This is a highly unusual novel. To have a greater appreciation of the text, a cursory understanding of Western philosophy would be of benefit. Morrow combines remarkable descriptive imagery with the history of ideas from Plato, Darwin, Spinoza to Wittgenstein with a satirists wit. The prose are original and a pleasure to read. The story itself is a comment on the dark side of our society’s values and the existential plight of the human condition.
Our protagonist and narrator is philosophy grad student Mason Ambrose. He has recently completed his dissertation entitled, Ethics from the Earth, containing arguments in Darwinist theory in the realm of Ethics. He writes:
The fact that humankind now finds itself in a post-Darwinian epistemological condition...need not trouble us from an ethical perspective. Indeed,, by problematizing our tendency to view ourselves as creatures apart – God's Chosen Species, discontinuous with the rest of nature – the evolutionary paradigm obliges us to address the assorted evils, from overpopulation to climate destruction, that we have visited upon us, our only planet. Through a Darwinian deontology, we might at last come to know the true character of our sins...
Ambrose presents his thesis to the university panel consisting of various heads of the philosophy department. His thesis is unfairly attacked on various points, resulting in the grad student ‘blowing his cool’ and resigning as a PhD candidate. After he has thrown his academic career down the proverbial shoot, Ambrose is approached by a man who offers him a job as a tutor, instructing a highly intelligent, adolescent child whose behavior is strange. He accepts the job and flies to a mysterious island in the southern Atlantic.
Ambrose meets his pupil Londa Sabacthani who has lost her memory and must learn the basics of ethical behavior. As it turns out, the beautiful young lady is not what she seems, that is, in reality, she’s a test tube child, constructed from her mother’s DNA, born fully formed as a young adult woman. Londa has no memory because she has no past. And it is Mason Ambrose’s task to fill in the behavioral blanks with the tenets of classical philosophy.
Once Londa’s mother passes, she leaves the island and enters society and begins a number of projects to better humankind. In effect, the woman believes she is a modern day Prometheus. Although at first her intentions look to be pure, she receives violent backlash from many individuals and groups who she refers to as ‘Philistines.’
One can rightly suggest that this novel is a modern take on Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein: though the ethical issues the novel explores move far beyond Shelly’s masterpiece. The way Morrow addresses these pertinent issues in the form of the modern novel is intellectually creative and exacted with expertise and literary flair.
The Philosopher’s Apprentice is one of a kind: informative and highly entertaining.
