Hackenfeller’s Ape by Brigid Brophy

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Hackenfeller’s Ape by Brigid Brophy. Dalkey Archive Press. 2026.

“Mankind invents necessities right and left to justify what it enjoys doing.” So says a minor character in Brigid Brophy’s first novel, Hackenfeller’s Ape, unpublished in the US until 2026, thanks to the efforts of Dalkey Archive Press. That same character goes on to define modernity as “The Age of Cain,” when “unthinking … neurotic cruelty” is the norm. It’s an apt designation, perhaps better than the one we bandy about today. While the “Anthropocene” feigns scientific objectivism, “The Age of Cain” is maudlin in its religiosity; it finds a kind of patron anti-saint in the Genesis narrative, its tale of violence and betrayal, of myopic, petty, self-serving murder.

Hackenfeller’s Ape is not, though, as dour as all that. Not on the surface, at least. No, this story’s surface is a crime caper – that or a David-and-Goliath tale – with humor, meet-cutes, and minor heroics sprinkled throughout. It is the tale of Professor Clement Derrylhyde (Thomas Pynchon called: he says “Give me that character’s name!”), who has been studying a pair of Hackenfeller’s apes for some time, hoping to become the first scientist to observe their mating. Despite his incessant singing of Mozart arias, the apes don’t seem to ever feel frisky – well, the male doesn’t. But when a shadowy mystery organization (Mr. Pynchon is on the line again. Shall I tell him to hold?) declares their intention of sending the male into space in order to test a rocket – a stratagem almost certain to lead to the creature’s demise – Derrylhyde, along with a plucky lockpick perhaps named Gloria, decides to take action.

It’s a fun enough premise, and at just 122 pages, this book makes for a perfectly enjoyable afternoon read. At first, the novel reminded me a bit of Rachel Ingalls’ novellas, but that wasn’t quite right; Ingalls’ books, books like Mrs. Caliban, are even weirder, more elliptical. No, what this reminded me of was Kurt Vonnegut: dopey characters, goofy meetings, light-hearted banter, and easy morality.

All fine if that’s what you’re looking for.

Brophy was politically savvy, a public intellectual with a polemical bent. As the back of the book tells it, she “championed several types of social reform, including vegetarianism, humanism, and animal rights. She was a staunch feminist and pacifist …” and the list goes on. Great. So was Grace Paley, highly involved in such worthy causes as the women’s rights movement and anti-nuke protests. But herein lies the difference. You might locate Paley’s politics in a book like The Little Disturbances of Man, but Paley never let her quest for justice get in the way of her aesthetics. Vonnegut did, quite often, put his politics and goofy antics ahead of his artistry. And here, in Hackenfeller’s Ape, Brophy does much the same. If you like the “Why can’t people just be nice?” politics of Vonnegut, alongside his characteristic mix of lighthearted, postmodern hijinx, you’ll enjoy this book; if you, like me, find yourself less excited about this kind of storytelling than you were in your youth – paragraph-long descriptions of what Character X is thinking as he walks down the street, long unfolding explanations as to why Character Y is the way she is, more “telling” than “showing,” to employ the overused dictum of writing courses the world over – then you might find Hackenfeller’s slightly nostalgic but a bit of a letdown.

“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind,” Vonnegut implores.

Okay, now, look: I know I’m coming out swinging here, but it is not because I think this is a bad book. Hackenfeller’s Ape is actually a good book for what it is – a good-faith effort from the early career of a criminally under-recognized author, showing flashes of the genius that would come to define the rest of her oeuvre. Brophy (1929–1995) was an English author whose works, both fiction and nonfiction – volumes like In Transit (another Dalkey publication), Prancing Novelist, and The King of a Rainy Country – demonstrate a mind alive to its times, politically, yes, but also quite aware of and, indeed, swimming in the deep end of the literary currents of her day. The complete arc of her career demonstrates her status as a writer and thinker of real brilliance: wonderfully radical in her personal life, her politics, and her art.

As for those aforementioned “flashes” – there are moments in this novel when, for instance, her support for animal rights makes a brilliant match for her aesthetic temperament, particularly when it comes to her use of free indirect narration. Early in the story, she trains the narrative on Percy, the male ape who inexplicably refuses to mate with Edwina, his would-be partner chosen by the zoo:

It was an indisputable scientific fact that Percy would never be able to speak. Yet it seemed no less indisputable, and no less established by science, that had he been able to live five hundred years he would have learnt. Here was an animal discontent with his monkeydom, already exercising the first characteristic of Man, which Man had never satisfactorily explained, self-restraint. Love … sharpened Percy and pressed his energies to higher and higher things, because the discipline was self-chosen.

