Brazzaville Beach - literary novel as absorbing page turner. William Boyd proves himself master of the craft - so much drama, so much suspense.
The skinny: twentysomething Hope Clearwater lives on Brazzaville Beach in West Africa, recovering from two major shocks in her life. The first relates to her former husband back in England, an accomplished mathematician by the name of John Clearwater, a man obsessed and driven to formulate groundbreaking equations within the fields of game theory and turbulence. The second revolves around Hope’s recent participation in the nearby Grosso Arvore Research Project studying chimpanzees under the direction of the world’s foremost expert on primates, Eugene Mallabar.
What adds a distinctive tang to Brazzaville Beach is the way William Boyd toggles back and forth between England and Africa, folding in Hope's backstory, including her relationship with her family, friends, academic advisor (trained in botany, Hope earned a Ph.D. in ethology) coupled with shifts of third-person objective narration and Hope's first-person voice. Also included are philosophic reflections sprinkled in at the beginning of each chapter on such topics as topology, genetics, algorithms and mechanics . All in all, novel as grand symphony in a brooding key, say César Franck's Symphony in D minor - so many rich interweaving storylines requiring a bit of unraveling. Here are a number of provocative strands:
CHIMP CENTER
Expanding out to many thousands of acres, under the direction of Eugene Mallabar, The Grosso Arvore Research Project has been thriving for 30 years. In addition to observing chimps in the wild, Mallabar set up a feeding station near their base camp so researchers could observe the chimps at close range. But how reliable and accurate can the behavior of chimps be under such artificial conditions? And to think, Mallabar published his The Peaceful Primate back in 1962 and plans to send his latest, most comprehensive opus to his publisher in the near future.
KING OF THE HILL
Mallabar repeatedly tells Hope that, as the world’s foremost expert, he knows everything there is to know about chimpanzees. Perhaps predictably, in 1972 when Hope reports on chimpanzees attacking and murdering a baby chimpanzee, know-it-all Mallabar dismisses her words. Mallabar then sends Hope off to town for supplies and when she returns to camp – surprise, surprise: Mallabar informs her of a most unfortunate accident: there’s been a fire at her lodging and all of her field notes have been destroyed. Oh, no you don’t, big man! At this point Hope plans her revenge.
NORTHERN VS. SOUTHERN
A more experienced team of researchers have been charting the behavior of the northern chimps. Meanwhile, Mallabar assigns Hope to compile field notes on the chimpanzees to the south. All goes well until that attack on the baby chimp. But then a further shock: in the following weeks, Hope watches a northern chimp patrol travel south to launch a full scale war on the southerners. Recognizing such acts of violence will completely invalidate Mallabar's forthcoming book, Hope must consider the odds before communicating her find.
MAN OF MATHEMATICS
Hope reflects on what exactly made John Clearwater so attractive to her as a marriage partner in the first place. She always wanted her man to be extremely intelligent and highly unusual, however, as she eventually realizes, she will continually take second place to John's true love - mathematics. John is a man obsessed with developing a new theory and when Hope inspires him with what she terms his "Clearwater Set," John's fanaticism reaches scary levels. Oh, to have such fame within the world of mathematics! But at what cost?
FAMILY AND FRIENDS
Hope travels to her parents' home for her father's 70th birthday party. Following the cake and birthday songs, her father speaks to her in private, "Trouble is," he said, "I'm so fucking bored. That's why I drink. I know your mother isn't happy, but I just can't help it, you see." And when conversing with her friend Meredith, Hope muses on what it means to possess the capacity to enjoy oneself when alone, that is, not to forever hanker after the company and conversation of others. To my mind, these sections of the novel are vitally important and provide a major theme: the nature of happiness; specifically, the ability for someone to rest content in themselves, valuing silence and solitude as foundational to a good life.
CIVIL WAR
During Hope's time at Grosso Arvore, political complexity casts it shadow: a civil war with three sides fighting it out threatens the project's funding and very existence. At one point, traveling north by jeep, rebels take Hope prisoner where she must duck down from an enemy patrol. Ah, enemy patrol - echoes of those northern chimps moving south.
SIGNIFICANT FEMALE
When speaking of his own observations out in the field with the chimpanzees, one of Hope's fellow researchers announces, "It's a theory I have. You see, it's not the alpha male that gives the group its cohesion, it's a female. A dominant female." The novel showcases plenty of groupings, both chimpanzee and human - so the question poses itself: How vital is a strong female to a community's health and harmony? - a theme worth considering as one turns the novel's pages.
GREEK PHILOSOPHY, ANYONE?
