Another book featuring great apes. I probably shouldn’t have read them so close together, as I kept getting some things confused. But maybe that’s because of some less-than-stellar writing, as a lot of other readers seem to think. Myself, I liked this better than Water for Elephants (same author) and it was a great improvement over Lucy, so I enjoyed it regardless. Even though I would have preferred more scenes with the apes, and less with the humans (per usual). In this novel, they’re bonobos, or pygmy chimpanzees. The bonobos live in a small colony in a language research center at a university. Some animal rights protestors bomb the lab, and one of the scientists is seriously injured. The story follows the injured scientist as she recovers, deals with family issues, and desperately tries to find out where the bonobos have gone (sold off in what seems to be a moment of panic on the part of the university) while fending off unwanted attention from reporters. It switches chapters with an alternate viewpoint: one of the reporters who is struggling with his writing career, frustrated at being forced off a newspaper’s payroll, unhappily taking jobs at tabloids where all his meticulous writing is edited into dumbed- down nonsense, and eager to get his footing back by following what happened the bonobo story. Meanwhile also dealing with his own relationship problems. There’s other minor characters of interest, but the main ones of course, were the bonobos themselves- who wind up on a crazily staged reality show where they’re basically put in an empty house and left to their own devices. Basically the man in charge is banking on the apes’ predilection for frequent sexual contact to draw in shocked and curious viewers. But as more protestors swarm the streets outside the “Ape House” and the reporter’s path gradually converges with the injured scientist, the bonobos actually prove themselves to be more calm and well-behaved than humans in the story, who do all sorts of awful and stupid things to each other. Well, apart from their eating habits. In that the bonobos were not reasonable- they demanded pizza and candy, until some of the scientists from the original language lab worried seriously about their health. But what brought it all to a close was a little twist revealing who had actually bombed the research center in the first place, and then everything fell apart- however I will let you know the bonobos ended up in a better place. The two main human characters did, too- as far as I could tell. The story leaned too much (in my opinion) on the sensational misbehavior of the people involved. I appreciated that the author did a lot of research, has actually visited a facility where bonobos are taught sign language and use lexicons to communicate, and states that every incident in the story on the part of the apes, actually happened somewhere in real life. I did recognize a few of the scenes (the child being handed over, the bird lifted free).
Borrowed from the public library.
4 Responses
I thought my reaction to this one was very similar to yours, but I had to go back to my 2011 review to make sure. Here’s the link if you are interested: https://bookchase.blogspot.com/search?q=ape+house
Looks like I ended up rating it a 2.5-star book for some of the same reasons you mention here, although I did like Water for Elephants a lot more than you did and thought that Ape House suffered a good bit in comparison to that one.
Funny how we each felt the other book was the better of the two. I think I would have given this one 3.5 stars just to distinguish it from the other in my enjoyment level, except I’ve never really got into using half-star ratings.
I kind of would like to see that reality show (if it could be done in a way that would be safe for the animals). I think I’d like to see the show more than read this book!
It was funny how the media people in the book expected the reality show would fixate everyone with the bonobos’ risqué activity. But when that got boring- they actually did a lot of just lying around, grooming each other, etc.- and they tried to throw in items or scenarios to make shocking, exciting things happen- the apes reacted not at all, or threw away the items- and it was the people who got into turmoil, ha. I actually liked that a lot, this idea that the apes were far better behaved than people!
I guess you can picture it like a webcam on any zoo animal enclosure- except in this case the apes got to order whatever food they wanted, watch television, sit on furniture, use a computer, etc. I’d watch it too, TBH.