I've just finished reading Peter Hoeg's The Woman and the Ape. It is an interesting novel, without the warm lyricism that I found in Smilla's Sense of Snow and even Borderliners, and this is quite interesting because these novels are in one sense more chilling in their subject matter and yet warmer in the way that subject matter is addressed, whereas this, which could be a love story and an awakening is told in icily cold prose. But of course this is a novel by Peter Hoag, so this novel is not merely a love story but also a commentary on contemporary society, science, and what makes us human.
It is an interesting novel, and yes it is about a woman who falls in love with an ape. But one should get beyond that, and not just because the ape is not really an ape, as we perceive "ape" that is, although the woman is really a woman, but because they are both more and less than what they appear to be. The choice of this woman is an interesting one, and if one allows oneself to get beyond one's initial dismissal of "rich upper class woman has everything turns to alcohol" one can see that the woman herself is just as isolated, controlled, and under-appreciated as the ape -- assigned her role in life and imprisoned in this role much like an animal in a zoo. Hoag's woman has isolated herself from herself in order to cope with a world in which she is already increasingly isolated. The author is good at outlining the depths of her isolation without really doing so directly just as he circles around the issues of science, humanity, and nature obliquely.
It is a good book and unsettling. Hoag writes with dry wit. No one is what they seem and in the end, the "good" are not always good and the "bad" are not as bad as one had supposed although the end seems a bit rushed and faded after the initial promise of the beginning of the book. It is not that I expected a more specific finish, rather that the end is so unfinished, leaving so many loose ends, just, I suppose, as most personal crises (midlife or otherwise) leave chaos around them.
In many ways the book was about the personal crises of two people, Madelene and Erasmus, and how this crisis was resolved. Our protagonists found themselves after passing through chaos, probably as most people in crisis hope to find themselves, and this always involves some amount of chaos, and the rest of their personal world was left to pick up the pieces. That there are greater implications than expected to the pieces left behind is also not unusual, it is always a matter of perspective. Madelene and Erasmus break with civilization and its expectations. The rest are left to pick up the pieces. All are changed by the process.
Interesting book.
