So. Having borrowed the new James Morrow book The Philosopher’s Apprentice from the local library, and having finished rereading the earlier James Morrow book from the previous time I was at the library, I was compelled to shove the book to the top of my list so that I could finish it before it needed to be back at the library. That due date was today; I finished the book this morning.
It was not necessarily the worst way to read the book. Given more time, I would have read the book more slowly, in smaller chunks with longer pauses between them. Your Humble Blogger is, as Gentle Readers are aware, a fiend for narrative, but Mr. Morrow’s plots come fast and high, and I would have chosen to take more time to chew and digest. On the other hand, racing through the book had the advantage that the lunacy washed over me, with no particular part of it sticking uncomfortably. I love Mr. Morrow’s books, but bits of them always make me cranky; reading on deadline may have limited the crankiness. On the other hand, I don’t know that anything has sunk in very deep. On the other other hand, I’m not sure what Mr. Morrow was on about with this one anyway.
To some extent, this book is about clones, although the genetic cloning is an extremely minor point. The major point is that many of those clones go through a sort of forced-aging process with informational imprinting, so they never experience childhood, nor do they learn the world through experience. The philosopher of the title is brought in to tutor one of those clones, a seventeen-year-old woman who has lived less than a year; she has no moral or ethical sense, nor the framework for creating one. The three or four clones who are real characters in the book are kept by the mad scientist in seclusion and comfort; their eventual interactions with the real world are shaped by the tutoring, but also by the absence of context.
There are two other sets of clones in the book. The first are called fetuses; they are created from the discarded (but through intervention not destroyed) tissue from abortion clinics. Anti-abortion activists create these people, force-grow them to young adulthood, force-educate them to scorn and deride their genetic parents for not carrying them to term, and then set them loose to cause havoc and then die. These are somewhat malformed clones, due to both not fully understanding the technology and not caring particularly about the clones as people. This is a vicious caricature of the anti-abortion movement, and I like it a lot.
The last set of clones are made from graverobbing historical figures, real and imaginary, and are deliberately created as straw men of sorts, with very limited will or sensation, and forced to recant their worst excesses. Those clones are also created by people who don’t care particularly about them as people, and they are killed by the fetus clones in a gruesome and fiery battle. Yay James Morrow!
Anyway, in all of those cases, the cloning is somewhat important: the mad-scientist clones look like each other and their progenitor, and have their progenitor’s aptitudes; the fetuses look like their genetic parents; and the historical figures look and sound like their famous predecessors, and have some of the same characteristics. What is far more important, though, is the lack of childhood and of experience, which allows the forced-education to be a brainwashing almost (but not quite) irresistible. The book ends with the first words of Our Hero’s baby daughter (well, toddler, technically); all the structural signs are that the book is staking the claim that childhood experience is vital to ethical growth, but then very few of the non-clones in the book can lay claim to any sort of ethical growth either. Or even humanity, really.
One more observation: Mr. Morrow makes abundant reference to hypothetical ethical questions of the stealing-medicine or the which-do-you-save type. Much of the narrative is set up to force Our Hero (and Our Heroine) into fiction-life analogues of those hypotheticals. My favorite of these appears several times and is from Plato. Say that Herman borrows an axe from Fred, promising to return it the next day. When Herman goes to Fred’s house with the axe the next day, Fred is enraged by something, on the verge of violence. Should Herman fulfill his promise? Clearly not. But should Herman go crazy and attack Fred with his own axe? I mean, is seems like the friendly thing to do.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.