Monkeys in A Jungle

By Martha Duffy

BRAZZAVILLE BEACH by William Boyd; Morrow; 316 pages; $21

For starters, take a charismatic scientist in west Africa, someone whose fictional career parallels Jane Goodall's or Dian Fossey's. Eugene Mallabar began by making scrupulous and original studies of chimpanzees during the 1950s and became a celebrity when his first best seller, The Peaceful Primate, was published. Documentaries, TV shows, citations and honorary degrees -- even a national park -- all followed, and Mallabar grew rich.

In his reckless, boundingly readable fifth novel, British writer William Boyd picks up the story at the point where Mallabar, in glamorous, leonine middle age, has lost track of the scruples part of his success formula. His nemesis is Hope Clearwater, who is on the lam from a troubled marriage in England and working as one of several learned acolytes who patiently observe and record the diurnal activities of chimps. She is assigned a small number of animals who have separated from the main group, and almost at once she stumbles on big news. Peaceful primates? Strictly sloganeering. The chimps are capable of killing and cannibalism. Before long, she realizes that a kind of genocide is occurring, the destruction of the splinter group.

Brazzaville Beach can be enjoyed as a superior suspense yarn: Will our heroine, who is no crusader but merely following scientific principles, prevail against the murderous plots of an evil genius defending his golden poppycock eggs? In fact that statement can be made without condescension, because swift and artful pacing is the novel's strongest quality. With his five earlier books, Boyd, 39, has gained an enviable reputation as an intellectual who wears his learning lightly, when he does not toss it aside completely. Stars and Bars was a smart send-up of both British and American roads to corruption. The New Confessions turned a dubious premise, a reprise of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's life, into a fluent book that is both romp and rumination. His new book is not so bumptiously funny as previous ones, but the author cannot resist a few energizing japes.

The chimps and their keepers are not the only ones at war here. Various local factions are engaged in obscure hostilities that threaten the flow of money into Mallabar's coffers, and at one point Hope and a fellow researcher are kidnapped by an armed student volleyball team. Boyd also tries his hand at a fashionable fictional device -- passages of italicized commentary interspersed through the narrative. He doesn't need this kind of frill, but when he is not being pompous, he makes his point: the chapter in which Hope is kidnapped by the volleyballers is preceded by a deadpan account of the sport's origins in Massachusetts in 1895.

But the author has a bigger target in mind than literary devices. Both Mallabar and John Clearwater, Hope's mathematician husband, are scientists who become so obsessed with their theories that they lose their grip on real life. Hope, whose previous job had been classifying 147 ancient hedgerows in south Dorset, falls in love with John's billowing dreams: "What I want to do," he says, "is write the geometry of a wave."

Alas, John cannot give a structure to his visions and watches helplessly as they vanish. Hope flees to Africa, but he continues to haunt her. There could be pathos in the decline of a man who wanted nothing dishonorable, just to be the renowned theorist of the Clearwater Set, but Boyd is too tough for that. John's descent into a watery grave is marked by heartless, droll milestones: he gives up drinking; he becomes an insatiable movie buff, sitting in the front row if possible; he reads only mystery novels, traveling with three dozen at a time; he starts digging holes; he digs a trench. And so passes his life away.

There is no doubt that Boyd is a gutsy writer, but in electing to tell his story largely through a woman's eyes, he takes an unusual chance. The past two decades have seen an unprecedented examination of a woman's consciousness, led not only by feminists but also by imaginative writers. Who is a woman and what does she want are hard questions to answer these days. Is Hope convincingly female? As a capable, active, admirably pragmatic person, she functions well as the centerpiece of an adventure. As a wife or a lover -- sex is mercifully kept to a minimum -- she is less believable. As a ponderer, someone who believes with Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living, she is, well, William Boyd, and for the reader that is good company to keep.