Introductory Note
- Julie, Bertie and I met the author, John, his wife and their labrador, Victor, in Holt Country Park in North Norfolk in mid-September 2024.
- We had a jolly chat about dogs, as dog-walkers do, but on parting John handed us a flyer for this book, saying he didn’t use social media, so this was his means of advertising.
- I imagined this would be of little interest, but it relates to my thesis on Personal Identity and works through one of the most famous thought experiments1.
- The author doesn’t make any references to philosophers (there may be one reference to Aristotle). However, the tale could be closely modelled on Locke2’s ‘Prince and the Cobbler’ Thought Experiment3 and would relate to "Williams (Bernard) - The Self and the Future".
- It also relates to the psychological aspects of Teletransportation4 (assuming this is not identity-preserving), where the teletransportee thinks of himself as being the person who stepped into the device, but is mistaken.
- I repeat some blurbs from Amazon before adding a review of my own. I intend to pass it by the author before posting it to a public forum.
Amazon Book Description
- “This afternoon I shall go to my own funeral service before I watch them bury me under six feet of London clay.”
- When kindly provincial solicitor, Andrew Soulsby, fails to listen to his instincts he is condemned to live an evil man’s life in a tailspin to destruction. Plagued by dark memories that do not belong to him and arrested for crimes of which he has no knowledge, he faces professional ruin, bankruptcy and a prison cell.
- Can Andrew discover what has happened to him, and will he find a way to survive if he regains the love of his wife and children, or is the truth altogether more terrifying?
- Fantasy meets grim reality in this gripping medico-legal mystery thriller with an original twist, making you question what it means to have a soul, a sense of self.
- "A great tale... a very moral and philosophical story."
→ The Law Society's Gazette
- “Amazing! The author takes a fascinating premise and makes it incredibly believable. I loved this clever blend of mystery and sci fi. I could imagine the fear and terror the character must have felt - that desperation was palpable.”
→ Louise Gray, NetGalley Reviewer - Five Stars
- "Wow! What a page-turner! I could not put this book down. I had to know what happened."
→ Louise Emerson, NetGalley Reviewer - Five Stars
- John Lawrance studied Law at Queen Mary, London, before qualifying as a solicitor. He lives in Enfield with his wife and their Labrador called Victor. In his youth, he was on the ground-staff at Lord’s as an M.C.C. Young Professional. A Spurs fan and season ticket holder, he enjoys watching matches with his son and daughter. Hosting Andrew is his first novel.
- Amazon Autobiography
- My first novel, Hosting Andrew, is a medico-legal mystery thriller with an original twist. The idea came to me as I woke from a minor operation a few years ago, chilled at the sudden shutdown of life, then what seemed an instant turning on again, bringing the relief and joy of being alive.
- It's been hard work but fun to write. If you read it, I hope you will be entertained – in my view the primary purpose of any work of fiction – but it may also give you pause for thought, questioning what it means to have a soul, a sense of self.
- My childhood ambition was to become a professional cricketer. I captained Middlesex schoolboys, played for London schoolboys and was briefly an MCC Young Professional at Lord’s. Although I wasn’t good enough to make the grade, I enjoyed many future years playing club cricket.
- After reading Law at Queen Mary, London, I went on to become a solicitor and opened my own practice in 1980. On the basis that it is never too late to open another chapter in life, at seventy-two, I now hope to pursue a new career as a novelist, while spending more time with my three granddaughters, and walking in the country parks of North Enfield with Sally, my wife of forty-four years, and our Labrador, ‘Victor’.
- And then there is my other passion: a masochistic attachment to Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, where my son and daughter enjoy watching with me as the Spurs flatter to deceive!
My Own Thoughts
- My interest in the book was mainly on account of the potential for philosophical reflection. However, I do like to write notes5 on what I’ve read, so I’ll do so here. Then I’ll make a more general stab at what the ‘thought experiment’ within the book has to say on the topic of personal identity.
- I’m no literary critic, and make no claims to be able to write creative fiction, not intentionally, anyway. The author deserves praise for stepping out from his solicitor’s office into the world of literature. I don’t read any pulp fiction and it would be unfair to compare this book with great literature. I imagine it fits somewhere in between.
