Brazzaville Beach

The chief complaint I see in reviews of this book is that Hope isn’t very feminine. Seriously, what was she supposed to do, cry a lot and paint her nails? Other than not being worried about rape when captured at the end, I thought Hope was portrayed well. I’m not a particular girly girl. I know about guns. I lift weights. I don’t scream when I see a bug/bat/snake. I’m heartlessly pragmatic about a lot of stuff. Just what kind of narrow-minded idea of femininity are we dealing with here? Hard to say.

So leaving that aside, I tore through this book very quickly. It weaves two timelines in Hope’s past, connected by her present state which is living on Brazzaville Beach. Boyd skillfully builds each story, dropping hints, moving show more the action forward with just the right amount of tension. For me, the parts that tore my heart were the ones about the chimps. I’ve long known that chimpanzees aren’t the platonic ideal of great apes. They’re crafty and violent when needed. Hope wonders about whether they’re also cruel after witnessing what seemed to be an egregious attack on a weakened and already injured chimp. She decides yes and with the escalating skirmishes between the groups of apes and the final scene between her and Mallabar, it shows just how close we are as species.

One thing that bothered me to no end was that Hope didn’t take pictures of these awful events. She wasn’t the only one with a camera, but like UFOs, the chimps seem to evade photography. All down the line she’s being balked and sabotaged because her research doesn’t support the accepted model of chimp behavior. Instead she invites the chief denier to join her in the field and witness the savagery first hand. Even this doesn’t work though. I’m a little baffled at her decisions in this area.

With the story of her marriage, things are less clear, as they always are when love is concerned. At first I thought the problem would boil down to infidelity and it does, but it’s a minor threat. The real threat is insanity. John starts acting nutty out of a desperation to achieve a mathematical victory. I don’t know if it’s an indictment on the field of mathematics itself or another on academia as a whole, but when John can’t reach his goals he cracks up and electroconvulsive therapy seems like a good idea. I wrote a quick note in my ebook copy of when Hope cottons to the final idea about John and races outside to find him; I was right and she was wrong so only one of us was surprised by the outcome. show less

(41) This is one of the best books I have read in quite some. time. I had thought Boyd was a spy thriller novelist for some reason; I did not expect such fine writing or such a setting. Hope Clearwater is a recently graduated English PhD in Ecology. The story on its surface is simple - she meets another academic; falls in love; gets married; it doesn't work out and she takes a job abroad and has a life-changing experience. But gosh - it is so much more than that. It is chimpanzees. It is mental illness, it is the chaos of civil War, it is kidnapping, it is boy soldiers, philosophy, calculus, and the search for a meaningful life all in less than 350 fairly tightly written pages.

I was most captivated by the chimpanzees as probably most show more readers were. It seemed inconceivable to me that the book could still be about so much more with that at its center. The lush descriptions of setting were so rich, yet managed to narrowly avoid being contrived. Hope's inner dialogue felt real to me - her petty annoyances and rationalizations hit home. I think its the contextual details that were so exquisite - the hair on the wine glass at Meredith's, the cold drizzly rain in the hedgerow, the tannic taste of red wine, the dinner-plate sized dry teak leaves, the swollen red vulva of the chimp in estrous. Remarkable.

This reminded me of my most favorite profound yet magical reads over time. Novels like "Corelli's Mandolin," Naipaul's "A Bend in the River," Farrrel's "Troubles." I feel I will need to read this again. I am not sure of the significance or placement of the passages in italics in the third person that began every chapter. They were not always chronological and sometimes not related to the chapter that lie ahead. Sometimes about mathematics or some other scientific discipline.

I can't say enough. A sleeper pick that I picked up from the used book store - how is this not more widely lauded? Seems like it should have won a Booker or something. Highly recommended for the finest reading experience - both literary; with an engaging exciting story to tell. show less

This is a favourite book. It's intelligently researched; it has a believable and gripping storyline. The writer knows what he's doing. He adopts the female first person in the African section of the novel, as Hope Clearwater the ecologist; and this he does extra well. He adopts third person reportage when writing about Hope, before her repositioning to Africa, during her marriage to a gifted and mentally ill mathematician, John Clearwater.

The novel suggests we ponder on the effects our lives have on others, something that Boyd tells us is one of the last things we learn, if ever.
The vicious anger displayed by chimps, scientists and political foes is a sobering aspect of the book, and it is at the end that Hope finds herself reassessing show more this turmoil. How responsible is she for some of it? Did she possess enough foresight? Was all the action inevitable?
A great and recommended read. show less

This is one of William Boyd’s earlier novel, and shows strong indications of the glories that were to follow. Set in Congo, it takes the form of recollections of Hope Clearwater, which in turn fall into two separate narratives. As the novel opens, Hope is living in a beach house on the Brazzaville Beach of the title. She is impecunious but composed, in stark contrast with the tone of the two disturbing stories on which she muses.

She had met, and then married, John Clearwater, an aspiring and innovative academic mathematician. She herself is an ecologist, engaged in postgraduate study of ancient hedgerows. While john struggles to bring his maths research to fruition, he gradually loses his grasp on ordinary life, and suffers a descent show more into mental turmoil.

