"The selfish gene aspires to immortality," says one of this intriguing novel's characters. This becomes the premise behind the clandestine US-Russian venture in "human enhancement" that is at the book's heart. Theroux ingeniously combines Russian utopianism (Nikolai Fydorov, 1829-1903, philosopher and scientist, not only believed the dead could be revived but that it was science's duty to do so) and Samuel Johnson biography (the novel's central character is a Johnson academic) to produce a high-class literary thriller that is also a profound meditation on human identity. If our identity is based on our ability to communicate and that ability could be implanted in another, would the two identities become one? Allusions to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and other literary classics abound, but it would give a wrong impression to concentrate too much on its philosophical and literary dimensions, because it is primarily a rattling good, gripping story that bounds along as its eerily plausible plot unfolds, "capturing the unutterable sadness of a finite life on a beautiful planet".
