Great Apes

By: Will Self

Narrated by: John Lee

Some people lost their sense of proportion, others their sense of scale, but Simon Dykes, a middle-aged, successful London painter, has lost his sense of perspective in a most disturbing fashion. After a night of routine, pedestrian debauchery, traipsing from toilet to toilet, and imbibing a host of narcotics on the way, Simon wakes up cuddled in his girlfriend's loving arms. Much to his dismay, however, his girlfriend has turned into a chimpanzee. To add insult to injury, the psychiatric crash team sent to deal with him as he flips his lid is also comprised of chimps.

Indeed, the entire city is overrun by clever primates, who, when they are not jostling for position, grooming themselves, or mating some of the females, can be found driving Volvos, hanging out on street corners, and running the world. Nonetheless convinced that he is still a human, Simon is confined to the emergency psychiatric ward of Charing Cross Hospital, where he becomes the patient of Dr. Zack Busner, clinical psychologist, medical doctor, anti-psychiatrist, and former television personality - an expert at the height of his reign as alpha male. As Busner attempts to convince him that everyone who is fully sentient in this world are chimpanzees, Simon struggles with the horrifying delusion that he is really a human trapped in a chimp's body.

Written with the same brilliant satiric wit that has distinguised Self's earlier fiction, Great Apes is a hilarious, often disturbing, and absolutely original take on man's place in the evolutionary chain. In a strange and twisted tale that recalls Jonathan Swift and Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, Will Self's comic genius is impossible to ignore.

©1997 Will Self. Recorded by arrangement with Grove Atlantic, Inc. (P)2014 Audible Inc.

So funny, from the 90's¿ wow! Awesome.

Introspective into our animal world neighbors from down the street at the zoo, in forests, on branches, and doing their animal business, going about their days of living in our world with cars, technology, modern psychological institutions, art institutions. And so what, the familiarity of chimpanzees at the zoo grooming and touching each others nether regions is fully there in this book, I find this amusing. It's funny because this is truly us humans , only in a different way with various shifts of value. Funny, absolutely hilarious.

I haven’t read anything quite like it before.

I can’t quite take the measure of what John Lee has accomplished by narrating this immense work. It’s somethin’, one way or the other....

I suspect the novel itself will stay with me for some time, almost entirely in good ways. It’s a pretty extraordinary accomplishment. (If the book does have a substantial flaw, I, for one would say it’s the final act, which felt variously rushed and—I want to say—disintegrative or even nihilistic.)

If I never hear the phrases “ischial scrag” and “ischial pleat,” though, it’ll be too soon.

Interesting

Interesting story. Though I don't know if I would have finished listening if it weren't for John Lee narrating.

Exceptionally well written & narrated!

I skipped the summary and reviews of this book, and jumped right in. It took a couple of chapters before I found the rhythm, and what a fascinating, off-putting, educating & slightly nauseating yet sweetly pleasant and innocent world opened up in my mind as created by Mr self and narrated by Mr Lee. Surreptitiously injected throughout this book are brilliant coined terms, satirical parallels of modern culture and human-ape counterparts. This book will stay with you long after you've put it down, Bravo to the author and bravo to the narrator!

Way too long

Interesting concept, albeit one already explored more famously by Charlton Heston. Very competently narrated considering all the hoots and chimp sounds required from the narrator. But wow this should have been a LOT shorter with half as many mating scenes and mentions of anal scrags. It got very repetitive. He completely lost me with maybe a third or a quarter left to go, in a scene involving a decanter full of liquified excrement. I wound up switching to a text version instead of the audio book because I could more easily skim through. Sorry, but I do eventually need to be able to eat again.

A Satire without Wit or Humor

The description of Great Apes is quite interesting - sadly, the actual book is a very dry and far too wordy blather that is confusing and annoying. Best guess is that the book is written by a human who pretends to be a chimpanzee writing about a human who turns into a chimpanzee? The narrator has a pleasant voice, but reads like a newscaster. I gave up after 4 chapters. It was free - which made it still overpriced.

Sex, sex, and more SEX

The synopsis sounds great and the first hour or so is really good, then it’s sex, sex, and more sex until it’s just sickening. Couldn’t get past 2.5 hours and gave up.

Simian Ulysses

Pretentious, tedious , truly awful . A simian Ulysses with the characters throwing their feces . Worst book I’ve ever downloaded from Audible .