Author Will Self picked up more publicity than he ever could have intentionally orchestrated when he was fired from his position with The Observer, a British newspaper, for taking heroin while on John Major's campaign plane. Win some, lose some. Great Apes, his first novel since the event, has much the same give-and-take. The story unto itself seems trite: Artist Simon (Simian?) Dykes goes out boozing and debauching one night, and wakes up the next morning a chimpanzee. Everyone is a chimpanzee, for that matter, and he is rapidly institutionalized for his delusion that he is a human. In Great Apes, Self pursues his favorite themes of distrust for psychiatrists and institutions, and dislike for human rituals, but he doesn't just propose a world of chimps as a backdrop for them. He pushes the land of chimp to the limit, changing the vocabulary to be more chimp-centric, keeping chimp hierarchies and social structures intact, and having chimp mating replace human relationships and intercourse. This attention to detail highlights the terror and disorientation the protagonist feels, but it also gets annoying after a while: Self is an immensely talented writer, and he doesn't mind reminding us through his attention to chimp detail and the occasional overlong description of a person or building. That aside, Self has a rare talent for blending satire and horror. Once the lengthy descriptions and the annoyance of repeated chimp grunts have passed, Great Apes is a thoroughly compelling book.