The Last Samurai [Hardcover]

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 schoolbook 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.....