Alan's Reviews > Bad Monkeys

I remember the context clearly enough. The first time I read Matt Ruff's 2007 novel Bad Monkeys was in January 2008. I had just purchased a copy of this brightly-colored, oddly-shaped book at Powell's on Hawthorne, and I was on an airplane, flying back to my home town (a good place to be from) to attend my father's funeral. But I realized recently, more than a decade later, that for some reason I had retained almost nothing about the novel itself. It seemed high time for a rereading.

{...}eventually I realized I wasn't in hell, I was just in America.
—p.60

Like the work of Nick Harkaway, another favorite of mine, every Matt Ruff book is unique—but Bad Monkeys is weird, even for Ruff. It begins in a featureless white room (which Ruff acknowledges is something of a cliché). Jane Charlotte is undergoing a psychiatric evaluation in Las Vegas' Clark County Detention Center after having killed a man named Dixon who, by Jane's own admission, wasn't such a bad monkey—

"He was a prick. I didn't like him. But he wasn't evil."
—p.3

This is a problem for her (as well as for Nevada's law enforcement, of course) because Jane herself is a Bad Monkey—one member of a clandestine organization whose very reason to exist is to do something about evil:

"So in your job with Bad Monkeys," the doctor asks, "what is it you do? Punish evil people?"
"No. Usually we just kill them."
"Killing's not a punishment?"
"It is if you do it to pay someone back. But the organization's not about that. We're just trying to make the world a better place."
"By killing evil men."
"Not all of them. Just the ones Cost-Benefits decides will do a lot more harm than good if they go on breathing."
—p.3

As Bad Monkeys progresses, the body count rises steeply, and it gets harder and harder to tell the good monkeys from the bad ones. And Jane isn't much help—turns out she's not the most reliable of narrators.

I should mention that emotional triggers, from massive amounts of bloodshed to multiple counts of sexual abuse, abound throughout Bad Monkeys. This novel would not, I'm afraid, be a very good fit for network TV, though I would love to see it done well by one of the more adventurous streaming video services. Jane Charlotte is already cast (in my head, anyway), for example—she's played by Fiona Dourif, the actress who did such a superlative job as the "holistic assassin" Bart Curlish in the 2016 BBC adaptation of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency—a series which veers madly away from Douglas Adams' own work, to be sure, but which is worth watching in its own right. Fiona Dourif is the daughter of veteran actor Brad Dourif, by the way, who—wait for it—actually turns out to be from my home town, the very place to which I was traveling back in January 2008.

It's almost enough to make one believe that "everything is connected" (just as Bart and others in Dirk Gently say, more than once).

In and around all the action, Bad Monkeys takes on some serious subjects—such as how evil is, so often, rooted in self-sabotage. You can ignore those bits in favor of the explosions, murders and general conspiratarian mayhem—I certainly did, the first time through—but if you're looking for depth, that's here too.

The pages of my copy of Bad Monkeys are a little foxed, now—I'm not sure its unusual format was a good choice, at least in terms of longevity. This isn't my favorite Matt Ruff book either, perhaps, but I find that it holds up to reexamination. Its twists and turns eventually come to a conclusion that's both logical and, even the second time through, surprising.

And I'm still hoping for that on-screen adaptation...