Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2013 August 07 • Wednesday

The Fourth "R" by George O. Smith is another book which can be connected to J. D. Beresford's The Hampdenshire Wonder, but only because it also concerns an intellectually advanced child.

"James Quincy Holden was five years old" is the first sentence. He isn't typical of his age group. His parents, one a brain surgeon and the other an inventor of electromechanical instruments, together created a machine that would speed up the process of rote learning. Their child is the first test of the process and the device. At the age of five he is, in learning and manners, at the level of a young adult ready to enter university after graduating from high school at the top of his class.

This is the same idea as the Speed Learn machine used in the Prisoner episode "The General". Also the same is the potential for such a device to do harm as well as good, to increase and consolidate power for those who would govern or dictate. It's something that certain people would be desperate to obtain for themselves.

And so the Holden family's closest friend, young James's legal guardian and godfather, attempts to murder all three of them. The parents are killed; the child escapes.

At this point the book might have you thinking ahead to Firestarter and The Fury, or perhaps thinking back to Slan, other stories of gifted children on the run. There is no supernatural or superhuman element in The Fourth "R", however. Holden's story is more prosaic and also more of a vehicle for its author to consider ideas and lines of thought about law, society and education. There's more talk than action but it's interesting talk that comes from varied and well developed characters.

Just as the Hampdenshire Wonder's name of Victor might have been a pointer to a Dr. Frankenstein of the same first name, so is Holden connected to Mary Shelley's famous scientist. At one point our hero desires a companion just like himself and thus begins to use his parents' educating machine on a girl his age. Two pages later the film The Bride of Frankenstein has a cameo appearance.

Despite the title and the back cover, reason proves not to be a missing ingredient for James Quincy Holden. He reasons superbly. What he lacks is experience, something that cannot be taught or learned, only acquired.