Will Self

Great Apes

Bloomsbury, 1997.

Primrose Hill was, if not exactly crowded, at any rate well stocked, with chimps of all ages, classes and ethnic groups. Trim, Sloaney mothers lolloped along the paths, wearing floral swelling-protectors and vocalising to one another with the extended grunts of their class, as they toted Mabel, or Maude, or Georgia, the infants dangling off the hanks of maternal fur that flared from between strands of pearls; or perching like jockeys between maternal shoulders

Simon Dykes has woken after a heavy night of drink and drugs to find that the world has changed - the human population has turned into chimpanzees. His insistence that he is still a human gets him locked up in a psychiatric ward; after a course of medication he is taken for an outing.

By the Regent's Park mosque Simon was amused to see Muslim chimpanzees. The males wearing skullcaps and flicking inordinately long strings of worry beads; the females' purdah compromised by their cutaway chadors. In the branches of the trees that filled the wide verge between the canal and the road, chimpanzee dossers reposed. Simon didn't notice them at first - so hidden were they by the foliage, but when first one leafy limb quivered, then a furry limb tossed out a crushed Special Brew, he saw the pongid piss artists and once more grinned to himself

Later there are visits to the zoo 'to confront you with the reality of your chimpunity', and then with a film unit to record his reactions to some 'wild humans' now in captivity. A 'conga-line of copulation' is observed in the park - 'some culturally marauding phalanx of Benelux language students and their teachers had become mixed up with three distinct groups of patrolling cockney males'.