I've been putting off reviewing this for a while, so I'm just going to bite the bullet and get it over with. This may be a quickie.
I fully expected to love
Great Apes. It's completely absurd, filled with drugs, violence, and wild monkey sex (as in, literally involving monkeys). There are some hysterical, laugh-out-loud funny bits and some perverse, cringe-worthy sections. Unfortunately, there are also some fucking boring parts. After a while, I thought the metaphor and satire became strained, and while Self's parallel world was slightly more creative than writing a standard novel and find-and-replacing the word "human" with "chimpanzee", the cleverness kind of wore off after a while. About halfway through I started checking to see how many pages I had left -- never a good sign.
I didn't hate this, but it was kind of disappointing. I'm still really intrigued by Will Self's writing and hoping to try some of his other books, but they may be pushed down my list a little.