By Dylan Kwok

Gus: The Life and Opinions of the Last Raffles' Banded Langur
Jon Gresham
Epigram Books (2024) / 440 pages / SGD 26.90

You can't help but respect authors who retell classics. It requires a certain skill and confidence to transform a well-loved work for modern – or localised – audiences. And while it's hard to suggest that the 2011 reboot series of Planet of the Apes is a classic yet, one cannot help but feel Jon Gresham's debut novel, Gus: The Life and Opinions of the Last Raffles' Banded Langur, is a Singaporean retelling of that sci-fi saga.

Narrated by the eponymous langur, the book covers much of the same ground that the film franchise does: an experiment with primates goes awry, one is raised by a human, an infectious disease stemming from the primate enhancement decimates humanity, and human civilisation is overthrown. Except, of course, Gus takes place in Singapore rather than San Francisco.

Or does it? Because as the plot develops, the city feels less Singaporean and more American, to the point you will be forgiven for checking whether Gresham is writing about a city named Singapore in the US (there is, in fact, one in Michigan). Despite the well-researched locales, Gresham's Singapore feels foreign, its characters un-Singaporean. Singaporeans are skittish of nature and love to call on the government to restore order, and yet as monkeys wreak havoc in the first act, the humans act as if nothing can be done. Later, as the enhanced monkeys conquer Singapore, the government's response is to firebomb the country, killing many people but not many monkeys. Again, this rings false. Does the Singapore government make foolish decisions? Yes. Would they firebomb Singapore? Let's just say the talking monkeys are more believable.

What reads worse than these fantastical takes on Singapore in a monkey crisis is the dialogue. The characters pepper their sentences with local slang, but the end-result feels unnatural. No one uses phrases like "sibeh shrewd and formidable", and while Singaporeans can switch from informal Singlish to formal English between thoughts, we don't do it in the way Gresham writes. Take this line for example:

"We decide who gets in and the terms of their stay. If they dun like the rules, they leave lorh."

Perhaps a reader unfamiliar with Singapore would not notice the stilted Singlish, but Gresham compounds it with outlandish details. In one scene, the monkeys build a trebuchet that fires a boulder the size of a Land Rover. No mean feat, given the largest trebuchet in history could barely fire boulders the size of a check-in luggage. Later, in a pivotal scene, the monkeys shoot down a hot air balloon – except hot air balloons can fly even with a few bullet holes in their envelopes.

Perhaps these details don't matter. After all, anything can happen in science fiction. Monkeys can talk. Humans can grow tails from monkey bites. You can crossbreed pandas with people. But speculative fiction authors need to know that readers expect consistency in the level of detail and plausibility within the worlds they create. If a story begins with "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…", readers are prepared to believe anything from the Force to faster-than-light travel with no explanation. If it begins with "30 years ago", they usually expect a more familiar world (because of the earth-centric time scale), with speculative elements maintaining some internal logic. If it begins with a near-future "2026", they would expect logical sounding or quasi-scientific explanations for any fantastical elements. And it is precisely because of Gresham's diligent research into his Singaporean locales – accurate to the point you could make a walking tour from the novel's settings – and his plausible explanation for the monkey pandemic, that plot points where he fails to provide believable explanations, like his massive trebuchets, feel badly out of place.

Facts aside, the plot itself lacks consistency. In one scene Gus is described as not knowing another character, Nur, but a few pages later, he recognises her on sight. Another plot point centres around the fact that humans who have "Turned" – transformed into primate-human hybrids – can detect one another by smell, but this power is ignored when inconvenient to the plot.

Many of these issues could be overlooked if the characters felt authentic. A positive read could cast the characters as a diverse ensemble from every walk of life in Singapore – a negative read would see them as tired caricatures. Is Tan the image of a neighbourhood cop or a worn-out racist trope? Is Juliette the quintessential Filipino nurse or a manufactured sob story to capture bleeding hearts? And is Charlie's auditor-clown schtick fresh or a half-baked Dungeons and Dragons character? Of larger concern is that these characters remain static throughout the novel, an unusual choice given the level of trauma they experience. Perhaps Gresham meant to make a point of it, to suggest humans never change, but if he truly believed that, what would be the point of writing the novel? Because while on one level the story is a decently gripping action-adventure, it's also quite clear the author is trying to convince the reader of his worldview.

Which brings us to Gus, the opinionated narrator. Less than a caricature, he's a mouthpiece for the author, because for a monkey born in the 2010s (a Gen Alpha monkey?), he's somehow steeped in '80s culture. But his character problems go beyond the fact he knows more than a monkey who had WiFi for precisely one month in 2026 should. The novel is riddled with his rants on every topic – conservation, Singaporean politics, SingLit, Internet addiction and xenophobia – and his sentiments read like someone who's spent too much time on the Singapore literati circuit. There is some merit in the opinions, but the points are blunted by the fact they read more like Instagram comments than the chronicle of a monkey who claims to read Indonesian poetry and Dickens. Worse – given Singapore's downfall in the story – it makes the work feel like a macabre revenge fantasy of someone with an axe to grind against Singapore. It lacks the nuance the novel format creates space for – which is a shame, because Gresham's prose demonstrates skill to speak more cogently on any of the explored topics. Perhaps he chose to limit himself, thinking to write in the voice of his cocksure monkey, but if the man behind the curtain is already visible he might as well just share his personal opinion.

Or better yet, make himself the narrator. Because by far the largest hurdle the reader faces is believing the frame device – that Gus wrote the book. Ignoring the fact he can barely spell (a detail I suspect was meant as a joke, but it inadvertently discredits the chronicle's authorship), Gus writes less like a chronicler and more like an omniscient narrator, describing in detail the private thoughts of almost every character in the novel, despite the fact that some are his enemies and despite the fact he is barely acquainted with some of them. At some point Gresham realises the implausibility and begins adding disclaimers in front of chapters which read something like this: "You may well wonder how I know this happened…"

The tactic does not work. It may seem funny and appropriate for a monkey author to claim a fly gave him the scoop, but Gus is narrating the story from the far future. Houseflies live for 28 days. It reduces an already farfetched novel to a tall tale told by a child trying to explain to his teacher what happened to his homework. You know what's going to be said is preposterous, but still you listen, out of a morbid curiosity to see if any of the whoppers will at least make you laugh. For me, they didn't.

_____