Book review: Thrilling tale of talking monkeys and primate warfare in Jon Gresham’s Gus
Gus: The Life And Opinions Of The Last Raffles’ Banded Langur
By Jon GreshamFiction/Epigram Books/Paperback/422 pages/$22/Amazon SG (amzn.to/4b28XjI)
4 stars
Consider this the Singaporean spin-off of the science-fiction media franchise Planet Of The Apes. In a dystopian near-future, primates are attempting to take over the country as Singapore’s polished veneer crumbles under the Monkey King’s domination of the city’s infrastructure.
An experiment by scientists at the government biomedical research and development centre Biopolis, funded by various sovereign wealth funds and a Shenzhen billionaire, caused monkeys to acquire human language.
Multinational deals, zoo escapes and international shipping all lead to the dissemination of this “virile eloquent lot”.
“Why do we talk? We talk to connect, like you. We talk to express ourselves, to woo mates, to influence others,” narrates the titular Gus. He is the last Raffles’ banded langur who escaped from his life as a topeng monyet (“dancing macaque” in Indonesian) hoping to reunite with his family at the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve.
The speculative eco-novel is told from Gus’ naive perspective.
Interestingly, Gus is the chronicler of the human apocalypse, weaving the stories of human ambition and tragedy, and mediating between both sides of the war. He is the hope and harbinger of a future where human domination over the non-human can be overcome, or at least made less oppressive.
Chatty and precocious Gus is the compelling voice which threads the novel. It is a fascinating hybrid of a voice which manages to reference the whole gamut of cultural works from the Harry Potter series to the late Indonesian novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer.
Thoroughly localised and well-read from hanging out in human environments, although in admittedly literary ones, Gus is comfortable citing Singaporean writers Edwin Thumboo, Catherine Lim and the late lawyer-writer Adrian Tan, as well as popular culture works such as the Phua Chu Kang series (1997 to 2007) and Ah Boys To Men films (2012 to 2017).
Gus is more compelling than his human companions, chief of whom are the accountant-turned-clown Charlie and the Filipino nurse Juliette. The human characters can do with a bit more fleshing out, appearing as devices for Gus’ musings and growth than as storied lives.
The novel is, most fascinatingly, a marvellous geography of Singapore’s urban and gardened landscape.
Gresham has created a compelling speculative setting around Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, Clementi Forest, the Rail Corridor, Blair Road and other locales, populating a world with multi-species life that allows the non-human to narrate the city.
It is an action-packed, page-turning novel that reveals the author’s fecund imagination of a Singapore which loses control.
In part, this can be read as a parable about climate change and the complete inversion of human-animal dynamics. On the other hand, it can also be understood as a pandemic novel, revealing how human domination is already complicit in the making of a less habitable world for all planetary life.
The recent excitement around the sighting of a Raffles’ banded langur on the Eco-Link@BKE shows a nation’s collective fascination with animal life amid this human-controlled city. Gresham’s timely novel is an imaginative glimpse into a beloved creature’s world and Singaporeans’ collective fantasies about living in a City in Nature.
If you like this, read: We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (Penguin Random House, 2014, $20, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/4aUqDhr). Human and animal life are entangled in surprising and emotional ways in this novel about an otherwise ordinary middle-class American family.