Great Apes (Will Self)

I have never been inparted with 'Grnn' any of Will Self's previous books. So I can't sign much about the 'euch-euch' cuffing he has received from critics in the past. But through my introduction to Self in this novel, I am thoroughly impressed with the efulgence of his ischeal pleat and submit to his literary suzerainity. Why do humans bash Self, 'huuu'? His effectiveness in taking up such a difficult task is ample evidence of his skill. Yet with all the potential he has for a devastating critique of modern society, he is modest. Amis' "Times Arrow" comes immediately to my mind in parallel, as well as T. Boyle's satire. Both those artists reserve a much more serious tone in their critique of western civilization. Yet Self maintains a delicate balance hovering around the personal which lends itself to extension without ever losing the pure joy of his parallel universe's perversions of what humans consider natural. Self's chimps are not locked inside their own minds as are humans. They quickly resolve their existential dilemnas with a quick mating or a brutal yet brief brawl. And for this, the world of chimpunity has no use for weapons. What chimps lack is sexual attention from their parents. Such a world! Self could do worse than to extend and expand in such fertile 'euch-euch' terrian. I for one would like to see more. For now, a hearty HoooGraah! Self is my kind of chimp.(updated from my anonymous review)

This is a pretty twisted offering from Will Self. He delights in displaying his awesome vocabulary in the same a way that a young child will do something disgusting to shock. If a suitable word does not actually exist it's no impediment...he makes one up..and it works.If you like shock value go no further and I'm sure greater minds than mine will find plenty of depth and satire. Freak out your bookclub and get them in to this!

Will Self doesn't need the addition of my words to support his universe. Perhaps one of my works compounded in the Otago Museum ( Dunedin.New Zealand) can offer something up instead -

I've been reading it two months and only in chapter 10. the only reason I'm still reading is because I pais $$ for it but this is the most disapointing book i have ever read 😦

so again, i bought this book for english class assigned reading. this book has so many words that you can't figure out unless you have a dictionary with you. The only impression this book gives me is that in that ape world. having sex is the only thing universal and everyone likes to do it, even with their own daughters :(

Given the obviousness of the device, the satire here should have been a slam-dunk, but somehow it was not as focused and pithy as it might have been. There were a few moments of clever insight where our human world was cast in a new and unflattering light, but generally just a lot of scatological humour, sex/violence, constant incest (for which I haven't been able to find much confirmation in studies of chimp behaviour) etc, and heavy-handed on the moralising (zoos, compounds). It felt (as others have said) rather like the author was indulging himself in a macabre romp through chimp-land, and he seemed to confirm it with the anticlimactic ending, where the whole 'human delusion' is dismissed by the chimps themselves as a satirical device. Self-referentially self-referential, but the reader is left feeling a bit used. Also agree with other reviewers that the first 90 pages or so in the human world could have been cut down to 20 without any loss of impact. It all quickly got very familiar and the language was too convoluted, no escape from the author's effortful voice competing with himself to use the most obscure descriptors. Felt no empathy for or interest in the characters' fates, but perhaps that's a symptom of my own human-centrism more than the author's lack of characterisation. Ended up skipping around the book looking for gems rather than reading start to finish.

Self's final book from his drug induced phase, before he went clean. And it's as packed with ideas, language riffs and gags as any of his best fiction. Self uses the conceit that the beasts with which we share 98% of our DNA are dominant in a version of London that is similar to mid 90's London, and hapless artist Simon Dykes awakes after a night of toxic and carnal debauchery with the delusion that he is human. He is taken up as a case study by the unscrupulous chimp psychiatrist Zac Busner (a familiar character in Self's fiction) who experiments on Dykes with the aim of making his own name.Self's conceit is a brilliant one to send up many of the foibles and delusious of what he calls the 'self enclosed humanism' of trendy metropolitan types. The sophisticated veneer that veils squalid sexual desires. The rumbunctious lovemaking of young Londoners - snaffling down on each other's pongid scrags. The pant hooting, brachiating, 'uu-graaa' noises that don't really seeem that different from the movements and sounds of human London.Basically Self wants to explode the myth that there is something unique and distinctive about humankind. We are nothing but beasts, with the rest of the animal kingdom, and the sophisticated hierarchies and systems we set up are nothing more than incarnations of the Alpha, beta and gamma tiers of the ape kingdom. Like Swift, Self uses gags, outrageous conceits - and a lavish dose of visceral language - to come at society from a unique angle. And send it up with much needed ruthlessness.

