Sophie's World (Jorsten Gardner)****

If you’re interested in philosophy, this book is great. Even if you’re not interested in philosophy, you could end up loving it. I used to think philosophy was a bit of a stupid and pointless subject (although this isn’t something I’ve said in front of my six-foot tall philosophy graduate sister) but I ended up really enjoying the philosophic aspect of the book.

However, if you’re just after a good story, you probably shouldn’t waste your time. The basic story is quite weak. It’s all about how Sophie gets messages from a mysterious philosopher called Alberto, and a lot of the book is just her reading about philosophy. Later on, the book turns into conversations about philosophy, but it’s still a bit disappointing as a story. Not a lot happens. The most dramatic thing that happens is probably the fact that Sophie is stupid enough to creep out in the middle of the night to meet a middle-aged man she’s never seen before.

The characters, it has to be said, aren’t that strong. Only the philosophers come over well, and apart from Alberto, they’re not original personalities. Alberto is an intriguing character, and someone I wouldn’t mind meeting (although he’d better not start inviting me out to churches in the middle of the night) but he seems rather emotionless. He is fascinated by the world, but apparently emotionally unaffected by it, and it’s quite difficult to identify with characters like that.

Sophie is okay until she comes under Alberto’s influence. She starts the book as a slightly odd but harmless and very nice teenage girl. But then she develops an inflated sense of her own superiority that is very unattractive. It’s probably not her fault. She’s at an impressionable age, and Alberto’s philosophical writings do say it is better to be curious about the world than to accept it, so it’s understandable really that Sophie has come to the conclusion that being curious makes her a better person than those who aren’t curious.

But one of the main aims of philosophy is to see the wonder in the world, and I think, rather than looking down at her fellow human beings, she should look for the wonder in them instead. It’s true that most people don’t appreciate philosophy, but that doesn’t mean they have no good qualities at all, and that you can’t admire them and be inspired by them. Sophie’s friend Joanna has little character, but she does seem to be genuinely kind and forgiving, and I find that more wonderful than intellectual curiosity.

But the natural world is pretty amazing too. Alberto got that part right.

Sophie’s World is a very challenging book. The story doesn’t make much sense unless you’ve taken in the philosophy lectures, and that can be quite time-consuming. It took me weeks to read this book, and that’s something that only usually happens if I a) hate the book so much, I can hardly bear to pick it up (like Jane Green’s Second Chances) or b) love the book so much, I want to savour every chapter (like Gareth Southgate and Andy Woodman’s Woody and Nord: A Football Friendship). Sophie’s World was c) a bit like reading a text book, so I needed to take in only a couple of ideas at a time.

In many ways, it is a text book. The philosophical writing is of a significantly higher standard than the story. You can’t really move on to the next section until you’ve understood the one before – well, you can, but the story isn’t very engaging when you’re just reading it blindly thinking, what the fuck is that Alberto going on about now? I like to try to guess what’s going to happen in books, and to work things out, and if that means I have to study philosophy, I will study it.

But I have to ask – how useful is the book for philosophy students, really? Jorsten Gardner wrote the book to help philosophy students, but my sister couldn’t read it. She’s not really a fiction person. So, to read Sophie’s Choice, an interest in philosophy is essential but it’s not enough. You probably also need to enjoy reading fiction and have the determination to get through a difficult book. Yet you also have to put up with some pretty crap writing, which a lot of people who love reading aren’t prepared to do.

Some of the problem could be in the translation – the fact that Sophie’s hair changes from fair to dark within the first few pages (no mention of hair-dye) shows something has gone wrong. It’s possible that the clunky and clumsily constructed fiction sections are a result of poor translation.

But there seems to have been only one translator, and the philosophy sections are beautifully written and constructed (which really was a great help when it came to making sense of everything). So what I think is (although the translator is undeniably a bit careless), Gardner is a really great non-fiction writer who knows philosophy very well, and is very good at explaining it to others – but he’s not a natural fiction writer and can’t cope with the complications of conversational syntax.

So, Sophie’s World probably would have been a more accessible book if he’d worked with a fiction writer who was more experienced in the delineation of plot and character. But it’s pretty successful as it is. Gardner does a more than reasonable job with a very difficult and challenging subject. What Gardner has achieved is more remarkable than his shortcomings, if you think about it.