Jostein Gaarder’s 1991 novel Sophie’s World was a global best-seller and has long ranked among my wife’s favorite books for its mixture of narrative, metafiction, and a crash course in the history of philosophy. It’s probably better at the last of those three things than it is at the first, as the prose is a little clumsy and the characterization is weak, but for the reader who has virtually no background at all in philosophy, like me, it’s a lot better than going back to school to learn the basics.

In the novel, Sophie Amundsen, a 15-year-old high school student in Norway, starts receiving mysterious letters and packages at her house that introduce her to philosophy, starting all the way back with the ancient Greeks. These letters turn into videos and face-to-face meetings with Alberto Knox, a philosophy professor of sorts who seems to have made it his mission to teach Sophie how to think about thinking. The course, such as it is, runs from the Greeks through the Romans, Jesus Christ (treated primarily as a philosopher rather than as a religious figure), St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and on through Marx and Freud almost to the present day. Sophie is a quick study – the book would be rather tedious if she weren’t – but still careens from one philosopher’s perspective to another as Alberto emphasizes both the differences and the common points between classic thinkers.

As their course continues, however, a second storyline emerges, a mystery of sorts regarding a girl almost exactly Sophie’s age named Hilde whose father is serving in a UN peacekeeping mission in Lebanon. Hilde’s father is sending her birthday wishes and messages by way of Sophie, even though neither Sophie nor Alberto knows who she is, and rudimentary attempts to find her prove fruitless. The resolution to this subplot takes up the second half of the novel, but almost any discussion of it would spoil it for readers. I’ll probably go too far by even saying that Gaarder delves into metafiction that reminded me of Jasper Fforde’s work – I imagine Fforde read Sophie’s World before embarking on the Thursday Next and Nursery Crimes series – and starts to blur the lines between reality and fiction in a way that further demonstrates the metaphysical questions tackled by philosophers in the last five hundred years.

Where Gaarder falls short is in characterization, as the emphasis on the novel’s didactic side detracts from development of anyone, even Sophie or Alberto or Hilde when she finally shows up in the text. Gaarder hooks the reader with the question of who’s who and what’s what, but that narrative greed is driven by the vast nature of the questions he’s asking, not by any strong reader interest in the fates of the main characters.

That flaw was significant, but I still found the book compelling because of how quickly and clearly Gaarder moves through several millennia of philosophy, even if the treatment is perforce superficial. As someone who couldn’t tell Hume from Hegel before reading Sophie’s World and who wasn’t about to head to night school to figure it out, I enjoyed getting that cursory education in a fast-moving work of fiction. As popular novels go, it’s quite erudite even if the characters are weak.

Next up: I just finished Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, a return to form for her after her dismal last novel Run, and have started Robert Tressell’s 1914 novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, an explicitly political novel arguing in favor of socialism.