Brazzaville Beach

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Hope Clearwater tells her story while she sits on the terrace of her cottage on Brazzaville Beach. As a student in England, she was Hope Dunbar, but then she caught sight of John Clearwater and knew she had to have him. The story is anything but linear. Sometimes we get the story of Hope and John, though better than half of the story takes place in Africa. Most of the Africa parts are at a primate research station in a national park, where Hope's job is to observe chimpanzees and record what she sees. The characters appear warts and all, (robbing me of the chance to hate some of them!) but making the book resonate with truth. While each strand is told linearly in time, the book cuts between them so that the reader is following them all simultaneously. Hope's marriage to John is happy at first. She is contentedly working as an ecologist mapping ancient hedgerows, while John is immersed in the study of chaos theory – a subject Hope can't even pretend to understand but she does understand John's passion for it. Gradually though, as John repeatedly fails to achieve his own goal to make a unique contribution to the subject, his mental health begins to show the strain. Jumping from one mathematical discipline to another, alternating between heavy drinking and total abstention, John's behaviour becomes progressively more erratic and their marriage comes under ever greater strain. The author superbly looks at our closest relative and makes us think about human behavior. There is abundant sex, and it is physical, but human sex IS physical, just as it is with chimps. I think the sex is well done. It might bother some. Not me. There is discord and aggression and manipulation. The parallels are intriguing. I told you it was cerebral. Continually you are comparing chimps and humans and mathematical axioms. Oh, and if it’s been raining then you’ll be walking through mud pretty much the whole time. I guess I’m not really selling this market very well, huh?

This is a book that could easily be read on two levels. The ideas in it about scientific ambition and evolution may not be particularly original, but they are very well presented, and Boyd even manages to make the maths discussions comprehensible and interesting, with something to say about the wider world. But put all the ideas and themes to one side, and the book becomes a simple but compelling story of Hope's life. She is an exceptionally well drawn character, a strong, intelligent, independent woman, self-reliant sometimes to the point of coldness, but I found it easy to empathise with her nonetheless.At the age of nine years he attended Gordonstoun school, in Moray, Scotland and then Nice University (Diploma of French Studies) and Glasgow University (MA Hons in English and Philosophy), where he edited the Glasgow University Guardian. He then moved to Jesus College, Oxford in 1975 and completed a PhD thesis on Shelley. For a brief period he worked at the New Statesman magazine as a TV critic, then he returned to Oxford as an English lecturer teaching the contemporary novel at St Hilda's College (1980-83). It was while he was here that his first novel, A Good Man in Africa (1981), was published. The first-person narrator, the unusually named Hope Clearwater, tells her story in retrospect whilst living in a beach house at the aforementioned Brazzaville Beach, which turns out to have nothing to do with the city of Brazzaville. The novel is one of those that has two strands in alternating chapters. In one, set in England, Hope relates the story of her marriage to a brilliant mathematician, John Clearwater, whose mind is finely balanced between brilliance and madness. In the other, set sometime later, she is a chimp researcher in Africa. The country isn’t specified but it seems to be a Lusophone one, since the reserve where she works is called Grosso Arvore and local people employed there have names like Joᾶo and Martim. The country is also in the midst of a civil war involving the government and at least 3 rebel groups. It takes place primarily in the continent of Boyd's birth, Africa (he was raised in Ghana), somewhere in the Congo. Civil wars are raging, with the federal government fighting factions, and guerilla warfare ongoing. You don't need to even know exactly where it takes place, or when. He doesn't tell us.

The experience can be quite chaotic, so be prepared for a sensory overload. And with all the stalls jumbled together with no rhyme or reason, vegans beware that it’s pretty much impossible to avoid passing by the stalls selling meat and fish. The Grosso Arvore Research Centre, where Hope seeks asylum, is the creation of Eugene Mallabar. After studying wild chimps for the last twenty-five years, Mallabar knows more about them than anyone else on earth. He is the author of "The Peaceful Primate" and "Primate's Progress" and the recipient of million-dollar grants. Mallabar has just finished writing a magnum opus that will be the last word on the subject of the seemingly gentle beast with which man shares 98 percent of his DNA. 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. Males from the northern group, led by the alpha male Darius, start patrolling into the southerners' territory and then start to kill, with extreme cruelty, the rival males - one an old chimpanzee called Mr Jeb, and the other Muffin, an adolescent. What she sees brings Hope herself into conflict with Mallabar, and threatens the very existence of Grosso Arvore research project and his lifelong study of primates. Right from the beginning it has the feel of something rather unusual and for me there was a definite double-take moment when I realised I’d found my place. It’s quite an impressive feat of engineering, and you may wonder why no such bridge has been built to connect Brazzaville and Kinshasa. But that’s more of a political issue than anything else. There are the asides that show a tremendous knowledge in a vast range of areas (or at least they seem to) that are interesting in themselves, but are also very relevant and helpful as part of a gentle analysis.Hope isn’t an entirely likeable character. She has a generally supercilious attitude towards others. Her husband is one of the few people she admires and that is because of his exceptional mind. She reflects in the novel that the practitioners of all professions have knowledge exclusive to that profession, but that in most cases others could obtain that knowledge provided they studied and worked hard enough. That’s not the case with higher level mathematics though. Few of us could enter that realm no matter how hard we worked. John is an ambitious man who wants to gain fame and status through making some great breakthrough, and becomes frustrated when he finds that just out of reach. Hope makes some effort to be understanding but has limited tolerance of John’s mental health issues. Personally I thought the author drew Hope as a realistic character. Instead, they encourage their students to expand their own creativity and originality. Currently, there are 7 professional painters working here and about 20 students who tend to come and go. John Clearwater, Hope's former husband, is a mathematician thirsty for discovery and fame. This part of the narrative is set in London, where the couple share her flat in South Kensington, and southern England, where Hope works as an ecologist on an intriguing hedgerow mapping project in Dorset. 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. She is uninterested in working after getting her PhD until her former Professor forces her to take on the hedgerow mapping project. After being interviewed by Munro, its leader, Hope discovers she is pleased to be working once more, losing weight because she is outside all day, and enjoying the disciplined approach she has to adopt: Hope makes a harrowing discovery about the two groups of chimps--the northerners and the southerner group that split off. When she shares it with Mallobar, he becomes threatened (he also has a new research book coming out). He tries to deny the accuracy of Hope's observation skills. The civil wars of the Congo both overshadow and parallel the events at the Grosso Arvore Research Center, the chimps, and the behavior of some of the scientists.