Brainchild

Completed by Ivor Baddiel some years after the untimely death of Jonny Zucker brought their writing partnership to an abrupt end, Brainchild was to be their first attempt at writing a teen thriller. They had completed almost two thirds of what is now the finished novel and finishing it was a labour of love well worth undertaking in my view.  The book opens with a dramatic fight to the death between ‘two of the greatest scientific minds of all time’ then skips fourteen years later with a monster’s attack on a security guard. How these violent episodes are related will be made clear in this page-turning adventure. The main protagonists are Isobel and Carl, orphaned, 14-year-old highly gifted twins living alone with a huge secret bequeathed to them by their father: in a laboratory hidden beneath their house, a human brain is growing. Following their father’s handbook, the brain is developing well, but they are shocked to discover that one hemisphere is entirely evil and the other entirely good. They believe that these will eventually merge when fully grown, but disaster strikes when they later realise the evil half has been stolen and implanted in a teenager, creating the self-same monster we met earlier who is creating increasing mayhem. They manage to convince the authorities that their father’s experiment has been hijacked and they become a crucial part of the team trying to trace and neutralise the monster while finding out who is behind the plot and why they are doing this. Together the team concludes they must utilise the good half of the brain and implant it in another teenage subject to have any chance of succeeding. Both the moral and scientific challenges of this decision are thoroughly explored. Ivor Baddiel obviously makes good use of his psychology background to explore the very nature of good and evil and where exactly the human mind and consciousness resides, which is highly topical as society is facing the challenge of AI. This is a tense, thought provoking and intelligent thriller, with plot twists and a dramatic conclusion (with just a hint of more to follow) that create a very satisfactory reading experience.