IT’S TEN YEARS SINCE Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World became a vital tool in the parent’s fight against anti-intellectualism in their offspring, and now the debut novelist Lucy Eyre hopes to do the same with If Minds Had Toes, a crash-course in Western philosophy cleverly disguised as teen-friendly fiction.

Meet 15-year-old Ben Warner. It’s the summer holidays and Ben is working in the local chip shop, Cod Almighty, in between living his happy, unexamined life as an older brother, dog-owner, football player and, most recently, girl-noticer.

One girl he can’t help noticing is the gorgeous Lila, who comes in to the shop and asks him whether he can be sure that chips taste the same to him as everyone else. This gets him thinking, albeit mostly about her, and he can’t believe his luck when she invites him to visit her in a place called The World of Ideas, accessible only though the back of the airing cupboard at home or the cold store in Cod Almighty.

Meanwhile, in the World of Ideas, where philosophers go when they die, Socrates’ 2,000-year presidency is being undermined by certain younger residents, particularly one Ludwig Wittgenstein, who are hungry for regime change. Wittgenstein is so convinced that Socrates is a dithering old fool who is wrong about everything that he bets him that he can’t take one ordinary person from the “real” world and make him love philosophy. Ordinary people, says the Austrian, are just too stupid. Fine, says the Greek, I’ll send my secretary down to get us one.

When Lila comes back with Ben, the leading lights of Western thought (and one from the East — Buddha himself, in town for a heads-of-state summit with Socrates) ply him with questions and hypotheses on everything from language and perception to free-will and ethics.

This world is indeed a heavenly place, where a door might give on to a meadow, a grand salon, or one of Socrates’ prize-winning vineyards, and where the sun always shines. Through one door a bank of screens enables the philosophers to keep an eye on the ticking over of the world. Everything — from Kosovo to the Beckhams’s marriage — is examined by the finest minds to have died.

Ben starts thinking. And just as Socrates said he would, he loves it. He thinks about freedom (“Grown-ups had always given the impression that you got more freedom as you got older . . . What with work and traffic lights and rules about how many vegetables to eat, adults were even less free than children.”) and he thinks about free will: “Why was it that gardens were so incredibly boring until you reached a certain age, when suddenly they were all you could talk about?” If minds had toes, says the lovely Lila, the World of Ideas is where they would stretch and wriggle. This impressive little book, strikingly illustrated by Paul Jackson’s line drawings, not only offers ample scope for cerebral wriggling but also has all the ingredients of a funny and engaging novel by a sharp new talent. Parents, you have been warned: this book will give your children ideas.

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