Great Apes - Will Self

Will Self is a love him or hate him kind of author. I've loved his short stories ever since I read "Grey Area" back when I was a student. I think that his deliberately overblown writing style is well-suited to the short form and becomes wearing if you have to read more than 10 pages of it. I had previously read "How the Dead Live" and didn't rate it much. I thought that the premise that when you die you just have to move to an unfashionable part of London was a good idea for a short story which had been padded out to novel length. And then there's his use of deliberately obscure words. There are 2 ways to go about reading anything by Self. The first is to have his book in one hand and the dictionary in the other. The second is just to assume that any words you don't know are probably rude. You won't go far wrong with this second approach.

Simon Dykes is an annoying Young British Artist happily spending his time getting wasted with his YBA mates and having unsuccessful attemts at drug-fuelled sex with his almost-entirely worthless girlfriend Sarah. One morning he wakes up to find that Sarah has turned int a chimpanzee... so has he... and so has everyone else in the world. Screaming and raving, Simon is sectioned and meets the notorious Dr Busner (a recurring character from some of Self's short stories) who makes it his mission to help Simon come to terms with his "chimpunity" at least partially because there might be a TV series in it for him.


One of the first things you cannot help but notice about chimps is their upsetting backsides which looks as if they’ve had a rectal prolapse. This is not glossed over, but dwelt upon with loving attention to detail. The chimp characters admire one another's floppy pink arse bits. In fact the phrase, "I revere your anal scrag" is used by the subservient chimps to suck up to the alphas. The whole book is pretty much obsessed with the wrong end of chimps. And with perineums. Most of us can g0 hours (actually, maybe months) without thinking about our perineums, but Will can only manage a few pages - it's a compulsion! I complained to a friend about it and he suggested that Mr Self's obsession is because he doesn't have a perineum himself. We think he has just one hole for everything, like birds do.

Anyway, back at the book, the apes represent everything about humans that we try to pretend we don't do, from indiscriminate public rutting, to hurting one another to enforce the pecking order, to picking horrible things out of their bum cracks. Apparently, this is satire. I just wish it was shorter satire! The quote on the front describes "Great Apes" as "Prodigiously original and very funny". I think I would have chosen the words "long" and "scatological" instead. As a short story writer, I revere Will Self's anal scrag, but there is a limit to the number pages I want to read about ape arses.