- Paperback: 416 pages
- Publisher: Penguin; New Ed edition (28 Jun 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0140268006
- ISBN-13: 978-0140268003
- Product Dimensions: 19.6 x 12.8 x 3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 98,892 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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'Exultantly hallucinogenic ... achieves the rare feat of temporarily altering the reader's perspective' Guardian 'Prodigiously original and very funny' Observer 'Excellent ... as in the best satires, this journey through the alien world of chimps is at heart a deeply serious (and even moving) call for us to reconsider the shortcomings of the human world' Alain de Botton, The Times 'His most daring and ambitious work ... genuinely provocative and entertaining' Brian McCabe, Scotsman
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
New Statesman
`A brick dropped into the stagnant pond of contemporary English
prose' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
prose' --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
Simon Dykes, the artist, stood, rented glass in hand, and watched as a rowing eight emerged from the brown brick wall of one building, slid across a band of grey-green water, and men eased into the grey concrete of another building. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Simon Dykes, the artist, stood, rented glass in hand, and watched as a rowing eight emerged from the brown brick wall of one building, slid across a band of grey-green water, and men eased into the grey concrete of another building. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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).
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).
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
To begin with I struggled with this book. I have never had to reach for the dictionary so often and I started to wonder if this was pure author self-indulgence. I had a similar sentiment of being privy to the personal bugbears of Will Self in his deliverance of unsubtle digs at various categories of people, for example sycophants, through the vehicle of ape behaviour. There is only so many times that variations on a joke about "ass-licking" can make you smile. However, setting the Selfish agenda aside and persevering through the first chapters I enjoyed the book more and more. The interest and challenge emerged in being asked to view human behaviour in its proximity to that of other apes. As the main character Simon Dykes struggled to accept that he was not a human being but an ape, the way people behave towards each other came to the fore. In the end it was even hopeful in revealing some overlay of human dignity on an animal foundation. The book is long and rambling but there is enough here to make it worth reading. Its last line is almost poignant and at the same time made me laugh more than the previous 400 pages.
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The book starts with the preparations for the central character, Simon Dyke's, latest exhibition. Dyke is a young London artist who lives in a world of rubbish drugs, socialising in shallow artistic circles, with life punctuated by meaningless and tawdry acts of copulation, the latter being described in really unpleasant and almost medically graphic language. We assume at the start of the book that we are dealing with a regular London, populated by human beings. After a night of low grade cocaine, slightly better Es and the inevitable unthinking intercourse, followed by lurid dreams where he and his girlfriend are chimps violently mating, Dykes awakes to find that he really is a chimp...and London is now populated with chimps. He is hospitalised at Charing Cross and his condition becomes the clinical case for the consultant in neurology and an eminant psycho-physiologist - both of course chimps. There Dykes mental breakdown and belief that he is human are investigated.
Once you get over the opening of the book - which will put you off enjoying sex for a goodish while - and move into the London of the chimps, the humour really kicks in. Really the joke is no deeper than a PG Tips commercial - the juxtaposition of putting chimpanzees in human clothing in a human world - but it is superbly realized. You'll come to love the terms 'pant-hoot', 'knuckle-walk' and 'go bipedal'. The way Self handles this anthropomorphising of chimps, and primatomorphising of humans, is just genius. The chimps are civilised in all ways, but their chimpness is retained and manifested is hilarious ways; sub-adults (teenage youths) are still sullen and insolent, the eminent professor will arrive home to his Group and discuss his day at the office whilst all around is vigorous inter-generational incestuous mating and casual displays of swollen anuses (perhaps the unpleasant human sexual behaviour at the start of the book was intended to contrast with the innocent and functional mating of the chimps, to show what dark shadows we humans throw on what is essentially the same act).
When Professor Busner visits Charing Cross to meet Dr Bowen to see the patient for the first time, there are primal displays of professional respect for the visiting clinician amongst the hospital staff, namely barking, horripilating and kicking of inanimate objects, immediately followed by regular discussion of the case...it's laugh-out-loud funny. When travelling by train, first class, Busner is infuriated by the use of mobile phones and so decides it's time for a 'display' as Alpha to get them to put the phones away.
The sub-plots are nicely developed and neatly resolved. This is my first Self book, but will definitely not be my last.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Grab yourself a dictionary!
I bought this book back in 2002 when I was a teenager just starting university and tried my best to read it. Read more
Published 5 days ago by Rory Q
Great Apes
Great Apes is the second Will Self book I have read recently in an attempt to familiarise myself with critically acclaimed modern fiction (the other was "How the Dead Live"). Read more
Published 21 months ago by Johnny F
Never finished
I ran out of stamina and terminated my read of this novel with less than 100 pages to go. The first few chapters of the book,a human morphing into a monkey, were interesting and I... Read more
Published on 6 May 2010 by Mr. I. J. Weston
A really good Panhoot!
Continuing on with my discovery of Will Self, if "The Book of Dave" is his Sgt Pepper, then Great Apes is his Revolver but fear not there is a whole Wings catalogue to be assigned... Read more
Published on 4 Feb 2010 by Warwick Holt
Smug and Hollow Misanthropy.
I like Will Self as a taliking head and a journalist, it's a shame he can't write fiction. Previously I had read Cock from Cock & Bull and assumed the smug, patronising, nasty,... Read more
Published on 15 May 2009 by Ogdread Weary
My First Self
This is the first Will Self book I've read and it is an excellent book and highly recommended. Although parts of the book might shock some readers and it takes a little while to... Read more
Published on 10 April 2009 by I. M. Knight
Self inflicted wounds
Will Self has always had an ambivalent relationship with the novel. He doesn't write about character and admits that he finds plot 'boring', as a result his novels usually work off... Read more
Published on 23 July 2006 by D. Hale
A chimp on the verge...
After a night of snogging, caning ecstacy and cocaine and a few stiff drinks in a London social club for the high-strung, you can imagine that a bloke would have a rather large... Read more
Published on 22 Mar 2006 by Sally A. Quinn
Perseverance??
Have just read a review of this book which says that perseverance is the key and once you get through the first 100 pages or so, it's a really good book. Sadly I failed! Read more
Published on 2 Feb 2006 by Dickie
Hoo Gra
Great Apes - An over view (sort of).
What if Apes had evolved instead of us? Imagine our world infested by Chimpanzees? Well Simon Dykes didn't need to imagine. Read more
Published on 28 July 2004 by charlotte scadeng
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