Brazzaville Beach

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He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Early in the book, John Clearwater announces to Hope that he’s given up alcohol, though just a few pages later, he’s drinking again, and even Hope doesn’t seem to notice. The primate scientist also appears to be at first beguiling, soon becomes a cantankerous ego maniac.

just as her husband had been a mathematician and he too wanted to understand, to simplify life, to get it into a formula, something to put on a paper in black and white. If man goes to war, killing innocent women and children, how can we expect better behavior from chimps? Hope Clearwater, however, slowly comes to the realization that the chimps are up to no good as the two groups of chimpanzees she is studying come into lethal conflict.This is the story of a very able ecologist (Hope) who marries a gifted and ambitious mathematician (John Clearwater). To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The Mirror and the Road: Conversations with William Boyd (edited by Alistair Owen) was published in 2023. I highly recommend you pick up a copy of Brazzaville Beach to explore this and many other philosophic questions for yourself.

That behind Mallabar, and his obsessive work, there lies another, more sinister truth: one that might also help explain Hope's reasons for leaving England . And because the chimps are such close relatives to humans, they gradually develop personalities of their own that we care about as much as if they were human.

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. Boyd was in Nigeria during the Biafran War, the brutal secessionist conflict which ran from 1967 to 1970 and it had a profound effect on him. At the beginning of their marriage the two are very much in love with Hope believing that John is the ideal man for her owing to his rather eccentric but empathetic character and strong intelligence. I could have done without that braid, and John’s story is interesting enough to warrant being set apart from Hope’s.