VILE BODY

Evelyn Waugh was a satirist of enormous talent — beyond much doubt the greatest of the 20th century, producing such classics as Vile Bodies in 1930, Black Mischief in 1932, and Scoop in 1938. He was also a Roman Catholic of a somewhat antique and dyspeptic character. Asked once how he could call himself a believer while being so savage in his writing and much of his public persona, he is reported to have replied, “Imagine how nasty I’d be if I weren’t a Christian.” With the 1990s fiction of the British journalist Will Self, we begin to get an idea of just how nasty that could have been.

Unfortunately, making any sort of comparison of the two authors might be taken as a suggestion that Self shares something of Waugh’s ability. Even more unfortunately, the suggestion is not entirely false. Will Self’s latest full-length satire, Great Apes, is nasty, brutish, and, at least in its second half, surprisingly well done — a book that, despite its endless vulgarity and its author’s cloying cleverness, cannot be dismissed quite as easily as the reader would very much like.

Born in 1961, Self is by all accounts a particularly loathsome figure, a trendsetter among the British literary hipsters, a drug addict, and an English version, 25 years late, of the “Gonzo Journalism” mixture of hallucinogens and political commentary practiced in America by Hunter S. Thompson for Rolling Stone magazine. Sent as a reporter to cover this year’s parliamentary elections, Self was, in a widely reported incident, revealed to have snorted heroin in the bathroom of Prime Minister John Major’s campaign plane.

In his journalism, Self has mastered the predictably slick, self- referential prose style much prized by the glossy British tattle magazines. But he also had almost from the beginning a certain less predictable talent for arresting metaphor — of the kind, for example, that leads him in Great Apes to describe someone at a cocktail party as “an adipose wader of a man, dipping his bill into knots of people.”

With his first book, 1991’s The Quantity Theory of Insanity, Self began to publish fiction, and the editors of the influential Granta magazine quickly named him to their list of the “Best of Young British Novelists.” Self seemed in his early fiction unable to rid himself of the absurd sense that authentic conversation between fictional characters must be larded with relentless streams of profanity, but his narrative voice occasionally did exhibit his patented metaphors, and he sometimes managed to hit the genuinely macabre note at which he often aimed. His fiction, however, was notable mostly for its deliberate sickness — a sort of willful indulgence of a slickly chosen “shocking image” as the over-clever master idea for a book. In Cock & Bull, for instance, he tells of an abused wife slowly growing the equipment with which to rape her husband. In My Idea of Fun, he relates the sexual uses to which a man puts the severed head of a hobo.

All of this ought to be plenty to keep any sensible reader away from Self’s fiction. Its functionless indecency, its vulgarity for no other purpose than vulgarity, is bad enough. But worse in some ways is its outmodedness, its exhausted notion that there’s still literary value left in being shocking — its author unaware just how dated and boring his desperate stabs at hip grossness have become.

With its interminable descriptions of sex and its over-clever central idea, Great Apes starts out little different from Self’s earlier work. Its main character is a successful artist named Simon Dykes who spends his days bedding his girlfriend, thinking about painting, and taking whatever drugs are offered him by the other members of London’s tony art world. But one morning, after a night mixing alcohol, cocaine, and Prozac, he wakes to find that he has turned into a chimpanzee — as has everyone else in England, for Dykes awakens in a world in which chimps have proved evolution’s dominant species, and the few human beings left are in zoos, African preserves, or medical laboratories.

Quickly judged insane for his insistence that he is a human trapped in an ape’s body, Dykes is placed in the care of the aging chimpanzee Dr. Zack Busner, a psychiatrist and media-star known for his interest in unusual psychoses. But Busnet has his own problems, for his young colleagues are hoping to oust him from his spot as the alpha-male at the hospital and a drug- trial that Busner led many years before may be, in the chimpanzee universe, the cause of Dykes’s delusion that he has undergone a Kafkaesque metamorphosis from human to monkey.

In concept, this isn’t that far from something Waugh might have done: an exact replica of London’s various social worlds, populated with apes. Particularly in the first half of the book, however, Self’s typical indulgence of grossness not only wrecks any pleasure the reader might take in the novel, but ruins as well the author’s own satire. His chimps engage in minutely and repulsively and repeatedly described grooming sessions, group sex, and coprophilia for no satirical purpose, but rather because Self discovered, as he mugged up information on simian behavior, that chimpanzees actually do such things.

But as the book progresses — and the reader, bludgeoned into insensibility, ceases to react to the grossness — Self actually begins to tell a story within his satirical frame. It’s a story about how the dominance patterns hidden in human society are exposed in a chimp world. It’s a story about how artistic perspective relates to the human body, and about how the elderly seem to lose their social prominence and reputation not gradually, but all at once in a coup by their younger replacements. And along the way, the novelist gets to take satirical potshots at animal rights activists, medical researchers, psychiatrists, and Self’s own world of hip Londoners.

Great Apes is not a book to recommend to anyone with a weak stomach. It may not be a book to recommend to anyone at all. Certainly, as a man, the author deserves little short of a straitjacket. Unfortunately, as a writer, his is a genuine, though repellent, talent.

Contributing editor J. Bottum last wrote for THE WEEKLY STANDARD about the Japanese novelist Banana Yoshimoto.