Sympathy

Having enjoyed the author's Asylum Road, I was keen to read Sympathy, her debut novel. Both are complex reads which share in common the dynamic of the narrator's life spiraling out of control. Sympathy is a very clever — almost too clever — work that perhaps is ultimately let down simply by its over-ambitiousness and the extent of its remit. Ostensibly it is a coming-of-age novel and a story of love and obsession. Many critics (mostly correctly) have also treated Sympathy as a satire about the limits of social media; its power not only to infatuate but also to alienate. The narrator is called Alice Hare, and Sympathy begins with a quote from Lewis Carroll's classic. Not uncoincidentally, Alice is sucked into the metaphorical rabbit hole of the internet. Things become stranger and stranger as she finds the boundaries between physical and online lived lives blurring. As a reader one is forced to ask how much sympathy we should feel for Alice and her course of actions. More broadly it is worth pondering on the extent to which curated lives naturally prove inimical to sympathy, since decisions become dictated by creating certain (often false) impressions only. Certainly there are the makings of a modern classic here, and one which future students may spend long discussing.

By Olivia Sudjic