I watched him go, and hoped that one day he’d forget he was ever human
Rating: 3/5
Trigger Warnings: Nothing I can think of
Spoiler Alert! If you haven’t read the book, this review will contain spoilers so it’s up to you if you continue…
So I got gifted a copy of Half Brother about 4 years ago, thought it sounded good and stuck in on the ever-growing pile of ‘To-Read’ books. Fast-forward to present day and I needed an easy read to get through quickly just as a break from writing about medieval texts. That’s exactly what Half Brother was. Easy, quick, a nice break. But that’s kind of all it was for me.
Ben’s father, Richard Tomlin is a leading researcher in…I forget what. And he’s come up with a new experiment to see if Chimps can acquire language - namely ASL (American Sign Language). This is probably nothing new to readers, this kind of experiment seems pretty generic nowadays and everyone has heard of Koko the gorilla, a real life version of the story contained within Half Brother.
Admittedly, this was an interesting look at a subject I probably never would have bothered to learn about. It’s good to learn something new, and ask the kind of questions that crop up in Oppel’s book.
Zan, the baby chimp the Tomlins take into their home, is playful, cheeky, and incredibly smart. But is it right for him to be raised thinking he is human? Taken from his natural mother and raised as part of the Tomlin family (however much Ben’s father fails to bond with Zan), later on in the book, he doesn’t recognise other chimps, and fails to integrate into their colony.
The narration is enjoyable, if basic, and the insight into a thirteen year old’s head was what I had been hoping for in picking up an easy book, but everything felt a little surface level for me: Ben’s feelings for Jennifer, his anger at his father, his disillusionment with school. Something about it felt very predictable and shallow. Rather than having to infer anything about his feelings it was all right there on the page. Is this something I didn’t enjoy because I’m a more mature audience than the book was perhaps intended for? Maybe, but it’s always more fun to work out a character’s feelings than just have them stated.
Which brings me to characterisation. The cast is large, but the focus is small. Many characters had minimal parts even though I feel over the two years the book focuses on they were probably quite big parts of Ben’s life. I’m not too fussed about this point because it did mean we got a strong focus on Zan’s journey - both what the book intends to focus on and what I was more interested in than a thirteen year old’s love life - but looking back over my reading of it I am questioning why some people got mentioned as much as they did or why we didn’t get more of an insight into important people like Peter. He was vitally important to the plot line…but I knew nothing about him outside of his work with Zan, making him little more than a plot device.
I only did some cursory research into it, but I found a couple of websites surrounding the topic of teaching animals to talk (if you feel like looking into it some more, there are links at the bottom of the post). Honestly, from the few things I looked at, I got the same impression as a couple of the characters who, until their brief reappearances at the end, are presented as fringe characters whose opinions don’t matter. By which I mean William Eckler was right to be against animal experiments. And sure, this was one of the less harmful versions, but the Tomlins weren’t just teaching Zan ASL, they were teaching him to be human, and I feel this could only have been harmful to him.
The book does confront the ethics of using animals in experiments, and Ben is very clearly opposed to it, but I kind of got the impression he was only opposed to it because he felt such a bond with Zan. Obviously this is an important factor and if that’s what it takes then I’m hardly going to dispute it, I just wasn’t left with the over-whelming need to take action that I felt I should have been left with after the confrontation with Helson and the Thurston Foundaton.
I guess in summary I have to say it’s an easy read, but I wasn’t very enthused by it.
The Official Koko website - http://www.koko.org/about-us
A clip of a TV with Koko - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNuZ4OE6vCkAbout
A Chimp who learned Sign Language (remarkably close to book’s plot) - https://www.npr.org/2008/05/28/90516132/the-chimp-that-learned-sign-language
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