Review: Great Apes by Will Self

I find Will Self to be an enviably gifted and creative writer, but to date I have only experienced his work in small doses.

I have now read three of his novels and one collection of short stories, but what I mean by 'small doses' is that, unlike some writers, I have not read one of his books and then been immediately compelled to run out and buy more. The reason for this is not because I didn't enjoy the experience, but because Self's mind is a place where one can only spend a limited amount of time before one starts wondering just which way is up.

Self is somebody who deals in Big Ideas - or High Concepts, as the film industry would call them - and, generally speaking, his stories do not play out at the bus stop, in the office or down the park. Or at least they do, but in wildly different and mind-bendingly surreal versions of the world in which those locations are usually found.

In The Butt, he sent a hapless tourist on a lengthy pilgrimage of atonement after illegally dropping a fag butt in a bizarre distortion of, I think, Australia. In his story collection, Liver, he spent a lot of time painting a drearily mundane and realistic picture of washed-up winos inhabiting a grotty London wine bar, only to introduce alien visitation into the murky cocktail. And in The Book of Dave, Christ only knows what was going on.

I don't know if Self was simply born with a brain capable of tremendous leaps of imagination and distortion, or whether he created this ability through his well-publicised adventures with illegal substances. Perhaps it was a combination of the two. But with Great Apes he finds yet another way to turn reality on its head by imagining a Planet of the Apes-style nightmare.

Druggie artist Simon Dykes is on the brink of opening a new exhibition and seems to have found some sort of sex-fuelled happiness with a girlfriend, even though the loss of his ex-wife and young sons clearly still troubles him. The animal fornication he enjoys with the nubile Sarah becomes a little too literal when he wakes one morning to find that Sarah has turned into a chimpanzee. And she's not the only one.

Eschewing the predictable movie-style approach that other novelists might have chosen, such as throwing Simon straight into chimp society with comic results, Self presents a grindingly realistic take on what would probably happen in that situation - Simon goes absolutely ape-shit. Or human-shit, as his baffled monkey pals term his maddening distress. Carted off to a mental ward before being handed over to an eminent psychologist with dubious motives, Simon struggles to comprehend the profusion of short furry legs, exposed arses and copious public shagging.

Worst of all, no one around him can understand his confusion. To the chimps, Simon has always been one of them. All the same characters remain in his life, just in simian form. His exhibition is still going ahead, famous people are still famous and the history of civilisation is unchanged, except that it has all been transposed onto a different species of primate. Buildings, cars, cities - all is unchanged, apart from being just that tiny bit smaller.

The quest to find out which one of Simon's realities is the delusion and which is the truth provides plenty of opportunities for humour and questions about the nature of madness. I found Great Apes easier and quicker to read than his other books, probably partly fuelled by the desire to find out the answer myself. But if you're looking for a simple solution, you might just be disappointed...