Empathy
by Bryan Walpert

Stalin considered writers engineers of the human soul. Less grandiosely, film critic Roger Ebert described movies as ‘a machine that generates empathy’. In Bryan Walpert’s third novel, marketing executive Alison Morris has commissioned a perfume that generates empathy in those who smell it, while her husband, Jim, is developing a video game to encourage and reward empathy in its players. This is no coincidence nor a joint endeavour for the betterment of humankind. Jim has stolen the idea from Alison, although in their own ways both are acting in bad faith. Empathy isn’t getting off to a good start. Empathy as a quality, that is; Empathy the novel is doing just fine from the very beginning.

It’s an opening worthy of the finest thriller: a man tied up in the boot of a car, his body throbbing, his mind drifting “through a number of thoughts that seemed inappropriate in context”. Who’s to say what’s appropriate to think in such circumstances? It’s just one of Walpert’s many skills as a novelist that he sees this and runs with it for all it’s worth.

The opening sets expectations high for a high-energy read. We’re on the first page and already trapped in the boot of a car – where’s Walpert going to take us next?

But Walpert is as interested in the quotidian aspects of domestic life as in the sparks his thriller plot ignites. So where he takes us next is away from the action altogether, to the impact on the son and school-age grandchildren (David, Gemma and Finn) of the missing man in the boot (Edward Geller), to the contours of their day-to-day existence without him, doubly bereft because David’s wife, Molly, died earlier. And then he takes us to Alison and Jim and builds slowly to the point in their and the Gellers’ lives when things get nasty. Really nasty.

One moment you’re in a contemplative novel admiring Walpert’s sensitivity towards his characters and their relationships with each other, the past and the situations in which they now find themselves; the next you’re being shocked and scared witless by one of the most ruthless and unrelenting villains this side of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men.

Empathy also manages to incorporate a third genre altogether – that of the fantasy novel – within the world of EMPath, the game Jim and Eli create. A world which, when David plays it, and notwithstanding the mixed reviews of gamers more used to blood-and-guts scenarios that reward your number of kills not your acts of altruism, makes for a gripping adventure in its own right. All in all, it’s a conjuring trick worthy of Edward’s lifelong passion for magic.

What it’s mostly worthy of, though, is Walpert’s own capacity for empathy. He gets deep inside his characters and takes us with him, whether it’s the lead actors or lesser ones such as David’s solid friend Tobias, with whom he renews contact having broken it off after Molly’s death, or Jim’s hopeless gaming start-up partner, Eli.

Walpert also appreciates that the ultimate engines for empathy are arguably the family unit itself and friendship – with family members and friends extending towards each other admirably empathetic consideration and understanding. Except, of course, when they don’t.

Walpert dramatises these potentially ponderous themes with great dexterity and maintains our rapt attention throughout even the lowest-wattage scenes. At the same time, he ensures his thriller thrills thoroughly when it needs to, with clever and edge-of-your-seat set pieces.

You may be wondering how a novel predicated on perfume, gaming and empathy becomes a thriller in the first place, but that would make you much naiver than Walpert ever is in a novel that fully comprehends the potentially bad as well as good consequences of an apparently benign quality. Just as you can have too much of a good thing, you can have too much of goodness. Empathy the novel, however, gets it just right.