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This is a difficult, playful novel. Sibylla is the
mother of Ludo, a precociously intelligent child. An American expat who
fibbed her way into Oxford, Sibylla now lives in London and single
motherhood. She has to earn a living, so she works at home typing endless
pages of Carpworld. However, having a ferociously intelligent young son
in the same room as she works is more than a little distracting. One of
the delights of The Last Samurai is the techniques DeWitt uses to place you in
the same room as Ludo and Sibylla. Ludo is not introduced as such into
the text, he barges his way through like the headstrong and loud toddler that
he is. The free style of the text is only natural following the typing of
so many copies of Carpworld.
Sibylla is a quite unconventional mother.
Despite her love for London, England (the only place in the
world that you can buy Alaska Fried Chicken), Sibylla is still very much an
alien. She makes an elementary error when she takes Ludo to the local
school at the age of six, and discovers that schooling begins at five in
Britain. Although she has had friends in the past, to whom she alludes via
pseudonyms, her life with Ludo is all time-consuming and isolated. Ludo
is the result of a drunken fumble, and Sibylla cannot bring herself to get back
in contact with Ludo's father, who's more a frog intellectually than a
prince. Thus Ludo is beset by the mystery of his father's identity.
To make up for the lack of male role figures in Ludo's life, Sibylla takes to
watching Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai with her son repeatedly.
Although Ludo gets to learn a lot of Japanese from it, he stills feels a hole in
his life and so embarks on a search for his father. Like Oedipus, Ludo
has to work out his father's identity by striving to interpret his mother's
riddles. But Ludo is only too aware that there is a gulf at the centre of
Sibylla's life, for she has tried to kill herself before...
No doubt many readers will be put off by the
amount of intellectual activity within this novel. Sibylla is shocked
when she reads a school book on Samurai and finds that it's full of
errors. Yet Helen DeWitt does make one singular mistake that hasn't been
picked up by her editors. On page 29, she refers to the American child
prodigy Boris Sidis. However, the child prodigy's father was the famous
psychologist "Boris Sidis", and the child prodigy's name was
"William James Sidis". This mistake is unfortunate since one of
the big themes of the book is child prodigies and hothousing. DeWitt
offers the Sidis tale as an example of the horror story for all parents who
embark on hothousing: the child prodigy who burns out at an early age.
Yet this is the popular view of Sidis as presented by the US press, and does
not comprise the whole story. Dan Mahony has done a great deal of
research on William James Sidis and discovered that he did a whole load of very
important work at the same time that the public viewed him as burnt out.
The reason why this work remains largely unknown was because Sidis went to
great lengths to hide himself from the unwanted attention of the Press, and
published anonymously. One of the downsides of hothousing and
self-education is that you can be quite ignorant of some basic things, as Ludo
later discovers in the book. Going round in rhomboids on the Circle Line
has done nothing for Ludo's knowledge of geography.
There is something balladic about The Last
Samurai's structure. What goes around does come around. It is very
pleasing to see strands from the earlier part of the novel coming to fruition
towards the end. However, one might suspect that Helen DeWitt has cobbled
lots of good stories together (her bio on the dustjacket does say that she's
worked on loads of novels before this one). It helps her plot that
Sibylla went to Oxford, a pivot around which a few of the men in the novel
dance. Although she had to fake her way into Oxford, Sibylla does fit in
there, as she is rich in cultural capital - perhaps richer than she ought to
be, given her motel background. The flitting around from place to place
in her childhood would seem to reflect DeWitt's background as the daughter of
an American diplomat who had assignments in various Latin American
countries. I don't think it's a coincidence that Ludo prefers The
Odyssey to The Iliad, with its epic quest for home.
Helen DeWitt certainly lives up to her name.
The humour is brilliant and quite vital. I loved Ludo's scenes in
school. For the most part, I admired the narration of Ludo very
much. The novel does really come alive when we see the world from
his point of view for the first time. As there is wit, so there is
darkness and poignancy, which seemed to be combined during the scenes where
Ludo's father keeps interrupting the boy's consciousness (much as Ludo the
toddler kept barging in on Sibylla's typing of Carpworld). I've
written a play with themes similar to the Red Devlin sequence, but Helen
DeWitt's writing here is sublime. The book could definitely have done with
more editing, but overall, there are sections of this novel that are quite
perfect.
authortrek rating: 7/10.
Kevin Patrick Mahoney
|
Visit
our Helen DeWitt
page for The Last Samurai Reading Guide, Helen DeWitt biography, and a
Helen DeWitt interview |
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