The Philosopher's Apprentice

The Philosopher's Apprentice by James Morrow

Category: Satire Grade: A

This novel is pretty close to a masterpiece but, unfortunately, one that I can't recommend to too many people. If you've been following this blog for a while, you may remember that I started reading Morrow with a book called Towing Jehovah - in which a group finds God's body in the Pacific and tows it back to Florida to turn it in to a theme park. Much like that one, you've got to have a tolerance for a high level of sacrilege and plain old weirdness to appreciate most of Morrow's books. He seemed to signal a shift in genre to historical fiction with his last book, The Last Witchfinder, that, with a few exceptions, played it pretty straight. Given the title of this book, that's kind of what I was expecting - less satire, more "serious literature".

The book starts out headed in that direction when the lead character storms out of his dissertation defense and gives up the chance of earning his PhD in philosophy. A few hours later, while drowning his problems in a pitcher, he's approached by a stranger who offers him what sounds like a dream job -- high salary, living on a tropical island, tutoring a single student. He's told that his student, a 15 year old girl, was in an accident and has a form of amnesia that leaves her with no moral sensibility. So far, it sounds like a great set up for a serious foray in to the works of all kinds of philosophers. There's plenty of that, but very quickly we're flying off on all kinds of tangents.

I try to avoid putting a lot of plot detail in to these reviews so that the books isn't ruined for everybody, but - spoiler alert - I'm going to give a quick overview of some the directions we go since, frankly, I think it's a good idea to scare most of you off from reading this one. OK, so, not surprisingly, our 15 year old is not an amnesiac. Soon after arriving on the island the hero meets the girl's "mother", a brilliant geneticist. The woman has a terminal disease but wants to have a broad ranging motherhood experience. So she and a colleague have invented a machine that can take a cloned embryo and grow it in a vat to any desired age while, at the same time, pumping the child full of encyclopedic knowledge. At various places on the island, the woman has a 6 year old daughter, an 11 year old and a 15 year old - well, not daughters really; sisters?

The oldest girl, thanks to our tutor hero, gains a fully, maybe over- developed moral sense and becomes the brilliant head of a massive feminist cult. Our hero comes in and out of her life as she does one outrageous thing after the other. Inevitably, there's a right-wing counter-conspiracy that, having stolen the cloning vat, engineers the wildest and most effective social protest ever. We also have a long story arch about the hijacking of an exact replica of the Titanic during which all the first class swells are sent to do the ship's scut work and the maids and butlers are moved to the first class quarters.

Hopefully, this is enough to convince most of you not to go looking for this book. For those few I haven't scared off, I really recommend this book. It's fast-paced, well-written, hilarious in places and definitely makes you think -- all the makings of a classic satire. If you can just get past the weirdness...