THE HARTLEPOOL MONKEY
by Sean Longley

Doubleday, £14.99 (hardback)

Amber Melville-Brown
‘Clothes maketh the man,’ said Shakespeare. Sean Longley's novel gets its title from the legend of a monkey found after a shipwreck off the coast of Hartlepool during the Napoleonic Wars. Mistaken for a French prisoner, the monkey is sentenced to be hanged, accused of a misguided French revolutionary plot. He needs the assistance of Warrens, a one-guinea brief, to save him. But the brief fails and the ape swings.

Dr Simon Legris, the eighteenth century anti-hero of the book, finds himself stumbling alone and naked through the African jungle as the book opens. When his clothes give way to the hot wet land, he dreams of better days and a fine pair of shoes. And when he is finally rescued after many years fighting through the forest, it is to his remaining tricorn hat that he clings: ‘It is all that prevents me standing naked in this hellish Eden’.

Once the toast of Parisian ladies – Legris was able to cure most types of venereal diseases – he brings with him a new companion, an ape he saves when its once-tolerant tribe set upon it, apparently as disgusted with its human looks as Legris is fascinated by them – the monkey is, like Legris, nearly naked.

The ape seemingly acknowledges a debt of gratitude to Legris, but shows skills beyond those of any monkey we would recognise. The pair are ultimately saved and return to Legris’ native France. When the monkey shows he can not only speak but also grasp abstract concepts and understand unfair treatment, it is decided that he is not a talking ape at all but a man. He is immediately given a job, a salary and a name: Jacques LeSinge. It’s all downhill from there.

Billing the book as ‘a riotous tale’ does it a disservice. Despite its ludicrous plot and its Blackadder-esque comic lines, it is profound and sobering. One is left musing not whether LeSinge was an ape or a man, but whether he would ever want to be a man at all.

Surely an example of contempt of court these days, LeSinge’s outburst in court when he knows Warrens, his lawyer, has failed him does not necessarily indicate how we are supposed to think of him: ‘We part as we met,’ says Warrens, ‘with a ball of his faeces hurled at my head’. We’ve all had difficult clients…

Where Warrens fails to save his client, Longley succeeds in making you think. Perhaps something akin to the author’s sympathy for the innocent ape also fuels his ambition to help troubled youngsters trying to survive in the concrete jungle and to escape from the unfamiliar territory of the courts. Longley describes himself as a ‘one-guinea brief’. If his legal oratory is as entertaining as his book, I suggest he puts up his fees.


Media lawyer Amber Melville-Brown is a consultant at David Price Solicitors & Advocates