Bernard Beckett

Text

2015

Bernard Beckett tells us the story of teenage twin Rene, in his book Lullaby. It is a fictional, philosophical novel aimed at young adults. Theo, Rene’s brother, is on the brink of death after an accident leaves him with serious brain damage.

There is, however, a way to save his brother. Essentially, this is a brain transplant, not of the physical brain, but of a copy of Rene’s connectome: the map of all the connections between neurons in the brain. When Rene is explaining this he says, “The connectome is us, we are our connectome.”

Bernard Beckett

Text

2015

The novel Lullaby by Bernard Beckett is a unique philosophical story about a boy whose identical twin brother has been knocked into a coma, and he has the option to effectively copy his brain into his brother’s defunct brain, making him “live” again. This book is one of the more outlandishly philosophical books to be written by a New Zealand author, and it will make readers think a great deal.

Beckett writes the book in the first person, from the view of Rene, an identical twin. Most of the story is conveyed through a long conversation between Rene and a psychologist named Maggie, who has been ordered to evaluate Rene’s mental state and decide whether he is eligible to make the decision to have his brain copied.