James Morrow's previous novel, The Last Witchfinder, was a massively ambitious, and widely praised, picaresque dramatisation of the struggle between science and superstition in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. The main character, Jennet Stearne, sees her scientifically minded Aunt Isobel burned at the stake as a witch by her father, a superstitious witchfinder. Jennet, appalled, devotes her life to debunking her father's profession through science.
Morrow's new novel, The Philosopher's Apprentice, is set in the near future, but it is no less full of odd intellectuals and picaresque incident. In prose dense with allusion and erudite humour, he tackles the issues of science and superstition once more, this time with a strong ethical twist.
The novel's narrator is ethical philosopher Mason Ambrose, whose Darwinist PhD dissertation is titled "Ethics from the Earth". A well-known anti-Darwinist philosopher whose work Ambrose has mocked on his website is chosen as one of the examining committee, and Mason self-destructs in spectacular fashion during the very public defence of his dissertation. While he is attempting to drown his sorrows, a stranger makes him an offer too good to refuse: $100,000 a year, plus all expenses, for the apparently too-easy task of tutoring a teenage girl in ethics, on an idyllic tropical island.
Soon, Ambrose finds himself in the gothic mansion Faustino on a modern version of the Island of Doctor Moreau, complete with Quetzie, a winged and feathered iguana that talks, and Proserpine, a mangrove that breathes and shudders (both bio-engineered by the resident DNA wizard, the creepy Dr Vincent Charnock).
Ambrose's employer on Isla de Sangre is a rich and eccentric scientist, Edwina Sabacthani, whose beautiful teenage daughter, Londa, has supposedly lost her memory in an accident, and "lacks a moral centre", though she has a stunning intellect. Despite the strange discovery that Londa has a virtually identical younger sister (also a brilliant amnesiac with ethical defi cits) who is being educated secretly elsewhere on the island, Mason leads his violence-prone student through the study of ethics from the Ancient Greek Stoics through to Jeremy Bentham.
When Mason moves on to Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, Londa decides that "somebody has to arrange for the merciful and the meek and the peacemakers to take over." Mason tries to dissuade her, but years later, she kidnaps a rebuilt Titanic-load of wealthy people to try to do just that. Meanwhile, what the Right-to-Life fundamentalists do with Dr Charnock's sinister scientific equipment is almost too horrible to contemplate.
