The fifth instalment of my attempt to re-read and blog all of Will Self's fiction, in order of release. Today: Great Apes, Self's second novel, first published in 1997.
Great Apes was the first Will Self book I read, around 1998. I can’t possibly have understood most of what was going on in it then, but despite this I’ve still always thought of it as my favourite of his novels. Looking back, it represents the beginning of his creative peak – ten years in which he would publish three more extraordinary novels, as well as the collection Tough Tough Toys for Tough Tough Boys, and pick up his first Booker nomination for Dorian. The premise of Great Apes is simple; an artist, Simon Dykes, wakes up one morning to find himself the only human in a world of chimps. Taken under the wing of the eminent psychiatrist Dr Zack Busner, he undergoes a process of radical psychoanalysis to help him come to terms with his essential ‘chimpunity’. The genius of the novel is in its execution; while most authors would be happy to use the chimp-world to satirise the foibles of modern living, Self’s analysis delves further, using Simon's crisis to explore alienation, identity and depression.
To pull this off, Self inverts the premise of Metamorphosis. Rather than waking up to find himself transformed into a monstrous vermin, Simon comes to from a heavy night at the Sealink Club to find that the rest of his species have been turned into ‘fucking beasts’. Catatonic with shock, he is swiftly removed to a mental hospital, where the initial prognosis is grim. In a Kafkaesque dialogue with the psychiatrist Jane Bowen, he attempts to explain his situation, to uncomprehending ears: ‘When you say that you are human, what do you delineate by this? Why do you think you are human?’ In his psychosis, Simon withdraws from the physical world. The bodily contact which makes up much of chimp social interaction (grooming sessions, violent admonishments, ‘conga-lines of buggery’) is anathema to him, and he is even uncomfortable in his own skin: ‘His very limbs were unfamiliar to him… somewhere between Simon Dyke’s brain and the rest of his body a diminution was occurring’.
The key to the delusion lies in the early chapters, which describe Simon’s life in the recognisable, human, society. An artist, Simon inhabits a world of gallery openings and private members’ clubs. He is separated from his wife and child, and conducting an affair with his agent, Sarah. Simon’s work is inspired by the Victorian artist John Martin, in particular his paintings The Plains of Heaven and The Fall of Babylon. These huge, emotive canvases depicting scenes of judgement seem rather kitschy today, but were a popular sensation in the mid nineteenth century. In Simon’s reworkings, similarly apocalyptic scenes unfold, but they are stripped of spiritual or moral content; shoppers in Ikea are overwhelmed by the ebola virus, and fireballs rip through tube stations. In his worldview, life and death have become meaningless, as commerce has replaced spiritual experience. At the same time, technological advances have become barriers to physical interaction.
Later, Simon meets with anthropologists who have studied humans in the wild, where he is presented with a theory. Whereas chimps communicate primarily through signs, with a limited range of vocalisations, humans are thought to suffer from an overload of sounds: ‘fifty different phonomes… so much of the vast human brain capacity must be taken up with the business of interpreting these confusing sounds… the human has become bogged down in a clamorous and perverse sound garden’. In this world of sound and fury, Simon's senses are overwhelmed and he becomes ‘lost in his own head’, separated from his family and unable to interact with his community.
Family is crucial to Simon’s condition, especially the terms ‘fission’ and ‘fusion’. We are introduced to these ideas early on, as a performance artist outlines a plan to walk the length of Britain following the path of powerlines, undergoing a process of cellular fusion due to the pollution he is exposed to. Later, the natural fission and fusion of social and mating groups is portrayed as an important part of chimp society. Simon’s own nuclear family has fissioned, and he is estranged from his children. The society he inhabits is atomised, his clique orbiting one another without coming into contact: they ‘only ever really touched each other on greeting or parting’. Without regular, meaningful contact, Simon retreats into a private world, alienated from his species to the extent of hallucination and dysmorphia.
The novel is also great fun to read. Self’s portrayal of the chimp world, with its regular mating sessions ('the milkmale dropped the fortnight's bill in, cause enough for another round of mating') and effusive displays of deference ('Thank you Zack, I acknowledge your suzeranity. I admire your eminence. I revere your reign over the group, your anal scrag enfolds us all'), is perhaps his best comic writing, and the chimp vocalisations (‘HoooGraaa, h’uuuuh, waaaah’) quickly become integrated into your own thought patterns. The author mocks the self-importance of alpha males by anthropomorphising their behaviour (‘they advanced, fully horripilated and barking with exceptional violence. Busner’s penis was erect. Both he and Bowen were spraying urine and saliva’), and questions our attitudes to food: ‘if we eat the meat of animals who have been physically tortured, perhaps we should be more imaginative about it… persistently sexually humiliate pheasants and then shoot them’.
Self’s best descriptive writing is often used to depict mental hospitals, and Great Apes is no different. Here, Charing Cross hospital ‘rears up, pushing a façade of Bauhausian rationality fourteen storeys into the chomped-up atmosphere’. Dr Busner is present again, the connection with Oliver Sachs more apparent than ever – he is identified as the author of pop-psychology texts such as ‘The Chimp Who Mated an Armchair’. The novel refers back to his controversial involvement with the drug Inclusion™ (from Grey Area) and looks forward to Umbrella with its references to hydrocephalus (a condition described by Sachs in his book Awakenings).
Self’s books always contain a certain amount of cross-pollination. Aside from the Busner connections, Great Apes looks forward to the relationship between Lily Bloom and Rude Boy in How The Dead Live with its description of ‘ectoplasmic cords strung across summertime London’, and the aforementioned ‘conga lines of buggery’ which Dorian would later enjoy so much. There is also an idle fantasy about an invasion of the Sealink club by ‘Balkan freebooters’; hatred of the London clubs is a theme Self returns to in the opening story of Liver, a vicious satire on the Colony Rooms.
Re-reading Great Apes made me realise just how good a novel it is; beneath the complex social satire, and the incredibly detailed alternate universe Self creates, is a powerful and thoughtful account of alienation and loneliness, displaying a level of empathy Self is rarely credited with* (‘If Simon concentrated on one chimp’s progress he could admire the power and efficiency with which it moved… but if he allowed himself to view the mass of chimpunity he saw nothing but a pack of animals’). The subtle way in which Self encourages the reader to identify with a mentally ill character, taking their point of view, showcases his narrative dexterity, whilst the revelation about Simon’s true identity is an another extremely skilful piece of writing. In my memory of the book, the initial scenes in the human world had been telescoped – the shock of the first chapter in Dr Busner’s mating group had wiped them from my mind – but the way in which Self sets up Simon’s reality before pulling the rug away from under him is classic horror. There is a hint of Ballard’s influence in the disconnection between Self’s protagonist and his environment, but Self here is stepping away from his peers and finding his own voice, unlike his slightly unsatisfying debut.
Self’s next novel was the Joycean How The Dead Live, possibly his most complex and ambitious work, until the release of Umbrella at least. But before that was Tough Tough Toys For Tough Tough Boys, the most gothic of his short story collections.
*The author’s note suggests this may be a sore point: ‘critic after critic has signalled that I treat my protagonists with a diabolic disregard… my work has been attacked for its apparent lack of sympathy’.
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