My Friends the Baboons

Doris Lessing wrote of Eugene Marais in 'The New Statesman': “He offers a vision of nature as a whole, whose parts obey different time-laws, move in affinities and linkages we could learn to see: parts making wholes on their own level, but seen by our divisive brains as a multitude of individualities, a flock of birds, a species of plant or beast. We are just at the start of an understanding of the heavens as a web of interlocking clocks, all differently set: an understanding that is not intellectual, but woven into experience. Marais brings this thought down into the plain, the hedgerow, the garden.” Written in the popular vein suitable to a newspaper readership, this book is a valuable ancillary to the author’s more detailed and scientific work on baboons, 'The Soul of the Ape'. Together, the two texts give us as complete a picture as we will get of Marais’ three year study of these complex and virtually human creatures.