You can’t accuse John Gray of dodging the big questions, or indeed the big answers. His new book The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom isn’t really that short and certainly isn’t confined to a reflection on human freedom. As a reviewer you’re often faced with books that are so bereft of content, so painfully thin that they’re transparent, and you wonder why anyone would publish them. I can imagine Gray’s editor begging him to jettison some profundity.
The reader is bombarded with boulders of philosophy and politics. Religions are gobbled up. Whole civilisations whizz past. It’s the ontological kitchen sink coming atcha, or to paraphrase Joyce, Here Comes Everything. Not just the past, but the future too.
As you would expect from a former professor of European thought, Gray offers an urbane and learned account of man from the Garden of Eden to secret rendition. Gray, like Isaiah Berlin, that great tour-guide of ideas, is skilled at hijacking the writings of others, and cogently expounds the work of Heinrich von Kleist (whose essay ‘On the Puppet Theatre’ provides the theme of marionette freedom), Giacomo Leopardi, Bruno Schulz, Thomas Hobbes, Joseph Glanvill, Guy Debord, T.
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