Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), a founder of the Vorticist art movement, also wrote novels and criticism. He was famous for his feuds, and "The Apes of God" is a satire directed toward the English literary scene.
Acknowledged by the critics to be one of the most devastating books in our language, THE APES OF GOD strips bare the social affectations and malaise that made the British culture of his time so hateful to Wyndham Lewis. The period of the late 1920s, described later by Lewis as the insanitary trough between the two great wars.' Lewis's mock-picaresque hero is Dan Boleyn, a 20-year-old Irish innocent. Tutored by a 60-year-old albino dilettante named Horace Zagreus, Dan travels reluctantly through the London art world. He is horrified (and confused, and bored half to death) by the false, contrived broadcasts' of the Apes' - a series of pseudo-artists who resemble, on the one hand, absurd mechanical dolls, and on the other, very specific personages of the era (like Sir Osbert Sitwell). Lewis's version of a world in which habitual falsehood has created general paralysis is fierce, unrelieved, and prophetic of an even more mediocre future