That behind Mallabar, and his obsessive work, there lies another, more sinister truth: one that might also help explain Hope's reasons for leaving England . His 1991 debut A Good Man in Africa immediately bagged the Whitbread First Novel Award, a win that has heralded contemporary classics such as the Costa-winning Restless and the literary tour de force that is Any Human Heart. This part of the narrative is set in London, where the couple share her flat in South Kensington, and southern England, where Hope works as an ecologist on an intriguing hedgerow mapping project in Dorset. Admittedly, I am not a “math person”, but the many explorations of game theory, turbulance, catastrophe theory, divergence syndromes and other chaos theory components sometimes left me shaking my head.

As this work was widely publicized, it is not much of a spoiler to reveal that the plot of this book deals with Hope making discoveries of such violence and encountering conflicts and resistance in acceptance of her findings. The story intertwines different narrative strands as the reader is led into the vortex of Hope's complex world. Like life itself, a simple story of powerful events linked to a few choices resonates with many universal themes. At the end he discusses this novel and how it emerged and said his first title was The Chimpanzee Wars.

As a result of the 1st person narrative, we don't fully understand, until the end, that Hope is a broken person as a direct result of these two narratives. At the center is Hope, twining the different narrative threads, keeping the reader suspended in the turbulent whirlpool of humanity.

Each half couldn't be more different, but the theme of professional ambition is the same, and both halves end in catastrophe. It was a fine story thread, and John Clearwater was an extremely interesting character, but frankly, I think he deserves his own book. Hope is professional in her approach so that the chimps are never anthropomorphised, but clear parallels are drawn between the behaviour of the chimps and the war going on in the human world. Complicating matters is the fact that guerrilla warfare is going on in the country at the time, making movement dangerous.Hope is trying to figure out all that's happened to her, both in England with her husband and the events that caused her to flee to a new job in Africa, and the challenges she's faced since then. The study of chimpanzees in Africa by the scientist Hope Clearwater becomes the theme for human society as well as the vehicle for the end of her innocence.

He and his wife have a house in Chelsea, West London but spend most of the year at their chateau in Bergerac in south west France, where Boyd produces award-winning wines.What if, John said, there are small perturbations that we miss or ignore; tiny irritations that we regard as fundamentally inconsequential. Yet Mallabar will not even entertain that idea; he, too, is losing it as he holds on to the tendrils of knowledge that he has accumulated. At one point, traveling north by jeep, rebels take Hope prisoner where she must duck down from an enemy patrol. She’s cottoned on to the fact that strange things are happening within her community of chimps that have taken themselves away from the main group.

The book is about a young, intelligent zoologist whose life is dictated by her own impetuous decisions.I enjoyed the book, as a change of pace from many of my normal, and while the conclusion to one half was inevitable quite early, the writing is very good. What adds a distinctive tang to Brazzaville Beach is the way William Boyd toggles back and forth between England and Africa, folding in Hope's backstory, including her relationship with her family, friends, academic advisor (trained in botany, Hope earned a Ph. Jumping from one mathematical discipline to another, alternating between heavy drinking and total abstention, John's behaviour becomes progressively more erratic and their marriage comes under ever greater strain. Three or four different plots in her life go on throughout the book and it evolves into a breath taking ride through a young life from love and sex to academia to brutality among tremendously written characters from all walks of life to African malaise as well as human destruction.