A strange and funny book about a man who finds himself and everyone else around him transformed into sentient chimpanzees.

Will Self's book "Great Apes" is a funny idea that gets dragged out into a full length novel for no particular good reason. A man wakes up and finds all the world has transformed into chimpanzees. Cue a whole lot of furry copulation and poop flinging. I found it tedious after about 50 pages.

Will Self is the literary equivalent of Ken Russell: pretentious, overrated and a producer of artifacts that can be described as anti-culture: they seem to actively degrade my understanding of the universe. With this book it manifested itself in an overwhelming urge to hurl it into a rubbish bin with as much force as possible.

I tried to read this. Really. It is apparently a book about a man and his girlfriend who spend a night drinking and partying and wake up the next morning as chimpanzees, as is everyone else, a la Franz Kafka. I did not get that far because I only got 25 pages in and had to give up. I have a degree in English; I'm used to reading authors' works written in fancy prose and using symbolism. This book is just over the top. The author took every single opportunity for foreshadowing and symbolism and other literary techniques during the first 25 pages. And really, did we need to read about the man and woman drinking for 25 pages? Every coat was black. Every person had a chimp-like body. People were monkey-like in every aspect. Ugh. I'm giving this one star but only because I have to give it a star. I want my star back.

I almost quite reading it... it took me quite some time to get into the novel. It occurred at roughly the same time we arrive into a fully realized world where chimps rule and humans are the lab tested animals.

Simon Dykes is renown artist and after a alcohol, drug and sex fueled night he wakes up in a where humanity is no longer -- rather, it's a chimpunity. Chimps drive the Volvo's and drugs are tested on human.; lil' chimps visit humans in the zoo and wear human masks at halloween. When I first began reading, I wondered which was the reality and which was not. Simon must face this new world with the help of a psychiatrist. It's fun and the chimp worldly description are so imagined.

The novel, in my mind, is gimmicky. But, the gimmick works. It's worth the 400 plus pages to read about the working in this Planet of the Apes (the Planet of the Humans movie descriptions are hysterical.)

If you're like me, bring a dictionary along for the ride. Self seems to write directly from a thesaurus.

Clever, eye-opening, but the satire of species reversal got tiresome quickly, particularly when there was little to engage me beyond that. I bailed.

Hmm. Obviously this book as very clever. Comes with the Will Self territory. I can't say I enjoyed it a huge amount, although I guess it was intriguing. I guess I just found it a bit gross, which is kind of the whole point given that the whole thing is a massive satire of social norms in our modern day society. Simon is an artist who wakes up after a massive binge to find that chimpanzees have out evolved humans and run the world. He's a chimp too these days, but is obsessed with his past humanity, and it takes a maverick psychiatrist to sort him out. Which he kind of does, I guess. Hmm. Just a bit eurgh and a bit meh really.

This one feels like cheating because I find Will Self so effortlessly readable that of course I was going to enjoy it. The book is based on a bizarre conceit that every now and then gives way to a brilliant turn of phrase or something totally unexpected. It made me laugh out loud several times.

That being said, there is no reason for it to be this long, once the central theme is established. I did skim paragraphs here and there, and the main story did sometimes get lost in ripples of “I’m a smart man writing a smart book here’s how smart I am”. It was immensely enjoyable though, and the last page took me by surprise.

It was occasionally off-putting and a little insensitive to… essentially anyone who isn’t a white dude, but the depth of the world-building did actually have me having to readjust to human people around me once I’d finished.