Seven years after its original publication, the first French translation
of Me, Cheeta has just been released by Le Nouvel Attila, whose founder
has been exploring all kinds of genre literature for the past twenty
years. I first heard about it on the French radio programme Mauvais
Genres. Little is known about the author, said Francois Angelier,
programme creator and presenter. James Lever doesn’t do interviews and
his previous works went by rather unnoticed. Actually, Angelier added,
rumour has it that James Lever might just be a pseudonym, that the
actual author of Me, Cheeta might be Will Self.
This got my attention. Not that I particularly like Will Self, mind you. There is a difference between being witty and having a point and I sometimes find that Will Self doesn’t understand it. But I was intrigued: what do you get by applying his undeniable talent to a topic like Tarzan? So I bought the book.
A lot of the readers I know research a book and its author before reading it. I don’t. I am under the illusion that this provides me with a more unblemished reading experience. Plus, I cannot resist the challenge: how much can I figure out about a writer based on his or her prose? Here is my guess work about James Lever upon finishing his novel, minutes before googling his name:
“Finished Me, Cheeta. I doubt it is from Will Self. The writing sounds very American, especially the way the metaphors are developed (that passage p.271 where Cheeta refers to pain as “the blue button” (the blue button being Tarzan’s absence) which he carries on pressing: “I was like a chimp working in university failing the cognition test with the electric bolt over and over, just not getting it that the blue button meant pain” and, further down the page: “Because, to be absolutely honest, I didn’t want to move on. I liked the blue button. Even if I could, I’d never stop pressing it”) to the way the core ideas keep popping up at regular intervals, for a reassessment (Maureen / Jane saying “The hurt will die down eventually” and, towards the end, p.301, this conclusion from Cheeta: “Jane’s law? It doesn’t work. The hurt doesn’t die down. It doesn’t have to.” – this is particularly reminiscent of John Irving), the division in 3 parts: the beginning in the jungle, the glory days in Hollywood, then the end years, the ageing and death approaching, that perfectly drawn arc, the world changing, the remarkable balance between action and comments, all these structural elements point to an American school of writing. The tone is however quite personal, constantly funny – with this also very American way of slipping comedy crumbs in the most tragic scenes, keeping the deep sadness but cutting the bitterness – and satirical as only the best satirists like Voltaire can do. For this reason, if I had to guess an author’s name behind James Lever, I would go for James Morrow [...]. In particular, the consistency in which Lever has kept Cheeta’s voice – the voice of a chimp who can think but thinks like a chimp, misinterpreting whole slabs of human society – is a tour de force [...]”
How wrong was I? Let’s run a quick check on the web. Here you go. An interview from August 1st, 2009 for the Guardian by Zoe Williams reveals that not only does James Lever exist but also that she knows him from University, that he is British, lives in Kensal Rise, is – or was – broke and 37 at the time and had been unsuccessfully writing for the past 20 years. Me Cheeta was, however, a command from his publisher, who tied Lever to extremely strict deadlines. Most of his work effort was put in the research. The writing was done in one go and hardly corrected. This makes the result all the more impressive. It can also explain the school book quality of the structure(1).
Steward Homes’s The Nine Lives of Ray The Cat Jones was my novel of the year 2014. So far, Me, Cheeta is my book of the year 2015. Both have this marvellous combination of a flawless style (precise, fast paced, fun, clever, well documented but never pedantic), a historical and cultural background to which I can relate. In both, the narrative point of view is, to say the least, unusual.
The Nine Lives of Ray The Cat Jones is an punk-anarchist, first-person account of the life of a thief who had his hours of fame in the late 20th century. Ray Jones, the narrator, is the opposite of a self-interested criminal. Stealing, he said, is completely acceptable provided that what is taken is taken from people who will not miss it. This, you might say, is nothing but the old Robin Hood tale all over again. However, the novel illustrates it from the insider point of view, giving it an angle that only stories can find.
Enabled with similar qualities, Me, Cheeta challenges what we usually see as an intellectual standpoint, more than a moral one: disbelief in humanity(2). The supposed simian author keeps hammering his love for the human race. “You want to make death disappear from the world!” Cheeta the chimp says to us. “You find shelter for us all, away from the risks and perils of the jungle”. This starts as a satiric joke. It ends up running throughout the whole novel. Always, new situations are interpreted with the same blissfully stupid adoring glance at human beings.
However, as the theme finds its pattern, it twists. At the start of the novel, in the capture scene, Cheeta is running away from a scene of carnage. His whole tribe has been decimated by what he calls “the hostiles” – bar this name, we will know nothing more of them. His mother and his favourite sister have just been killed. Cheeta drags in his wake his brother Cary and his other brother slash archenemy Stroheim. Stroheim catches up with him. Cheeta loses the ensuing fight. Just as he is about to die, the fight is interrupted by (this is Cheeta the chimp, writer of the autobiography, talking) “an ape, white-faced, complexly coated, smiling: […] Tony Gentry (3) [...]” . The same Gentry immediately turns to his assistant and shouts: “‘Got three! [...] Three of them playing together!’”. Sighing, Cheeta-the-author adds: “Thank God for humanity”.
