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A Review of the book Cast of Shadows by Kevin Guilfoile
by Christina Bieber Lake, Ph.D.
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Christina Bieber Lake, M.A., Ph.D., is an Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College. |
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When a writer known as a humorist quotes Mary Shelley in an epigraph to a serious novel, it is difficult to know how to interpret it. “The opinions which naturally spring from the character and the situation of the hero are by no means conceived as existing always in my own conviction; nor is any inference justly to be drawn from the following pages as prejudicing any philosophical doctrine of whatever kind.” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the first genuine science fiction novel, is most often read as a warning against the character of Dr. Frankenstein, the scientist who wants to play God by creating human life out of body parts. Anyone who has read the novel—and not just pop culture’s appropriation of it—knows that it is difficult to take Shelley seriously when she claims not to advance any philosophical view.
Whether intended ironically or not, Kevin Guilfoile’s use of this quote to
introduce his engaging futuristic thriller Cast of Shadows makes sense. The
novel is above all a great page-turner, and it is not easy to discern where
he stands on some of the difficult ethical questions. The plot revolves
around a human cloning specialist, Dr. Davis Moore, whose 16-year-old
daughter was raped and murdered. The crime was never solved, prompting Moore
to secretly clone the killer so that he could look into his eyes, and maybe
use the image to find him. This is not typical speculative fiction about
cloning, which tends to be dystopic and otherworldly. Instead, Guilfoile has
created an eerily plausible future world that differs from ours in only two
significant ways: human cloning is legal and practiced regularly as a way to
help infertile and genetically at-risk parents to have children; and a
virtual reality computer game called “Shadow World” has most Americans
addicted to going on-line to create, and play out, other lives for
themselves. The novel’s title suggests the game’s symbolic significance:
fiction is a kind of Shadow World that enables the writer to alter our
familiar landscape just slightly to see what will happen.
But whereas you might expect this novel to employ its “cast of shadows” to
deliver some kind of judgment on cloning, it does not. Instead it assumes,
rather realistically, that the political battle over biotech is likely to be
won by extremist scientists who, like Dr. Moore, acknowledge that they are
playing God, but feel justified because they are “doing good” with this
power. It also assumes that extremists on the opposing side will always be
religious zealots on the order of abortion clinic bombers. Neither side
smells of roses here.
So instead of focusing on the ethics of cloning, the novel focuses on the
aftermath of Moore’s particular decision. This move ensures that the drama
of the novel comes not from dry speeches about ethics or useless arguments
about whether or not clones have souls, but from the playing out of the
“nature vs. nurture” debate. Will the clone of a killer necessarily become a
killer himself, or will he make different choices? And even more
significantly, how will the knowledge of being the clone of a killer affect
these choices? But here we must remember that this redirection of our
attention to the whole idea of human choice is itself a moral move. For
although Guilfoile does not take a stand on the cloning issue, he also never
doubts that Moore’s decision to clone the killer was wrong—a decision that
someone who is used to playing God will find a little too easy to make. Dr.
Moore resembles Dr. Frankenstein in that the problem is not the technology
but his particular attitude toward using it. Indeed, the moment of Moore’s
choice to clone a killer is chilling precisely because, like Dr.
Frankenstein, he gives so little thought to morality or even to the
pragmatics of the future world he is about to create.
Ultimately Guilfoile illustrates how cloning is just one more new technology
that opens up rather old questions in ethics that center around the nature
of being human. And it seems to answer in the best narrative style by
emphasizing that it is our power to choose that defines us. No matter how
much our genes determine us, on the human stage, it is our choices that turn
a cast of shadows into a cast of flesh and blood—and it is there that either
the beauty or the horror lies. CBHD
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Copyright 2005 by The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity The contents of this article do not necessarily reflect the opinions of CBHD, its staff, board or supporters. Permission to reprint granted as long as The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity and the web address for this article is referenced. |
