Book review: Natural History

I've been to a few safari parks and zoos in England and all of them, even the best-maintained ones, were depressing. The English countryside is beautiful, but fence some of it off and bang some chimpanzees or tigers in there, and it comes to seem hopelessly forlorn. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the smell of browning apple cores.

In any case, it was a stroke of genius on Neil Cross's part to commence his new thriller in an ailing North Devon animal sanctuary with enclosures full of abused chimps, a car park half-full of old people's Hondas and a front gate that looks like "a Soviet border crossing".

As the story begins, someone has lobbed 1080 (local mention!) over the fence, fatally poisoning an elderly ape.

Monkeyland is the quixotic venture of Patrick and Jane Bowman, who met when Patrick, a reporter, interviewed Jane, a zoo worker, about white tigers. On their first date, both took a piss in the bush.

Now, Jane has become a sort of Terri Irwin figure a celebrity of reality television nature shows, always surrounded by a camera team and a producer who's not to be trusted.

The couple's 13-year-old daughter Jo is an awkward, bird-like astrology nut whose tutor, Mr Nately, is so awkward himself that he may not be all that he seems. Charlie, their 17-year-old son, is remote, irritable and interested in all of the usual self-destructive teen stuff.

Together, they live in a crumbling, lichened house on two acres of overgrown garden. Beyond, and down a steep cliff, lies the ocean. The area, with its high hedges and empty lanes, is sometimes pleasantly and sometimes uncomfortably secluded.

Cross adroitly conjures a mood of near-constant apprehensiveness. His prose is economical and restrained, but he has a decided flair for visuals. (Jo feels her braces are "oversized and conspicuous her mouth crammed like an urban canal, with old wire shopping trolleys".)

Somehow, he manages to imbue elements that are usually romantic or uplifting or sweet rescued chimpanzees, Devon and Somerset, nebbishy astronomers with a creepy cast.

Monkeyland, for instance, might be risibly feeble, but it's also the sort of place where startling, atavistic things can happen among chimps and among humans. As such, it functions as an entry point for some of the concerns that still fascinate and frighten primatologists.

How are we to understand our biological relationship to chimps? And given the link, what are we to make of their occasional murderous outbursts, their bouts of rape, cannibalism and group-sponsored torture?

Natural History draws much of its power by teasing out the biological implications of all that primate bloodlust, without ever being obvious or didactic about it.

Moving from Monkeyland to the Bowman household to Zaire, where Jane goes in search of a new primate species, the story chugs along happily enough, but then, like a charging ape, it suddenly picks up speed and becomes truly frightening.

In fact, the tension built so much that I expected an anti-climactic or an overwrought conclusion. Instead, Cross extracts every last shudder of impact from every strand of plot.

The final series of surprises burst open with a great thwack, followed by several sickening ricochets.