We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves

One of the things which struck me most about this book is how Fowler writes the character of Fern. She writes Fern as being almost human, occasionally to the point that if you hadn't been told that Fern was a chimpanzee, you might not always be able to tell.

Rosemary perfectly sums up her and Fern's relationship on page 108. "Sometimes it was encumbering, a monkey on my back, but mostly I felt enlarged, as if what mattered in the end was not what Fern could do or what I could do, but the sum of it - Fern and me together.” Later on that page, Rosemary describes Fern’s loss as being like the loss of a twin, leaving a permanent gap in her life. Fern here is not a chimp, not a research subject, but another human being who draws the same level of affection, compassion, and love from Rosemary that a human twin might have.

Much of the point of the book, it seems to me, is to say how similar humans and chimpanzees really are. Fern and Rosemary have an almost human-like level of communication - a level of communication no one else can establish with the ape. Rosemary describes on page 98, in one of my favorite passages in the entire book. “No matter how bizarre her behavior…I could be counted on to render it into plain English. Fern wants to go outside. Fern wants to watch Sesame Street. Fern thinks you are a doodoo-head. Some of this was convenient projection, but you'll never convince me of the rest.”

Fern and Rosemary’s relationship strengthens with time. They grow to be more and more alike: Fern begins to act more and more human, and Rosemary begins to act more and more like a chimpanzee. This is very true to the real-life experiments that this book was based on. The first of these involved a chimp named Gua, who was raised alongside an infant boy. Her development proved to be very similar to his, and she was actually better than him at certain tasks, such as drinking from a cup, but the experiment was cut short after the boy began to respond to his mother’s actions with chimpanzee noises.

Sadly, the book is also very accurate about humans’ treatment of experimental chimpanzees. Once the experiment is done, Fern is forcibly removed from her family and given to a research facility which puts her in a cage with a number of violent male chimpanzees, presided over by a research staff armed with electric cattle prods, just as many of the chimpanzees used in real-life experiments have been sent to cruel testing facilities. What an ignoble fate for such intelligent creatures.