Stylistically, Manrissa Man is an outlier, one of the most unusual and extreme of all 1982 novels in the set. The language is wilfully disjoint, terse, acidic and formal, trusting readers to fill considerable gaps. The book opens with a foreword and an ‘Author’s note to the second edition’ which follow the spiel of carefully placing oblique hints without giving the story away (great apes developing super-human intelligence under the sinister manipulations of science in Manrissa, a US laboratory complex, and eventually turning against their tormentors and the human race in general, using the biological weapons they were made immune to), followed by prologue of unreferenced quotations from Deuteronomy; a philosophical quotation on two types of imperative (hypothetical and categorical); Martin Chuzzlewit, including its library reference card; an account of Napoleon’s battle strategy, etc. The terse and disjointed approach also rules in the body of the novel itself, which is to a large extent constructed from post-mortem testimonies of surviving ranks of the incidents by some congressional committee. The thing I liked best was the interaction between Matthew Longmore, ‘obscure lecturer in linguistics in a run-down Southern college’ (dust jacket), and the three Manrissas he teaches; Alpha, later on the leader of the devastating Manrissa uprising, has become far more intelligent and ruthless than the specialists who subjected him to experiments. Some of the sentences used to describe the behaviour, facial expressions, and gestures of the Manrissas, as well as of the chimpanzees in Malamud’s God’s Grace, felt only very slightly off —in fact just right—when applied to human characters. Things like: ‘He reached out a hand and tentatively pulled at my lips, much as one fumbles at a transistor in search of a voice.’