William Boyd has written a highly philosophical novel. One key question I return to again and again: What is the price of fame and reputation? For Hope's husband John and Hope's boss Eugene Mallabar, fame and reputation are matters of life and death. They are both extremely intellectual men but are they men of wisdom? Greek philosopher Epicurus warned his followers of the great dangers when one's identity becomes closely entwined with fame and reputation, a need that is neither natural nor necessary. On one hand I can appreciate a person's dedication to a particular academic discipline but on the other, I value what Greek philosophers like Epicurus called Ataraxia, a combination of tranquility and joy, a state free of stress and anxiety. Among other strengths, Ataraxia requires one to have a measure of control over one's emotions, something both John Clearwater and Eugene Mallabar lack - and that's understatement.
Am I being too harsh here? I highly recommend you pick up a copy of Brazzaville Beach to explore this and many other philosophic questions for yourself. And enjoy all the chimpanzees and humans along the way.
British author William Boyd, born 1952
“The last thing we learn about ourselves is our effect.”
― William Boyd, Brazzaville Beach
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Back in 1991 when this novel first published, Michiko Kakutani wrote her review for the New York Times,
a splendid review that prompted me to read the novel, one of the most
exciting reading experiences of my life. And when I gave the novel a
reread in January 2020 (and also wrote my own review), I had a similar
experience. Anyway, here is Michiko's NYT review:
In
recent years, many novelists have turned to the sciences as a source of
ideas and allusions. Jay Cantor's "Krazy Kat" used Los Alamos and the
principles of physics as extended metaphors for the uncertainties of the
modern, post-nuclear world. "Roger's Version" by John Updike featured a
computer hacker who claims that God's existence will soon be proven by
scientific calculation. And Lisa Grunwald's "Theory of Everything"
introduced a young scientist who believes he's found a theory that will
explain all the mysteries of the physical world.
In "Brazzaville Beach," William Boyd's latest novel, two sciences -- mathematics and primate studies -- provide both a fount of metaphors and a backdrop against which to explore the hubris of human beings' craving for certainty and knowledge.
Like Morgan Leafy in "A Good Man in Africa" and Felix Cobb in "An Ice Cream War," Mr. Boyd's latest protagonist, Hope Clearwater, suffers from self-absorption and self-delusion. Yet she is determined to come to terms with her failings and her ambitions, and she emerges as the author's strongest, most independent character to date: someone given to action, not whining; self-assessment, not hapless bumbling. She is a tough, willful woman, used to taking matters into her own hands, the sort of woman one can imagine being played by Sigourney Weaver or Glenn Close in the movie version of the book.
When we first meet her, Hope is living in a small cabin in Africa on Brazzaville Beach. She has holed up there to take stock of her life, and to recover from two traumatic experiences. The first involves her former husband, John Clearwater, a brooding mathematician obsessed with his work in turbulence theory and divergence syndromes, research subjects that conveniently provide Mr. Boyd with all sorts of terms that might be used to describe the human condition. The second experience has to do with her own work with chimpanzees in the forests of Africa.
In much the way that he modeled the hero of his last novel ("The New Confessions") on Jean Jacques Rousseau, Mr. Boyd has loosely modeled Hope on the famous chimpanzee authority Jane Goodall, with a few touches of Dian Fossey, the mountain gorilla expert, thrown in for good measure. Like Jane Goodall, Hope has no formal academic credentials in the area of primate studies, but goes to Africa to work as an apprentice to an eminent scholar. Like Ms. Goodall, she finds her research threatened by a local civil war. And like Ms. Goodall, Hope spends hours and hours observing chimpanzees, noting their relationships to one another, their mating and feeding habits.
Eventually, she makes a startling discovery: she realizes, as Ms. Goodall and other experts realized in their later research, that chimpanzees are capable of cannibalism and murder, that fierce wars occasionally break out between rival groups over territory or sex.
Here, Mr. Boyd begins to fictionalize in earnest. As he tells it, Hope soon gets in trouble with her boss, Eugene Mallabar, who regards her discoveries about chimpanzee aggression as a repudiation of his own research, and as a threat to his coming book. Considerable intrigue ensues, with a ferocious confrontation in the bush that leads to Hope's departure.
Her findings about the chimps, combined with her disillusioning experience with Mallabar, prompt Hope to reassess her difficulties with her former husband, John. She remembers how his preoccupation with his research drove him to the brink of madness, and she begins to question the ambition and intellectual pride that also drove her, as a scientist, to search for absolutes and answers.
