Primal sphere

Will Self puts the animal back in animal rationale

by Chris Wright

GREAT APES, by Will Self. Grove Press, 404 pages, $24.

Censure -- the satirist's tool in trade -- is, as Doctor Johnson said, "always willingly indulged, because it implies some superiority." Well, yes. But if the satirist's role is to take the moral high ground, how then to explain Will Self's down-and-dirty real-life indulgences?

The most piercing satire in Self's new novel, Great Apes, pinpoints the hedonistic excesses of London's druggy countercultural elite. But Self -- recently pilloried in the British press for in-flight heroin snorting on John Major's campaign plane -- is not entirely without sin in the druggy-elite department. A case of the blind berating the blind, or just writing what you know?

His lifestyle aside, Self's work has provoked finger-wagging of its own -- as good satire should. And Self is a good satirist: syntactically inventive, intellectually agile. He's not going to stop at magnifying our moral blemishes. No, in Great Apes Self betrays Swiftian ambitions as he sets about us with the butt-end of an evolutionary conceit.

Self's previous books have all been satirical in tone, but Great Apes is the first to wag such intentions so openly before us. "HoooGraa!" begins the author's note. It's Self, addressing us in the "voice" of a chimpanzee. Chimps, he tells us, are the prime primate. Humans are feral, close to extinction, kept alive in zoos and killed in laboratories. After detailing chimpunitarian crises (such as CIV -- get it?), he closes with a swipe at those who complain that his work debases chimps, "a chronic misunderstanding of the meaning and purpose of satire." His "H'hooooo" response to such critics: "I've made my protagonist human!"

The protagonist is Simon Dykes, a successful young London artist. The book begins with Dykes on a typical night out: the patter with happening pals at a local nightclub; him and his beautiful girlfriend Sarah banging away in the club's basement; the snorting of crap cocaine in toilet stalls. Meanwhile, the reader scores some of the finest high-octane prose available. By the end of the night, when Simon starts tasting "his own metallic cud," we feel a bit blotto too.

But Simon's cavortings are taking their toll. He has become -- call it a case of toilet existentialism -- nauseatingly aware of his physical existence:

Simon's bum exercised him nowadays, as if his arsehole was haltingly learning to talk, in order to inform him that his days were numbered. . . . his bowels seemed to move all the time, telegraphing him fart bulletins, and faxes of shit-juice that soiled the gussets of his pants in hideous ways.

After a bout of loveless copulation with Sarah, Simon dreams of his two children, who offer him his only meaningful human contact, and from whom he has grown increasingly distant. Painfully aware of his body, alienated from his humanity, Simon awakes the next morning to find himself in bed with a chimpanzee. Naturally he is troubled by this -- or, in chimp idiom, he goes "humanshit." Even more disturbing, the orderlies who arrive to drag him off to the nearest psychiatric hospital are chimps too. In fact, everyone in the world except Simon has turned into a chimp. Or so he believes.

Enter Zack Busner, a self-styled maverick psychologist who spends the rest of the book attempting to cure Simon of his delusion, to reconcile him to his own chimpunity. Sundry characters drift in and out -- Sarah, Simon's artsy friends, Busner's duplicitous research assistant Gambol -- but the main thrust of the book (if it can be called that) is the progress of the relationship that develops between Busner and his deluded chimp. Meanwhile, Self indulges in riffs on drugs, sex and AIDS, love and compassion, psychology, racism, and animal rights.

Self isn't the first to use the human-ape trope as the basis for satire. "I am, of course, not original in this," he writes in the author's note. But this is no Planet of the Apes. Self's animals, though endowed with reason, are animals: they bite each other during philosophical discussions, fuck on subway steps during the rush hour, wave their scraggy arses in greeting, pick cum and drool from each other's fur as a form of polite discourse. Conversely, Self's humans, stripped of their humanity, are pathetic, defeated, but not the bundles of impulse that Swift envisioned with his Yahoos. Self is not looking to rehash the old mind-body dichotomy. In fact, he's saying that there isn't any. Self's chimps are meant to prick us into recognizing our own bestiality.

What is astounding about the book is the comprehensiveness of Self's vision. Every detail is seen to, from the mundane (the apes communicate through intricate sign-systems -- silence becomes "signlence," and so on), to the comical (a chimp with a pronounced forehead is identified as Liam Gallagher, of Oasis), to the grotesque (child abuse in chimp terms: a father failing to mate his daughter). The miracle is that Self can make such a fantastic scenario so authentic. Perhaps, though, he expends too much energy making his chimps act convincingly, and not enough making them act.

We marvel at Self's firecracker prose. We giggle at lines like: " `Kiss my arse!' he had signified respectfully . . . . `Kiss mine!' she had countersigned with equal formality." We shudder through endless descriptions of effulgent arseholes. Heck, we may even be prodded into examining our fundamental assumptions about humanity. But Self does such a good job with his parallel world that we soon take it for granted and begin looking for a plot -- which is where Great Apes is lacking. With its lone subplot (a half-arsed conspiracy involving Gambol), the narrative seems one-track. And, for all its kinetic energy, the book seems slow, eventually lumbering toward the finish line like a man who thinks he's a sloth.