Brazzaville Beach

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If man goes to war, killing innocent women and children, how can we expect better behavior from chimps? And to think, Mallabar published his The Peaceful Primate back in 1962 and plans to send his latest, most comprehensive opus to his publisher in the near future. The first relates to her former husband back in England, an accomplished mathematician by the name of John Clearwater, a man obsessed and driven to formulate groundbreaking equations within the fields of game theory and turbulence. Here’s the plot in a nutshell: Hope, a brilliant scientist in her own right, marries a mercurial and highly intellectual mathematician, who increasingly begins to go insane as he pursues an elusive game theory on turbulence. Sometimes we get the story of Hope and John, though better than half of the story takes place in Africa.

The other aspect of the chimp story is Mallabar's reaction to the threat to his life's work, and I found this equally well executed and believable. But put all the ideas and themes to one side, and the book becomes a simple but compelling story of Hope's life. Our protagonist - Hope - is the classic slightly broken narrator, and the book splits between the present in the camp, and the past in the UK, with her husband and the story of how she came to be in the camp.He’s obsessed by seeing things in different ways and interprets things with numbers and visual patterns.

It was premiered at Hampstead Downstairs(2016) and has recently had a new production at the Theatre Royal Bath. When you yourself have suffered considerably, it is hard to cope with the rest of the world’s indifference to your experience, and upsetting to see how unmarked it is. I don't need to enjoy the content of a book to like it but there has to be something - a compelling story or interesting characters. His ninth novel, Restless, was published in September 2006 (Costa Book Award, Novel of the Year 2006) followed by, Ordinary Thunderstorms (2009), Waiting for Sunrise (2012), Solo (a James Bond novel – 2013) and Sweet Caress (2015).

She is uninterested in working after getting her PhD until her former Professor forces her to take on the hedgerow mapping project.

She was discovering aspects of the English landscape that were unknown or hidden; and what pleased her most was that she could prove she was right. I’m so glad he changed that because I never would have picked it up being completely freaked out by monkeys of any kind. With a wide variety of settings, quirkiness, and unsettling events, the reader is given a unique glimpse into Hope's unfailingly human reactions to the tumult, and her steadfastness in keeping true to herself and not what others' want her to be for their self interests.

I could have done without that braid, and John’s story is interesting enough to warrant being set apart from Hope’s.

The story goes back and force between different periods of her life and is told in a truly capturing way. Initially the civil war exists only in the background, but it gradually intrudes more into the novel and the lives of the characters. He is the world’s leading authority on chimpanzee behaviour, his reputation resting on a 1962 book which describes chimps living in peaceful and cooperative societies. Boyd has been with his wife Susan since they met as students at Glasgow University and all his books are dedicated to her.

I delighted in this book because it tells a compelling human story with a rich framework of ideas that appeal to me. Hope Clearwater is the feisty heroine, a young PhD in plant and animal ethology who was married to an obsessive mathematician, until she wasn't. The reader knows John is headed for a crash, and we wonder what will become of the Clearwater marriage once that crash happens. Admittedly, I am not a “math person”, but the many explorations of game theory, turbulance, catastrophe theory, divergence syndromes and other chaos theory components sometimes left me shaking my head.