Mind-Catching

I hadn't intended for my blog to become a series of "book reports", but because I've been doing more reading than writing, it seems to have come to this (at least for now.) It wasn't until I finished Mind-Catcher by John Darnton, and then went to his blog, that I realized I had read the first of his books, The Darwin Conspiracy which was, at the time, another one of my favorites (overlooking the fact that it was truly a work of fiction, hardly biographical, except that he spelled Darwin's name correctly.) I humbly forgive Darnton his license to fictionalize Darwin (and to use the word opprobrium twice in Mind-Catcher.) So, here is a review of the most recent of my "personal favs," Mind-Catcher (2003) by John Darnton.

The personal appeal of Mind-Catcher was that it is a wonderful meld of my passion for the study of the brain from an anatomical, mechanistic point of view and my interest in whatever may exist beyond the physical, what some may refer to as the supernatural. Others simply state the meld as the "mind-body" problem. (This was also referred to in the non-fiction memoir My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor.) I don't remember who said it first, but I like the explanation that the mind is what the brain does. In other words, while the miracle of who we are results from the neural connections and electro-chemical processes, we are nevertheless the miracle.

The characters of the story are both miraculously good and miraculously evil. In other words, they are human. The father of the comatose son who has been the model single parent now wallows in an alcoholic cesspool and belabors his own self-centeredness in violence as well as verbiage. The villain in the story has his compassionate moments and I reluctantly sympathized with the villain's abused childhood which left scars on his adult intellectual genius.

For me personally, I felt most strongly attracted to both the egomaniac male neurosurgeon that unwittingly set the stage for the genius villain and the compassionate, spiritual, self-aware female neurosurgeon who was willing to set aside professional conduct for doing what was right for the father and son. The neurosurgeons are two sides of the same coin and if do-overs were possible, I would do whatever I had to to become a neurosurgeon. (Maybe in the next life.) Do-overs occur in the Mind-Catcher for all but the villain whose punishment perfectly fits the crime. Do-overs and justice sound like cliche denouements but this book is a thriller from start to finish. Yes, I know the last half of that statement also sounded very cliche, but most book reports are.