Cheeta takes his raptor for an ape. Gentry takes a fight to death for a game. Two short and funny sentences is all it takes to Lever to tell us this: the misunderstanding between chimp and human is total and mutual. Humans love animals. Animals love humans. Neither of them has the smallest clue about what is going on in the other’s life. Me, Cheeta could have been called Love and Misreading. It could have been a Jane Austin novel or a Hernandez comic.
From there onwards, the theme of the misinterpretation is recurrent: hundreds of animals are captured and shipped back to the US aboard the cargo named Forest Lawn? This is part of a herculean task to rescue the whole animal kingdom from mutual murder. Animals are kept in closed cages? This is part of a rehabilitation programme where, with food and shelter provided, animals are allowed to laze around as long as it takes to bring down their stress level (an awful lot of masturbation is involved at this stage). The seas are overfished? This is in order to make them safer. Through this distorted lens, the human world is reinvented as a Disney-esque theatre. At the centre of its stage, Johnny Weissmuller and Cheeta live the perfect love on a paradisiac set – which Cheeta calls The Dream and which we know as the setting of the early Tarzan movies.
Walking us through all the dirty stories of Hollywood Golden Age, James Lever uses and develops this angle. As he does so, the way Cheeta has to lie to himself to preserve his fiction of a perfect world gets more obvious and the satire more subtle. With Jane entering the scene, things start getting ugly. Soon, we come to realise that Cheeta is no fool. As the chimpanzee stops believing in his own lies, we stop believing in his naivety. What was satire becomes irony. This slow reversal takes us all the way to the final pages. When the extent of Cheeta’s credulity is finally revealed, it is with Lever’s characteristic sobriety, in one anecdotic piece of sentence, between brackets, like a rock dismissively flipped at our face. However, this falling of the mask does not alter Cheeta’s feelings towards humans. “[…] no other species would even have come close to what you’ve done! You’re amazing”. There might still be double meaning in these words. But there is no ambiguity in the declaration that follows: “I love humans […] I’m the one that’s on your side. I’m the one up here trying to be the best damned friend you ever had”.
Does this sound like American blind-bliss optimistic self-patting auto-satisfaction to you? This is one way of seeing it. Another way is to do what I did after reading about James Lever and recognise this as an expression of what British people quintessentially are: paradox lovers, contradiction seekers, and goddamn animal huggers (4).
(1)The interview also goes to show that I am not the only one not doing my homework. Francois Angelier, usually so well documented, should have known better.
(2)And is there anything more British than this form of self-deprecation?
(3)Tony Gentry was a once famous “animal trainer” (Wikipedia’s politically correct version of “animal hunter”) for Hollywood.
(4)I am by no way being dismissive to my dear wife’s fellow countrymen. I love you British people! I’m the one up here trying to be the best damned friend you ever had!
This got my attention. Not that I particularly like Will Self, mind you. There is a difference between being witty and having a point and I sometimes find that Will Self doesn’t understand it. But I was intrigued: what do you get by applying his undeniable talent to a topic like Tarzan? So I bought the book.
A lot of the readers I know research a book and its author before reading it. I don’t. I am under the illusion that this provides me with a more unblemished reading experience. Plus, I cannot resist the challenge: how much can I figure out about a writer based on his or her prose? Here is my guess work about James Lever upon finishing his novel, minutes before googling his name:
“Finished Me, Cheeta. I doubt it is from Will Self. The writing sounds very American, especially the way the metaphors are developed (that passage p.271 where Cheeta refers to pain as “the blue button” (the blue button being Tarzan’s absence) which he carries on pressing: “I was like a chimp working in university failing the cognition test with the electric bolt over and over, just not getting it that the blue button meant pain” and, further down the page: “Because, to be absolutely honest, I didn’t want to move on. I liked the blue button. Even if I could, I’d never stop pressing it”) to the way the core ideas keep popping up at regular intervals, for a reassessment (Maureen / Jane saying “The hurt will die down eventually” and, towards the end, p.301, this conclusion from Cheeta: “Jane’s law? It doesn’t work. The hurt doesn’t die down. It doesn’t have to.” – this is particularly reminiscent of John Irving), the division in 3 parts: the beginning in the jungle, the glory days in Hollywood, then the end years, the ageing and death approaching, that perfectly drawn arc, the world changing, the remarkable balance between action and comments, all these structural elements point to an American school of writing. The tone is however quite personal, constantly funny – with this also very American way of slipping comedy crumbs in the most tragic scenes, keeping the deep sadness but cutting the bitterness – and satirical as only the best satirists like Voltaire can do. For this reason, if I had to guess an author’s name behind James Lever, I would go for James Morrow [...]. In particular, the consistency in which Lever has kept Cheeta’s voice – the voice of a chimp who can think but thinks like a chimp, misinterpreting whole slabs of human society – is a tour de force [...]”
