Reviewed by Anastassiya Andrianova
6.22.07

The Allegory of the Cave has had a long history in literature and film—from Gulliver’s Travels to The Truman Show. The idea is that reality consists of a series of moving images projected on to the wall of a cave, and that only someone who escapes from the darkness into the light of day can then come back to enlighten the others. While we may all want a romantic reading of Plato’s allegory, in which the enlightened one releases humanity from the shackles of ignorance, let’s face it: philosophy makes our lives generally more difficult, our decisions contingent upon our dubious freedom of will, and our bodies distinct from our minds. And when has philosophy made anyone popular? Socrates might have caught a glimpse of the sun, but when he tried to create a buzz about it, he was met with an unreceptive audience and a bottle of poisonous hemlock. Gulliver, of course, went crazy and started talking to horses.

Ben Warner, the hero of Lucy Eyre’s If Minds Had Toes, is an ordinary fifteen-year-old who loves soccer, hates his annoying sisters, and holds a summer job at a local fish-and-chips shop. However, Ben’s life takes an extraordinary turn when he enters the World of Ideas via a linen closet—his version of Alice’s rabbit-hole. The long-dead but surprisingly vital Socrates presides over the World, a place where philosophers refuse to let death “get in the way of a good debate.” After his first visit to this strange place, Ben thinks twice about his own sanity. Fortunately, he discovers an acorn in his pocket which, like Gulliver’s miniature sheep, convinces him that he has indeed come from the tall hedge maze, called The Skeptical Tank, where he had been persuaded, in turn, that he should and should not trust his senses. What Ben doesn’t realize is that he is the subject of a bet made by Socrates and his archrival, the logician Ludwig Wittgenstein, with Socrates’ betting his presidency on the chance that he can make any “normal person” not just think about the big questions in life but actually love philosophy. With each successive visit to this Dantean Limbo, where one can have a drink with René Descartes or hear John Stuart Mill’s spiel on happiness, Ben becomes less and less popular among his buddies but more and more inquisitive about what it means to have a mind. And, as we follow him on this philosophical journey from epistemology to ethics, we too are kept on our toes, “[m]entally speaking”—hence the title Eyre’s first novel, an original, witty page-turner which beats any crash course in practical philosophy.

Like all philosophy, Eyre’s book begins with a single question: “Do you think this chip tastes the same to me as it would to you?” Lila, a twenty-four-year-old woman who ended up in the World of Ideas after her philosophizing had made her lose control of the steering wheel, appears before Ben at the fish-and-chips shop and launches his almost 300-page-long journey, which would introduce Ben to the difference between life and death—inside a butterfly house, to the theory of relativity—at a skating rink, and to the concept of person—at the beach, where the boy’s intellectual curiosity would be piqued by Lila’s person or, rather, her “tiny purple bikini.” Lila’s question, so different from anything Ben has ever encountered, and her good looks get him hooked on philosophy so much that he insists on questioning if his father’s headache is in his mind instead of helping the poor man find some aspirin. But while his newly acquired wisdom baffles his parents and makes Ben the butt of his classmates’ jokes, it becomes necessary when Ben is faced with an ethical dilemma: either to break a promise and lose a friend, or to keep his promise and condone a theft. All of a sudden, whether or not morality is a human invention becomes a question of vital importance. The relevance of philosophy to our everyday life is put to the test.

In the end, Ben wanders into the monitoring room of the World of Ideas, realizes that the un-dead philosophers have been carefully following his life, as though on reality TV, and is finally told about the original bet. When pressed to answer if philosophy has made his life better, he readily responds that “the unexamined life is not worth living,” thereby announcing Wittgenstein’s defeat. As a novel about a boy’s coming of age, If Minds Had Toesis quirky and sweet, and has just enough “arse” jokes and jabs at the silliness of teenage girls to appeal to a younger audience. As a philosophical novel, it has its shortcomings, including an apocryphal reference to Plato burning all of Socrates’ writings, and a somewhat negative portrayal of Wittgenstein as the misanthropic welder who seeks advice from Machiavelli himself before he resorts to cheating. But Eyre’s book is engaging, and not limited to philosophy majors who wish to brush up on the mind-body problem. It’s accessible and will be enjoyed by anyone with an open mind—with or without toes.