Brazzaville Beach by WIlliam Boyd

BB is a novel about a woman called Hope. The story is divided into three narratives about her marriage, about academic competition in the field studying chimpanzees, and war.
  The stories are presented as a reflection from Hope’s point of view at BB, and we find out in leaps and meanders how she eventually ends up living on the beach. Her marriage to mathematician John, gradually declines ending in his madness and suicide. After his death she goes to work on a chimpanzee research station in Africa only to find that the research leader Eugene Mallabar can’t accept her discovery that the chimps are killing each other because it doesn’t fit into his long treasured thesis. This ends in a row where Eugene attacks Hope. As she flees to the nearest city she and a colleague Ian are caught in a road block and taken by soldiers into the bush. She eventually escapes, and is rescued by some Belgian mercenaries.
  There were some interesting juxtapositions in the book; the chimps’ aggression and cannibalism compared to the war. John’s area of study; chaos theory, turbulence, and catastrophe theory compared to the relationships of the scientists and others in the book.
  The narrative is not set out in chapters. Sequences from each story are punctuated with text in italics, in first or third person, put forward by Hope. These mainly cover scientific subjects including Fermat’s Last Theorem, The Inverse Cascade and so on. The point of these sections is not clear, other than to add some scientific kudos to the stories, and perhaps bringing to our attention that Hope is a scientist too. It was difficult to make connections with these pieces and what was happening in the narrative.
  The section about the kidnap and the war seemed to have no connection with the rest of the book and could have been cut without any loss to the remainder. It could be there to prompt a comparison between the war and the behaviour of the chimpanzees/scientists in the camp, but this is not clear.
  The part of the book we found most interesting was about the competitive academic environment that both John and Hope found themselves, where John pushes himself to destruction with the effort of finding the Clearwater Theory, and Hope finds her research rejected when it contradicts the theories of the long established team leader. Both situations do not end happily, John commits suicide and Hope is beaten and rejected from the research camp. Not a very happy reflection of academic circles.
  All in all everyone enjoyed the book. The characters were will drawn and interesting, we had a lot to say.