Brazzaville Beach

Hope Clearwater sits on Brazzaville Beach, contemplates her past, and narrates the events of this novel. One strain of the story concerns her failed marriage to a mathematician whose unquenched thirst for revolutionary discoveries and their attendant fame drove him to madness. The second strain concerns the animal research that Hope had fled to Africa to participate in. Grosso Arvore Research Center is run by the renowned chimpanzee expert Eugene Mallabar, who was just putting the finishing touches on his master work, describing the peaceful ways of our close animal relatives, when Hope's own observations seemed to indicate that all was not quite as idyllic as had previously been supposed among these primates. But the evidence of aggression that she finds between two competing colonies of chimps threatens the carefully constructed image that Mallabar has built up over the years, and, most importantly, threatens to make the animals less attractive to charitable organizations which fund the project. Meanwhile, thrumming in the background is a guerilla war which threatens to swamp this African nation at any moment.
William Boyd takes these various threads and weaves them together, along with a variety of brief comments on scientific and mathematical ideas and issues, into an exciting and intellectually compelling novel. With its Edenic setting and themes of Man's search for knowledge--and the madness the search can bring--the book taps into our primordial myths and some of the core questions of our existence. If it sometimes seems to be almost too consciously striving to be a serious novel of ideas, that ambition is justified, if not always realized, and the philosophical failures are more than offset by the good old-fashioned African adventure story that unfolds simultaneously.
The shelves fairly groan beneath the weight of books warning that when a little of the veneer of civilization gets stripped away in the jungle, Man must face the fact that he has a dark heart. And there are elements of that here, particularly in the way that Mallabar treats Hope and her discovery, but Boyd has much more to say besides just this. Perhaps the most exciting message of the book lies in the contrarian stance it takes to the modern age's tendency to romanticize Nature. It is always well to recall Thomas Hobbes's famous description of Nature as "red in tooth and claw." The reader of this book will not soon forget it.
GRADE : A

William Boyd's Brazzaville Beach is a dramatic suspenseful novel that quickly pulls readers into the story of scientist Hope Clearwater's experiences in Africa where she's been studying chimps. Alongside her delving into brutal events and grotesque facts that she has witnessed, we also follow the story of Hope's failed marriage. That the characters of the primates in this book are nearly as well-developed as the humans is due to the fact that Boyd received assistance from Jane Goodall, the famed primate researcher.

This is an absolutely stunning book in terms of Hope Clearwater's character and the events that unfold as the book progresses.
Evocative of the senses and smells that hit one in Africa, the character development of Hope unfolds into a compelling drama based on her relationship with her increasingly insane mathematician husband(?) and her relationship with the chimpanzees she is studying.
The book conveys a very clear message about the harsher and more sinister side to man's character, drawing strong parallels between the chimpanzee's behaviour and that between the scientists in the research camp where Hope is based.
The book has several strands to it and each a fully developed into a unified whole. Boyd's exploration into, and description of, chaos theory is excellent in terms of putting this across in non-technical terminology and a stroke of genius regarding how it fits into the story's development.
One of my top six novels
- Of Human Bondage - Birdsong - Charlotte Gray - Jude the Obscure - Coasting (Jonathan Raban) - The Misfit

I found this a fascinating book - intelligent, well written, well paced and with wonderful turns of phrase. But what was particularly remarkable was the weaving together of an extraordinary range of topics, emotions, flavors and moods. Mathematics, science, divergent cultures, the senselessness of human and primate violence, the tragedy of mental illness, the poisonous effects of greed and grasping - it's all there. I highly recommend it.

Those interested in chimpanzees and their complex social behavior are urged to read BRAZZAVILLE BEACH, where the powerful alpha-male Darius, starved for female companionship, leads patrols of knuckle-walking extermination in the territory of a neighboring chimp clan. In the novel's final pages, the story of these murderous chimps culminates in a surprising act of rescue and revenge, which is satisfying but impossibly pat. Nonetheless, this monkey-business is definitely within Boyd's narrative reach and he produces a troubling story, suggesting there is brutality and evilness innate in the hominid family, which forces people to choose.

In contrast, Boyd's handling of his major human characters is less satisfying. IMHO, two of these characters--Eugene Mallabar, a primate research star, and Dr. Amiclar, a civilized soldier and boyish nationalist--are transparent from the get-go and never evolve. This means that, as narrative presences, they never really surprise.