I found the book very difficult. It started as 'a man about town' with booze, drugs and Sex; far too much detail, I then moves to our 'hero' waking the next day to find himself as a chimpanzee in a parallel wood where the chimps are the dominate species. Whilst quite clever the constant sex (OK it is true that chimps are promiscuous and complete intercourse in a few seconds) becomes boring. The main plot is the efforts by chimpanzee psychologies to persuade him he is a chimp. no explanation why the transition took place.Definately not a book for the faint hearted,

Loved this first time around and re-purchased with great expectations when I saw it re-released in Kindle format. Very disappointed second time around. Irritating, pompous prose and gratuitous obscenity which becomes truly boring after a few chapters. Glad I re-read before I recommended it.

I really enjoyed this book once it got going. It certainly doesn't deserve some of the bad reviews I have read on here. It starts slow in the sense that it takes a while to understand where the plot is going, but chapter by chapter disparate parts of the story are brought together with consummate masterstrokes. My tip, keep reading til the very end, author's notes and footnotes included.

I really loved the concept of this book, a human who wakes up one day to find himself a chimpanzee. Very cleverly written, Will Self takes a satirical look at humanity by exploring the differences between them an the apes. I liked the level of depth that he put into the writing, it made you able to visualise the planet of the apes that Simon Sykes had awoken to and you feel part of his struggle to accept what he has become. I did find that at times some of the vocabulary was a little too clever for its own good and the ending to me was rushed an a bit of a let down. He had set up an interesting subplot surrounding the doctor but let this fizzle out which was disappointing.

I tried to read this but only got as far as the first chapter and I found that my mind kept wandering! Just not my sort of read - however, it was a book group read and the group was divided between those who loved it and those who hated it....I shall try to read it again at a later date as I am not often defeated with a book! Perhaps I was just not in the right frame of mind.

This is a leaden satire which soon becomes tedious. The world has been taken over by very promiscuous chimpanzees who behaved like humans in some respects. Lost on me but I persevered to the end. I prefer Self's food reviews in the New Statesman where his humour is punchy and witty. There's not enough here for a novel.

Many years ago I used to be a regular reader of Will Self's Sunday column and developed an appreciation of his humour and style. If you appreciate that then you will appreciate this, if not then the flexing of his intellect can prove too clever for his own good.

then you will like this. That's because it's by Will Self.But you do always get a strong feeling that you know which writer most impresses Will Self.

Perhaps a book - amongst other things - about accepting the unacceptable, a monkey of a novel: funny, arresting, challenging, a great read.

This book is fantastic, my favourite book by Will Self

Took a while to warm up but after the twist about 25% in the story really picked up. Really enjoyable.

Thought provoking: the thoughts it provokes are centred on the fact that chimps are the same everywhere and human beings are not - primitive societies all differ from one another and advanced societies even more so. If we ask why this is, it must have something to do with human adaptability; also potentially with the fact that we have both a left and a right hand side to the brain. Chimps, to judge from Self's novel, don't have time for all that boring left hand side of the brain work that gives rise to modern society.So this description - essentially of a series of tableaux in which Self describes how chimps would set about interactions with one another (mating; grooming; dominance and caring) and with the environment (eating: first and second breakfast, first, second and third lunch and so on) - but against the presupposition that they have otherwise created the world in which we now live. It is just a series of tableaux, however, with a plot designed to show of Self's virtuosity in desription of the ape way of life - and his virtuosity is considerable. It isn't really a plot, to speak of. Nor are there characters to speak of. It's all about situations.What it's not: Animal Farm (satire on corruption of political belief systems among human beings); Timbuktu (dogs subject to the same radical chance in their lives as human beings in the Paul Auster world); Under The Skin (Michael Faber; story of return to psychic health of more advanced female actually transformed into human shape, more or less, by plastic surgery - passionate defence of vegeterarianism, genuinely gripping plot and theme).

