#73 REVIEW OF THE LAST SAMURAI

By TOM WELLS

The Last Samurai—Helen Dewitt 

This is a novel I had to immediately re-read—Books I and II, anyway—in order to make sense of what at first comes off as a showy, self-indulgent, brain dump. Helen Dewitt, as the preface says, had written portions of fifty novels before she finally finished this 600-page mental heptakaihexathon, and it seemed as if she’d taken random snippets from all fifty and ladled them into this novel. It’s only when I re-read to the point where her savant son Ludo takes over the narrative at Book III that what goes before is not just intellectual exhibitionism. And is LOL funny instead of WTF exasperating. 

American ex-pat Sibylla is a single mom living in London. She has a one-night stand with a married travel writer whose output she mocks by giving him the nickname “Liberace”. Nine months later, out comes Ludo, whom she determines when he reaches the age of two to spoon-feed one mental exercise per day in imitation of Yo-Yo Ma’s father. Ludo turns out to be an insatiably curious savant who by age three is reading The Odyssey in ancient Greek and, ironically, begging for more input than Sibylla has the time or patience for.  

Sibylla herself possesses a deep well of knowledge, especially of languages, some as arcane as Aramaic and Sanskrit. She eschews a decent job in publishing or academia, partly because of work-permit restrictions, but mostly because of her disdain for the values that publishing and academia tolerate and even promote. She instead barely ekes out a living transcribing such periodicals as Practical Caravanning and Pig Fancier’s Monthly from print to digital format. To save money on home heating, she spends the days riding the Circle Line with Ludo, who sits in a stroller stacked with books ranging from Hop on Pop to White Fang to The Iliad, the last of which is a persistent source of judgment by fellow commuters about age appropriateness.  

When she is not attending to Ludo or digitalizing “Have I Got News for You” guest periodicals, Sibylla escapes to her happy place, repeated viewings of The Seven Samurai. Akira Kurosawa’s cinematic masterpiece also serves as Ludo’s occasional baby-sitter and, to Sibylla’s way of thinking, paternal role model. She reasons that the film provides Ludo with not just one father figure but fifteen of them--the seven characters, the seven actors playing them and Kurosawa himself. Because Ludo’s relationship with The Seven Samurai is at best sporadic, Sibylla gains only the odd break from his unceasing barrage of questions, the most persistent of which is “Who is my father?” Like a mythological being, Sibylla sets Ludo a task before she will reveal the secret. He must, she says, “see what’s wrong with these things,” these things being Lord Leighton’s painting “Greek Girls Playing at Ball”, a cassette tape by the pianist Liberace and an unidentified magazine piece. 

Sibylla’s challenge sets the stage for Ludo’s quest to find his father. He actually tracks down the travel writer Val Peters, Sibylla’s “Liberace”, early on in his search. Not satisfied with a father of such artistic and moral mediocrity, Ludo continues his search and winds up confronting five others--a child savant like himself who becomes an Amazon explorer; a Nobel Prize-winning astronomer and Robert Donat lookalike; an avant-garde artist who gifts Ludo a signed (and therefore valuable) work he paints with Ludo’s blood; a champion bridge player who is also an inveterate lothario; and a war correspondent intent on suicide as the only means of erasing the horrors he’s seen—all of whom have reason to believe they might have fathered Ludo.  

Just at the point that Ludo ceases his search, he happens upon a seventh figure, the pianist Kenzo Yamamoto who, at a show Ludo in his early childhood saw with Sibylla, played “variations on variations on variations” for twelve hours before playing Brahms’s Ballade Op. No. 10 for seven-and-a-half hours, a reminder of Sibylla’s mother, who once played Chopin’s Prelude No. 24 in D minor forty-one times in a row as a protest of her father’s authority. Yamamoto has become a virtual recluse, making no recorded music because what he values he believes will never sell, reminiscent of Sibylla’s translation as an Oxford student of Aristarchs Athetesen in der Homerkritik, a work read by all of 49 people. Ludo persuades Yamamoto to cut a CD of the Brahms Ballade as a gift to the kind of person who rides the Circle Line every day, who believes everyone should want to see a Tamil syllabary, who thinks boredom a fate worse than death, who always wants things to be different. In exchange, Ludo offers to fund production of ten CDs with the sale of his art piece and teach Yamamoto to play “Straight No Chaser.” 

And the final word of The Last Samurai? “Done.”  

*****