How wrong was I? Let’s run a quick check on the web. Here you go. An interview from August 1st, 2009 for the Guardian by Zoe Williams reveals that not only does James Lever exist but also that she knows him from University, that he is British, lives in Kensal Rise, is – or was – broke and 37 at the time and had been unsuccessfully writing for the past 20 years. Me Cheeta was, however, a command from his publisher, who tied Lever to extremely strict deadlines. Most of his work effort was put in the research. The writing was done in one go and hardly corrected. This makes the result all the more impressive. It can also explain the school book quality of the structure(1).
Steward Homes’s The Nine Lives of Ray The Cat Jones was my novel of the year 2014. So far, Me, Cheeta is my book of the year 2015. Both have this marvellous combination of a flawless style (precise, fast paced, fun, clever, well documented but never pedantic), a historical and cultural background to which I can relate. In both, the narrative point of view is, to say the least, unusual.
The Nine Lives of Ray The Cat Jones is an punk-anarchist, first-person account of the life of a thief who had his hours of fame in the late 20th century. Ray Jones, the narrator, is the opposite of a self-interested criminal. Stealing, he said, is completely acceptable provided that what is taken is taken from people who will not miss it. This, you might say, is nothing but the old Robin Hood tale all over again. However, the novel illustrates it from the insider point of view, giving it an angle that only stories can find.
Enabled with similar qualities, Me, Cheeta challenges what we usually see as an intellectual standpoint, more than a moral one: disbelief in humanity(2). The supposed simian author keeps hammering his love for the human race. “You want to make death disappear from the world!” Cheeta the chimp says to us. “You find shelter for us all, away from the risks and perils of the jungle”. This starts as a satiric joke. It ends up running throughout the whole novel. Always, new situations are interpreted with the same blissfully stupid adoring glance at human beings.
However, as the theme finds its pattern, it twists. At the start of the novel, in the capture scene, Cheeta is running away from a scene of carnage. His whole tribe has been decimated by what he calls “the hostiles” – bar this name, we will know nothing more of them. His mother and his favourite sister have just been killed. Cheeta drags in his wake his brother Cary and his other brother slash archenemy Stroheim. Stroheim catches up with him. Cheeta loses the ensuing fight. Just as he is about to die, the fight is interrupted by (this is Cheeta the chimp, writer of the autobiography, talking) “an ape, white-faced, complexly coated, smiling: […] Tony Gentry (3) [...]” . The same Gentry immediately turns to his assistant and shouts: “‘Got three! [...] Three of them playing together!’”. Sighing, Cheeta-the-author adds: “Thank God for humanity”.
Cheeta takes his raptor for an ape. Gentry takes a fight to death for a game. Two short and funny sentences is all it takes to Lever to tell us this: the misunderstanding between chimp and human is total and mutual. Humans love animals. Animals love humans. Neither of them has the smallest clue about what is going on in the other’s life. Me, Cheeta could have been called Love and Misreading. It could have been a Jane Austin novel or a Hernandez comic.
From there onwards, the theme of the misinterpretation is recurrent: hundreds of animals are captured and shipped back to the US aboard the cargo named Forest Lawn? This is part of a herculean task to rescue the whole animal kingdom from mutual murder. Animals are kept in closed cages? This is part of a rehabilitation programme where, with food and shelter provided, animals are allowed to laze around as long as it takes to bring down their stress level (an awful lot of masturbation is involved at this stage). The seas are overfished? This is in order to make them safer. Through this distorted lens, the human world is reinvented as a Disney-esque theatre. At the centre of its stage, Johnny Weissmuller and Cheeta live the perfect love on a paradisiac set – which Cheeta calls The Dream and which we know as the setting of the early Tarzan movies.
Walking us through all the dirty stories of Hollywood Golden Age, James Lever uses and develops this angle. As he does so, the way Cheeta has to lie to himself to preserve his fiction of a perfect world gets more obvious and the satire more subtle. With Jane entering the scene, things start getting ugly. Soon, we come to realise that Cheeta is no fool. As the chimpanzee stops believing in his own lies, we stop believing in his naivety. What was satire becomes irony. This slow reversal takes us all the way to the final pages. When the extent of Cheeta’s credulity is finally revealed, it is with Lever’s characteristic sobriety, in one anecdotic piece of sentence, between brackets, like a rock dismissively flipped at our face. However, this falling of the mask does not alter Cheeta’s feelings towards humans. “[…] no other species would even have come close to what you’ve done! You’re amazing”. There might still be double meaning in these words. But there is no ambiguity in the declaration that follows: “I love humans […] I’m the one that’s on your side. I’m the one up here trying to be the best damned friend you ever had”.
Does this sound like American blind-bliss optimistic self-patting auto-satisfaction to you? This is one way of seeing it. Another way is to do what I did after reading about James Lever and recognise this as an expression of what British people quintessentially are: paradox lovers, contradiction seekers, and goddamn animal huggers (4).
(1)The interview also goes to show that I am not the only one not doing my homework. Francois Angelier, usually so well documented, should have known better.
(2)And is there anything more British than this form of self-deprecation?
(3)Tony Gentry was a once famous “animal trainer” (Wikipedia’s politically correct version of “animal hunter”) for Hollywood.
(4)I am by no way being dismissive to my dear wife’s fellow countrymen. I love you British people! I’m the one up here trying to be the best damned friend you ever had!
