own. Its inhabitants drive Volvos and read Cosmopolitan; their delinquent offspring hang around on street corners, drinking Special Brew and smoking blunts. But their social structure is rigorously chimp: polygamous, hierarchical groups, maintained by casual violence and mutual grooming. Cute ironies abound. Premature ejaculation denotes sexual prowess, and displaying an 'effulgent arsehole' is the height of elegance.

---

Communication is by sign-language, supplemented by hoots and growls radio was discovered when John Logie Baird left a television on in a cupboard. A parenthetical quirk of evolution has left dogs that are the size of horses and vice-versa: 'lap-ponies are kept as domestic pets' (though I am not entirely sure chimps have laps).

---

It is a typically, exuberantly schizophrenic mixture of self-estranging Swiftian satire, and groaningly cheap jokes. The schoolboyish aspects of Self's writing are often a strength. My Idea of Fun, his first novel, benefits from at least as strong a flavour of Danny, Champion of the World as it does of The Naked Lunch or American Psycho.

---

Still, after 300 pages of 'Chimpunity'; 'Grease humans', 'Anton Mosichimp' and so on, faith in the sustained satiric purpose of the fantasy may give way to the view that the main difference between the chimp world and the human consists in an abundance of puns.

---

Although Great Apes doesn't seem to go anywhere much, it is never dull being aboard. Self is, line by line, prodigiously original and very funny; and where he covers old ground drugs, hospitals, academics, excreta, psychiatrists, London he does so as well as ever. He throws off spot-on observations at an indecent rate. No one who has changed a nappy can fail

View more