Escaping from the emotional wreckage of that failed relationship, Hope joins a project in the Democratic Republic of the Congo which is studying in minute detail the behaviours of a community of chimpanzees. Some of the team observe unexpected activity among the chimpanzees, but are encouraged not to pursue it, as unwelcome results might endanger the fragile funding streams which keep the project going. Against this context, Hope is sent off to collect the latest batch of provisions from the nearest big city. This is not simply a case of a ten or fifteen mile drive, but rather an expedition taking two or three days, and requires driving hundreds of miles on dreadful roads, in territory which is lawless, and subject to military action between the strict, tyrannical regime, and zealous armed rebels.

As always, Boyd weaves the separate threads of his complex plotline with great deftness. Hope is an empathetic, but far from saintly character, who has suffered great hardship but managed to fight back against life’s vicissitudes. Boyd always writes with great clarity and conviction, and from his own experience of growing up in Africa, conjures the local atmosphere vividly (at least to my little-travelled mind).

This is not his finest novel, but that leaves wide scope for it still to be very good, and there are clear signs of what was to come in his future work. show less

Hope Clearwater is a young woman who has already accumulated quite a few harrowing life experiences, and she tells the story of what has led up to her living on Brazzaville Beach in some unnamed part of Africa. First comes a marriage to a mathematician shortly after having finished her own studies as a researcher. Completely obsessed by his research into the mathematics of unpredictability, her husband displays more and more distressing signs of mental instability until Hope must face the fact that she cannot continue living with him. Then comes her work in Africa as part of a research organization that focuses on studying primates in the wild. Here again, she soon sees some disturbing behaviour on the part of the chimps under her show more observation, which runs contrary to the long-held belief that they are peaceful and gentle animals, and rather more like humans than anyone, including her boss, is willing to accept. Brilliantly written and filled with unexpected twists and turns, I was continually impressed with the way Boyd incorporated what must have been an incredible amount of research (into primate behaviour and advanced mathematics, among other things) into a very engaging novel. My first William Boyd and certainly not my last. Great narrations by Harriet Walter, who does a very convincing job as Hope Clearwater in the audio version. show less

It's the first William Boyd I've read, I'm ashamed to say, and I wonder just why it took me so long because it's such an intelligent, well-written novel that now I want to plunge into the others.

Hope Clearwater lives alone in a small beach house of Brazzaville Beach in an unnamed African country. (There actually is a Brazzaville Beach in the republic of Congo though!). She looks back on the cataclysmic events which have changed the course of her life, and throughout the book two stories run parallel, at times echoing each other.

She recalls her relationship and marriage to a brilliant but psychologically unstable mathematician genius. At the same time describes how she came to Africa to participate in a primate research project at The show more Grosso Arvore Research Center (there are echoes of Jane Goodall's work here) and finds herself uncovering an unnerving truth about the nature of chimpanzees (and by extension perhaps, about mankind's predisposition towards violence). Her discoveries have far reaching consequences and she finds herself pitched against her employer and mentor who refuses to accept her findings.

Boyd is particularly good here at pointing out the dangers of narrowly focused dogmatic belief and academic obsession. I enjoyed the way Hope refers to the mathematical principles she's learned from her husband, John, and tries to draw a philosophy from them to illuminate the seeming chaos of her own life.

The characters, human and ape, were all well-drawn. Here's a male author convincingly able to inhabit a female skin - I felt a lot for Hope. (And I like to imagine for her the happy ending that isn't quite reached in the book.) I also felt deeply for the manic-depressive John Clearwater who fails to fulfill his dream of great Mathematical discovery and suffers terribly because of it.

This book has one of the best first sentences ever:

I never really warmed to Clovis-he was far too stupid to inspire real affection-but he always claimed a corner of my heart, largely, I supposed, because of the way he instinctively and unconsciously cupped his genitals whenever he was alarmed or nervous.

And while anyone who loves a well-written thought provoking novel will enjoy this book, it will appeal particularly to those of you with a love and understanding of maths and science. show less

Hope Clearwater lives alone in a rundown beach house next to Brazzaville Beach, a nondescript beach in an unnamed African country where she makes a living by doing odd bits of translation work for a friend's company. But why is a previously career focused woman with a doctorate in science content to fritter her life away in a place like that? It is clear from the start that there has been some traumatic event in her past which is colouring her current life, and the remainder of the novel tells the two intertwined tales of what has brought Hope to that beach.

Hope is in Africa to carry out a research project at the world famous Grosso Arvore research station run by the equally famous Eugene Mallabar, the acknowledged world expert on show more chimpanzee behaviour. She has been employed to investigate the behaviour of a group of chimpanzees who have broken away from the main Grosso Arvore pack, but as she becomes more and more familiar with them she gradually becomes aware that the behaviour she is witnessing is not the peaceful view of chimpanzee society which is espoused by Mallabar and which forms the basis of his definitive and shortly to be published book on the subject. As Hope becomes more and more convinced of her own conclusions, it becomes obvious that Mallabar will not countenance challenge to his own views. And interspersed with this story, is the story of what took Hope to Africa in the first place: her ill-fated marriage with the brilliant mathematician John Clearwater, who becomes more and more mentally unstable as he attempts to recapture the brilliance of his earlier work.

I first read this over twenty years ago when it first came out and while I certainly enjoyed it this time as well, I was much less shocked by the behaviour of the chimpanzees than I had been for my first read. But whether you think you are interested in chimpanzees or not this is a well-written book that is strongly recommended. show less