Ontological Page-Turner!

[Gregory Comestor]

Right at the start of the novel, Whitaker quotes John Searle’s remark that “most people in the Western world today accept some form of dualism”. Building on Descartes’ horrendous mistake, the idea that our souls are our selves inhabiting a material body has sadly become ubiquitous. That there is a far more intimate connection between the soul and the body (so that the soul was considered the “form” of the body) was much better understood in former times.

“Freak of Nature” wanders through some of this territory, with two people sharing the body of conjoined twins (or are they?) and it does so in a wonderfully entertaining manner. Just when you think that you’ve got your head around the problem of who the persons in a set of conjoined twins are and how they share their body, Whitaker kicks the ladder from underneath you with a sneaky twist! I guess we’d better not give it away here, but it’s a nice development along the road of the “self is a social construction”!

A novel covering this sort of stuff could end up very pretentious; but “Freak of Nature” is far from pretentious. The characters are engaging – and very real. I’m sure I’ve met some of them!

Gregorius.