Der Künstler Simon Dykes ist im Londoner Nachtleben mit seinen Freunden unterwegs und konsumiert reichlich Drogen und Alkohol. Soweit also alles ganz normal, doch als er am nächsten Morgen erwacht, muss er entsetzt feststellen, dass sich seine Gefährtin Sarah in eine Schimpansin verwandelt hat. Damit nicht genug: Die ganze Welt ist von Affen bevölkert und Menschen gibt es (außerhalb afrikanischer Reservate) nur in Zoos zu bestaunen.Simon wird nach längerem Aufenthalt in der Psychiatrie schließlich in die Obhut des erfahrenen Wissenschaftlers Dr. Zack Busner entlassen, der die Ursachen dieser offenkundigen Geisteskrankheit erforschen und den Patienten auf den rechten Pfad der Schimpansenheit zurückführen soll. Dank der hingebungsvollen Geduld des ambitionierten Doktors stellen sich alsbald erste vielversprechende Fortschritte ein; gleichwohl wird Simon aber immer wieder von verstörenden Erinnerungen an ein vermeintliches Menschendasein geplagt..."Great Apes" ist ein großartiger Roman, wenn der Leser bereit ist, dem Autor zu folgen und vorbehaltlos in eine fremde Welt einzutauchen, die sich nach den Regeln der Schimpansen dreht, in der Rangkämpfe und pausenlose Paarungen im Vordergrund stehen. Mit viel Liebe zum Detail und ausgefeilter Sprache erschafft Will Self nicht nur konsequent neue Begriffe (Ersetzen von "Mensch" durch "Schimpanse"), sondern ein eigenes Universum mit elegantem Wortwitz, was die Lektüre im Original allerdings nicht gerade erleichtert. Natürlich erinnert das Buch an die "Planet der Affen"-Filme, die übrigens auch vorkommen, selbstredend mit vertauschten Rollen.Fazit: Ein intelligentes Lesevergnügen, bei dem bisweilen das Lachen im Halse steckenbleibt.

Reading the summary, this book seemed quite good, with a nice refreshing look at some of our crazy behaviour. Unfortunately, the author completely fails to make anything out of the initial idea. The satire of human behaviour remains very rare and isn't thought out. Worst of all, the book uses up all of its few jokes in the first few pages, after that it's the same stuff over and over again. Addressing another chimp as "his effulgent arsehole" may be slightly funny the first time around, but it gets stale very quickly - but the author doesn't deliver anything else. Couple this with an uneventful storyline and characters, you don't care for, and the book becomes tedious to read.If it was free, and you had nothing else to read than go ahead - but I do definitely not recommend buying this book.

I have listened to Will Self expound with erudition upon a host of subjects via the wireless. I have found myself agreeing with his point of view on many occasions and, when I did not, I still found much to commend itself in the manner of his argument. I have not, however, previously read any of his literary output and so, when the excellent Kindle offered 'Great Apes' at the bargain price of 99 pence, I felt that it would be churlish to decline - even allowing for my, almost usual, state of impecunity.This was a mistake. I found the book to lack any characters or discernible story. Will Self has, it seems to me, written an entire book with the sole purpose of lampooning a certain London based upper middle class genre. Even if one agrees that they are as contemptible as Mr. Self appears to believe, it is a group which has been targeted before. This book really adds nothing new to the table and for an intellect of this height to train its guns upon such a sorry target, leaves my British love of the underdog sympathising with the impaled.