PLANET OF THE PROLIX APES

By John Skow

Cynics may reflect: there is no forgiveness for the marvel who writes a brilliant, successful novel, one of those rare, resonant tales that every literate soul burns to read. On pain of universal outrage and derision, the marvel's next book and all succeeding ones must be even grander than the first, and, while precisely the same, also boldly and completely different. Reviewers, who are in charge of outrage and derision--as well as words like resonant--will pout like rejected lovers at anything short of incandescence.

And so it has gone for Danish novelist Peter Hoeg, who followed his brilliant thriller, Smilla's Sense of Snow, with a couple of mannered, too-clever fictions, A History of Danish Dreams and Borderliners, that found their balance somewhere between interesting and irritating. And the glum report here is that Hoeg's latest novel, The Woman and the Ape (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 261 pages; $23), is a disaster, part animal-rights tract and part millennial doom mongering, that looks at irritating from the underside.

A Tarzan plot in reverse--a very smart ape on the loose in London--is the most promising of the novel's inharmonious elements. Erasmus is an enormously powerful and intelligent ape of a species not yet discovered by human beings. He is captured and examined by a set of arrogant English zoologists. The wife of one, an alcoholic and depressive Danish beauty named Madelene, foggily sets a rescue in motion. Woman and ape then swing off, Tarzan and Jane fashion, to live in the treetops of a nearby zoological garden. London, in the middle distance, stands for the big, bad, polluted world. Of course.

The ape proves to be an athletic lover, which is fortunate, since the couple's bed is 75 ft. in the air. But he is not much more sensitive to inter-primate relationships than a suit-wearing human male. Hoeg causes Madelene to brood, with the gluey profundity that clots his novel: "Deep inside, for the first time in her life, she came to terms with the fact that even the one you love you cannot ever fully understand."

Where the ape comes from is mysterious. He and others of his species apparently live among us, gloomy illuminati who are most often unseen, though they worry a lot about people. Toward the novel's end there is a confrontation scene in which a dozen prominent (though frustrated and deeply saddened) humanists reveal themselves to be apes, and bid the dreary world of men goodbye. Erasmus delivers a sanctimonious homily of farewell: "Where we come from, we say that if a...person is on his knees you offer him your hand. If he rejects it you offer him both hands. And even if he rejects them both you have to help him up. But if, even so, he turns his back on you, then you have to let go of him. I hope I won't hurt anyone's feelings when I say that you are on your knees, you are all on your knees. So we decided to try. But it didn't work out. We were wrong..."

Wrong and dull, O wise one. And lugubrious. And sloppily written. And humorless. Not a laugh in a carload. Somebody send author Hoeg a Fawlty Towers tape! Somebody hit that ape in the kisser with a custard pie! And in your shiny fur, is that a flea I see--that Hoeg, in his solemnity, has missed?

--By John Skow