The Apes of God

The Apes of God is certainly a great book, one of the monumental satires of our day, and it deals with events and issues of great importance. It also goes out of its way to pay off specific grudges against various denizens of Bloomsbury, Chelsea, and Charlotte Street. It ends with an extremely

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specific attack on the Sitwells. It is all very entertaining, but it is rather too monumental and you miss much of the fun if you don’t know the people.

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Satire should (pardon the pun) be swift, and The Apes of God—all 650 pages of it in the recently published Penguin edition*—merely shambles along. The impression of extreme slowness derives from the careful brushwork, but we should be looking at the results of this, not be asked to admire the

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process. It is the time and the paint that Lewis gives us, not the instantaneous image dredged out of time; we're borne along—by a dreadful irony—in a flux that's near-frozen...

For all these strictures, The Apes of God ought to be read, if not all through (life being short). The big indigestible prose draws on a vast vocabulary and can be precise if not concise; it is also the idiosyncratic garment of a great, if pig- and wrong-headed, British personality. The visual concentration is a fine corrective in an age of careless and perfunctory description. It is no bad thing to send young novelists to art-class or to set them to the reading of exhibition catalogues—a useful part of their training, though it should not be the whole of their life. But, as a satirical novel, The Apes of God is an awe-inspiring failure.

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