- I’m more interested in plot than in style, and – as the selected reviewers have claimed – it is indeed a ‘page turner’. So as not to spoil the plot for people who’ve not read the book, my comments that follow won’t make much sense unless you’ve read the book. I would encourage you to do so. This isn’t a balanced review. I’m a philosopher (of sorts) and a philosopher’s job is to pick over arguments and find weaknesses repairing them as necessary and suggesting improvements. The same style will prevail here. The book has been written and improvements are not really in order, so I’ll skip the recommendations, which may make my comments even more negative than would be usual in a literary review. So, on we go …
- The Plot
- There are multiple levels of implausibility in the plot. I’ll discuss the ‘memory transfer’ later. To a degree, the implausibility of this can be allowed in order to get the plot going. The same goes for the involvement of the British Secret Service in all this. I don’t like inculcating the thought that they might be involved in murders when national security isn’t really at stake. When it is, such murders may be collateral damage or classed as assassinations. Not so here. This could be circumvented by locating the story in a country where such activity is commonplace.
- As Shapiro points out, it was always obvious that Shivani’s fixation on Matthew couldn’t be genuine. But the idea of a brilliant mind with a stellar career as a barrister ahead of her would be a ‘sleeper’ ready to help out the Secret Services in this way is absurd. You could imagine it if she was an ideologically-motivated agent of a foreign power, but what could possibly motivate her in this case? Not money – top barristers earn a few bob, last I heard. Not pleasure – who would enjoy consorting with a middle-aged lothario of dubious morals? The thrill of being a spy?
- Also, while Matthew is portrayed as a ‘bad man’, it’s not clear why he acts as he does. Why not just earn an honest living? He’s not just living beyond his means, because he’s salting his millions away. Presumably he’s intending to do a flit as part of his overall campaign, not just to bolt when found out. But how would this make his life better for him than enjoying his career and success in this country. He’s supposed to be clever, but seems to have no inner life at all. He’s just interested in the high life and sex. Is that what clever people think it’s all about? I suppose ‘the mob’ have always found lawyers to help them out, but presumably they didn’t go to Oxford. Doesn’t Oxford teach anything about the connection between the law and ethics?
- I suppose we have to pass over how this story is supposed to be written after Matthew’s death – including the first-person account of his own death. I suppose it’s the inevitable outcome of the book being wholly from the first person perspective. It reminded me of disputes about whether Moses really did write Deuteronomy right to the end (including the account of his own death).
- Andrew is presumably the Dr. Jeckyll to Matthew’s Mr. Hyde, but I didn’t like him much either. He’s portrayed as a good, if rather dull, man. Hopefully he’s not the author in disguise, though career and cricket suggest that he is. The problem is again with inner life. We get no idea what he believes and why he believes it, if there is any ‘it’. He seems to be interested in work, sex and cricket. He claims to be a ‘family man’ – always guaranteed a round of applause – but there’s no detail. He takes his son to the cricket but there’s not much else about his family. His descriptions of his wife involve her mind – she’s a clever lawyer – and her sexy body, but again there’s nothing about her inner life either.
- It’s almost as though some adviser has suggested that you sell more copy the more sex there is in a book, just as sales go down the more equations there are (to quote Stepehen Hawking). But why has the author written this book, and why does he want to be an author. What has he really got to say?
- I suppose what I most disliked about the book was its relentlessly first-person perspective. Almost everything is from Andrew/Matthew’s point of view. The only time the other characters come to life is when they interact with him. We never get to know what motivates them and how they see the world independently.
- Having made all the above critical remarks, I did think the transition from Andrew back to Matthew was well done. Andrew always seemed a bit of a cardboard cut-out, but when Matthew’s own character started to resurface in Matthew’s body we did at least get a character with clear – if entirely selfish – motivations, someone to relate to.
- Philosophical Aspects
- Now to the philosophical and psychological aspects of the book. As noted above, this is a variant of a philosophical puzzle that started the modern discussion of personal identity. I’ve written very extensively on this topic, but will leave all the references to the literature to one side for now.