"I needed that rigor, that discipline, but it was not sufficient for me," she says toward the end of the book. "Even more I needed the knowledge that proof and understanding were always going to fall short and falter in the end. Something else had to take over then, and it was that something I was prepared to trust -- and it was that which gave me comfort."
Many of the parallels Mr. Boyd draws between chimpanzee hostility and human aggression (as symbolized by the civil war that engulfs Hope and her colleagues, and her own arguments with Mallabar and her former husband) feel obvious and forced, and the first half of this book frequently feels awkwardly artificial, full of exposition and laboriously researched information.
In the latter portions of the book, Mr. Boyd's sure storytelling talents -- his terrific sense of drama, his authoritative knowledge of his characters, his ability to build emotional suspense into the narrative structure -- take over, and the philosophical implications of his scientific analogies begin to pay off as well. In fact, the reader gradually forgets the early frustrations of "Brazzaville Beach," finishing the book with a sense of satisfaction, both edified and entertained.
In "Brazzaville Beach," William Boyd's latest novel, two sciences -- mathematics and primate studies -- provide both a fount of metaphors and a backdrop against which to explore the hubris of human beings' craving for certainty and knowledge.
Like Morgan Leafy in "A Good Man in Africa" and Felix Cobb in "An Ice Cream War," Mr. Boyd's latest protagonist, Hope Clearwater, suffers from self-absorption and self-delusion. Yet she is determined to come to terms with her failings and her ambitions, and she emerges as the author's strongest, most independent character to date: someone given to action, not whining; self-assessment, not hapless bumbling. She is a tough, willful woman, used to taking matters into her own hands, the sort of woman one can imagine being played by Sigourney Weaver or Glenn Close in the movie version of the book.
When we first meet her, Hope is living in a small cabin in Africa on Brazzaville Beach. She has holed up there to take stock of her life, and to recover from two traumatic experiences. The first involves her former husband, John Clearwater, a brooding mathematician obsessed with his work in turbulence theory and divergence syndromes, research subjects that conveniently provide Mr. Boyd with all sorts of terms that might be used to describe the human condition. The second experience has to do with her own work with chimpanzees in the forests of Africa.
In much the way that he modeled the hero of his last novel ("The New Confessions") on Jean Jacques Rousseau, Mr. Boyd has loosely modeled Hope on the famous chimpanzee authority Jane Goodall, with a few touches of Dian Fossey, the mountain gorilla expert, thrown in for good measure. Like Jane Goodall, Hope has no formal academic credentials in the area of primate studies, but goes to Africa to work as an apprentice to an eminent scholar. Like Ms. Goodall, she finds her research threatened by a local civil war. And like Ms. Goodall, Hope spends hours and hours observing chimpanzees, noting their relationships to one another, their mating and feeding habits.
Eventually, she makes a startling discovery: she realizes, as Ms. Goodall and other experts realized in their later research, that chimpanzees are capable of cannibalism and murder, that fierce wars occasionally break out between rival groups over territory or sex.
Here, Mr. Boyd begins to fictionalize in earnest. As he tells it, Hope soon gets in trouble with her boss, Eugene Mallabar, who regards her discoveries about chimpanzee aggression as a repudiation of his own research, and as a threat to his coming book. Considerable intrigue ensues, with a ferocious confrontation in the bush that leads to Hope's departure.
Her findings about the chimps, combined with her disillusioning experience with Mallabar, prompt Hope to reassess her difficulties with her former husband, John. She remembers how his preoccupation with his research drove him to the brink of madness, and she begins to question the ambition and intellectual pride that also drove her, as a scientist, to search for absolutes and answers.
"I needed that rigor, that discipline, but it was not sufficient for me," she says toward the end of the book. "Even more I needed the knowledge that proof and understanding were always going to fall short and falter in the end. Something else had to take over then, and it was that something I was prepared to trust -- and it was that which gave me comfort."
Many of the parallels Mr. Boyd draws between chimpanzee hostility and human aggression (as symbolized by the civil war that engulfs Hope and her colleagues, and her own arguments with Mallabar and her former husband) feel obvious and forced, and the first half of this book frequently feels awkwardly artificial, full of exposition and laboriously researched information.
In the latter portions of the book, Mr. Boyd's sure storytelling talents -- his terrific sense of drama, his authoritative knowledge of his characters, his ability to build emotional suspense into the narrative structure -- take over, and the philosophical implications of his scientific analogies begin to pay off as well. In fact, the reader gradually forgets the early frustrations of "Brazzaville Beach," finishing the book with a sense of satisfaction, both edified and entertained.
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