The implication is that our narrator is speaking – the prototypical, objective, omniscient and unnamed, God-adjacent narrator – yet whence this optimistic outlook? We seem to have caught a whiff of the professor’s hopes for Percy: that the creature is very gradually beginning to understand. (Notice that comma before “self-restraint,” placed where my composition training says a colon belongs, taking emphasis away from the word, undercutting the notion even as it’s broached, as though a host of potential narrators are battling over interpretation even as the story progresses.) Or perhaps we are entering Percy’s mind, conceptually and linguistically separate from our own.

The latter interpretation lends its own class of complications to the story’s narration. Here, for instance, is what happens when the professor calls Percy “friend”:

Percy frowned. His whole body became rigid with trying. Quite without literacy, he had no conception where one word ended and the next began … Seeing him intent, silent, flexed, Edwina let out a half second’s chatter. Percy started. The vision on the tip of his mind was jerked back. It was now in limbo …

I read this and think of Golding’s The Inheritors, an experiment in imagining an entirely different form of thinking than the human kind – a non-conceptual, pre-linguistic form of cognition based on vision and feeling. It’s not scientific, sure, but Brophy invites readers to practice forms of radical imagination and, consequently, empathy, with such passages. Indeed, the Professor is empathy embodied, bidding readers join him by putting themselves in the shoes (or lack thereof, in the case of two particular apes) of others, to see the world anew.

An evaluation of Brophy’s literary chops would be remiss to exclude an analysis of her allusions. There are, throughout Hackenfeller’s Ape, a multitude of Biblical references, especially to the Garden of Eden. Not all of her motifs resonate; some fall terribly flat. Yet some are preternaturally artful:

[Edwina] bit into the apple, and moved back a pace or two, seeking refuge in the depth of the cage. She ate rapidly, finding some satisfaction, though not the one she most desired, in sinking her yellow, over-long teeth into the flesh, and chewing it with her mouth open. Her face was wrinkled like a hag; she ate apples like an urchin. All the time she watched the Professor, but with an animal’s gaze, impartially taking in his whole figure. She had not yet realized the face was the important part.

The corporeality of the passage, at the outset, is hard to miss. Edwina is all physicality, disgustingly so; it’s like being forced to eat dinner with someone who not only has bad table manners, but also has bad B.O. But then there are the similes – she is “like a hag,” eats “like an urchin,” watches “with an animal’s gaze.” What a list! To compare the ape to a hag is a fascinating move once we consider the tradition of placing humans at the apex of some evolutionary pyramid, particularly when we are told she watches the Professor “like an animal.” As opposed to what? The decision to deploy a trio of similes, back to back to back, seems intentionally misleading, as if the author wants to leave us with an unsteady feeling, the sense of being called out for being judgmental. And then, finally, comes that last sentence of the paragraph, with its implications that Edwina will one day realize the face is the “important part” of a person. Important to whom? When will she realize this? And – did I already ask – important to whom?

Then there’s a passage like the following, depicting Professor Derrylhyde entering the zoo:

He passed between the vultures and the flamingoes, creatures no less extravagant and bizarre than Man, as though between two fantastically ornamental gateposts, leading to a palatial labyrinth. On the floor beneath the vultures’ perches lay nuggets of still bleeding meat, the remains of some small mammal.

These gateposts sound like something out of Joyce’s Dubliners, highly symbolic, as if we were following Adam and Eve out of the garden, or trailing Dante into Hell. The feeling of foreboding is only amplified by the labyrinth, the threat of a minotaur at its center, the narrow halls reeking with his now-dead prey. But, as always, the novel enjoys blending evolutionary themes with the religious and mythical, the bleeding nuggets perhaps adding to the foreboding feeling or reminding us of the ways of nature, smaller animals eaten by larger ones in a never-ending cycle of predation. Either way, look at the comedown: the first sentence mentions extravagance, describes the gateposts as fantastically ornamented, the labyrinth as palatial, only to have the second sentence drop the minor chord. It’s almost as though we begin with the Professor’s rose-colored lenses, the strange beauty` of this zoo and its creatures, just to be shown objective reality, nature as it really is, where a beautiful bird might just rip a rabbit to pieces and then sit and watch the body fester for a bit before digging in.

Near the end of her life, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote a brilliant essay about the works of Nathanael West, titled “Funny as a Crutch.” Besides having a title that would make any reviewer feel more than a tinge of jealousy, the essay astutely argues that West’s works are not comedies but in fact morality plays; there may be things one can laugh at in these books, she writes, but lurking behind the dark comedy, and far more important to reading them, is despair. So it goes with Brophy’s first novel. When Professor Derrylhyde, early on, is talking to the ape Edwina, he says “When my species destroys itself, we may need yours to start it all over again.” Haha. Haha? Laughter in the Age of Cain always has a bit of a bite to it, like eating a sour apple.

Matt Martinson lives in the Pacific Northwest. Follow his decade-long quest to read every Dalkey Archive book on Substack: mattlmartinson.substack.com.