Meanwhile, Boyd never quite delivers with Hope, a novice primate researcher, and John, a genius mathematician. Reason: Their issues and natures clearly emerge only after they are labeled by other characters. John's plight, for example, clarifies when a physician provides a diagnosis. What am I saying? Boyd never fully animates these characters and they depend on commentary to attain clarity.

In fairness, I acknowledge that Boyd does offer a character--the pilot Usman--who is not transparent and whose actions are not explained until the novel's very end. But Usman, a schemer and contrast to Dr. Amiclar, surprises through a plot twist, not because Boyd finds new depth in his character.

BRAZZAVILLE BEACH is a highly balanced literary machine. There is a chimp war and a human war, abstract mathematical research and concrete primate research, idealists and schemers, boringly conventional human families and boring monkey families. Furthermore, Hope never quite attains a believable female voice, making her seem very male, even though Boyd constantly has her getting in and out of female clothing. Even so, balance does not a great novel make.

Those who read BRAZZAVILLE BEACH to the end will be rewarded with a surprising and touching philosophical sadness, which shows Hope depressed by her actions as she is drawn into two wars. It's a terrific ending, with posttraumatic stress disorder dulling her instincts as she waits at the beach for her man.

Man vs chimpanzee: Boyd takes the wonderfully named Hope Clearwater's experience as a chimp-sanctuary research scientist in Africa and interleaves it with her crumbling marriage to a failed mathematical genius/lunatic, John.

Hope suffers from an unerring scientific passion to tell the truth about her empirical observations, a quality not always shared by her colleagues or bosses, whose agendas and motives grow darker as the book progresses.

Boyd jumps seamlessly across time and place to make this an easy one-day read and a very rewarding one. Brazzaville Beach blends a depth of detail, well-juxtaposed mathematical theories and the realisation that chimps can be just as brutal as human beings.

This is an intelligent, quality novel from an intelligent, world-class novelist.

Truly brilliant, and I rarely use that term.
It's a novel of ideas - philosophy, mathematics as metaphor for the apparently unsolvable paradoxes of life, and more obviously, the primate world of good and evil. But the author never forgets to entertain with cosmonauts, a volleyball team army, miniature flea-powered planes, etc, as well as the mystery of sex, love and relationships.
I read this book concurrently with David Lambkin's The Hanging Tree (due to a vacation trip), which is another novel of ideas set in Africa - four stars.

I just read Boyd's latest, "Restless," and went back to re-read Brazzaville Beach which I first discovered 15 years ago. (Whoever recommended that, thanks!) Brazzaville still retains an intriguing set of themes, and somehow sets the scene to the troubles that west and central Africa have suffered in the past decade and today.

I won't go over the plot, but would suggest that Boyd's use of language is something that other reviewers have not stressed. It is very economical, and very rich; sometimes you have to read a sentence over to find the nuances of comedy, despair, cynicisms, and then go back to the purely narrative description that pulls his stories along.

Kudos to Boyd, and Brazzaville remains my favorite of the many novels of his that I've read. Will Hollywood wake up and make a film of this?

If someone had given me a basic description of what this novel was about, I probably would not have read it. I don't really have any interest in reading about the life of a scientist studying primates in Africa. But William Gibson is a masterful storyteller and I became enthralled with this book. It's truly moving and exciting and yes, even thrilling and hilarious sometimes. I read this book shortly after it was published and it's with me all these years later. They don't come much better than this.

This is a brilliantly written book which tells a good story, but in a way that demonstrates the technical excellence of the writer.
The tale of the Heroine, Hope Clearwater, is told retrospectively by herself. Boyd cleverly puts himself into the first person so that he is believable as Hope herself. Then he has Hope speak of herself in first and third person, which creates an interesting effect. On the one hand you are viewing a narrative account of her story, but then you easily slip into her mind and listen to her thoughts. This makes the story very personal, and brings you close to Hope's character in an empathic way.
The story moves from College in England, to research in the downs of Southern England, before it leaps to Africa where things really hot up. Relationships move from civilised distraction to out and out bloodletting.
Boyd weaves in themes familiar from Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey's primate studies. He makes mathematics and research into interesting subjects, and is guaranteed to have you reaching for the dictionary to understand some of the obscure terminology of medieval english architecture. Over all of this he lays a central african civil war, academic cloak and dagger politics and some complex human and chimp relations.
Two love affairs that seem doomed, sexual politics in the bush and a shifting and uncertain movement of grant aid and civil war add to the complexity. A rebel army formed from a volleyball team, an egyptian cosmonaut, a half built hotel and the smallest model aircraft in the world inject the sense of ridiculous that is part of Africa.
A highly intelligent and enjoyable read.