- John Locke started the psychological view of personal identity – that we are fundamentally psychological beings and they ‘we go where our consciousness goes’. He took it as obvious that we would judge a cobbler ‘informed by a prince’s consciousness’ would be the prince and not the cobbler. However, Bernard Williams wrote a paper that pointed out that this judgement depends on how a story is told. He asks you to consider – if your present body is to be mercilessly tortured in the morning – whether you would be at ease if you were told that you would go mad beforehand with someone else’s memories stuffed in your head.
- It seems that Andrew’s brain has been destroyed by the process of extracting the memories from it – and I can well believe it6. However, just how did these memories get into Matthew’s head without causing similar damage? A miracle of modern science, no doubt, which adds another layer of improbability to the plot, beyond the improbability of Brain State Transfers7 themselves.
- The problem with BSTs, from an identity-preservation point of view, is that they are – unlike BTs – software rather than hardware. Presumably Andrew’s memories are recorded on some device before being squirted into Matthew’s brain. But, of course, this squirting need not only be done once: Matthew’s memories can be squirted into any number of brains all of whose owners would have an equal claim to be Andrew, but they can’t all be – at most one could be. So, none are. So, Matthew is not Andrew8 even though he thinks he is.
- This means that not only does Matthew have difficulty persuading his interlocuters that he is Andrew, he is mistaken, and said interlocutors need to probe more carefully into what has happened rather than taking the claims – and the evidence for them – at face value. After all, given that we’re dealing with the miracles of modern science, it might be the case that Matthew has had a silicon implant with Andrew’s memories encoded in it that enables him to answer tough autobiographical questions. Would he then be Andrew, any more than Neo in The Matrix changes identity when he has a new ‘Ninja skills module’ uploaded to his virtual brain.
- There are numerous references to Matthew retaining the impulses and some of the skills of his former self. Also, p. 76 says that he – Andrew as we are then to suppose is inhabiting Matthew’s body – has his alter ego’s brain (as he must, given he doesn’t end up looking like Frankenstein’s monster).
- I’m really interested to know what medical procedure could have resulted in the ‘identity transfer’. Of course, there may be no answer. This, like most philosophical thought experiments, is far from being fully described (which is why they don’t often have the force claimed for them).
- After this memory transfer, would Matthew-body really consider himself to be Andrew inhabiting a strange body? Or would he consider himself to be Matthew but with someone else’s memories and his own misplaced. In the book, Matthew claims to have amnesia. But is this in fact correct?
- As the story plays out, it certainly seems so. Whatever is supposed to have happened to his brain is just temporary. Matthew’s memories have been temporarily misplaced, with Andrew’s in the foreground.
- The book seems to presuppose physicalism: it’s memories rather than an immaterial soul that has been transferred. Yet Matthew retains his urges and some of his abilities. Presumably this is on account of his submerged memories that have not been obliterated but are still there in the background. But what is it about the brain that gives us our sense of self? There’s lots of discussion on this, in particular with relation to the possibility (I would say likelihood) that other animals have a sense of self in some – maybe reduced – sense. There are two sorts of memory – factual or event memory and ability memory (parallel to the two sorts of knowledge – ‘knowing that’, and ‘knowing how’).
- To be completed …
In-Page Footnotes ("Lawrance (John) - Hosting Andrew")
Footnote 5: Footnote 6:
- This is a practical objection to the ‘bungled branch-line’ case of Teletransportation, where the original is supposedly not destroyed.
Footnote 7:
- Now that I’ve finished reading the book, I know that it relates to the sub-topic of Brain State Transfers rather than the other favourite: Brain Transplants.
- I had hoped that the book would explore the psychology behind the ‘brain transplant intuition’ – that we go with our brains – which is denied by at least some Animalists, Click here for Note. However, it cannot.
Footnote 8:
- I’ve ignored the cumbersome ‘Andrew-body-person’ so beloved in the literature.
- Leibniz’s Law, Modal Logic and Identity being an equivalence relation need to be martialled to make this argument rigorous.
- The argument can be resisted by invoking Perdurantism – the claim that we are not Substances but growing (or maybe eternal, depending on your philosophy of time) space-time worms that can overlap at a time.
Book Comment
The Book Guild Ltd (13 July 2022); new paperback.
Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)- Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2025
- Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)