Greater Empathy Through Fiction?

I’ve heard it said that those who read fiction develop a greater sense of empathy. Maybe. It could also be an example of my favorite Latin logic fallacy, which I trot out at the drop of a hat because I love how it sounds: post hoc ergo propter hoc. (After this, therefore because of this.) It could be people with greater senses of empathy are attracted to novels, and those with less of that quality read non-fiction. I’ll leave that for greater minds to debate. There is no shortage of them in the world.

What I do know is that I have far more empathy for those whose situations vary from my own than I did as a younger man. There is no single date or occurrence that prompted it. I can say when the tide began to turn: The Wire. I came late to the show (as usual), picking up Season One with Season Four already in progress. I’d already read Homicide, so I was primed. Around this time I read The Corner and I started to to look past the superficial dissimilarities between my rural upbringing and what happens in the inner city of Baltimore.

My reading remained focused on crime, but crime with more diversity. While reviewing books for the New Mystery Reader web site I became sort of the unofficial Irish crime fiction reviewer, routinely assigned books by Declan Burke, Declan Hughes, Adrian McKinty, and Ken Bruen. NMR also exposed me to Tim Hallinan’s Poke Rafferty thrillers, set in Bangkok. Charlie Stella’s looks at mob life from the underside. Arnaldur Indriðason’s Iceland novels and Leighton Gage’s Chief Inspector Silva series. J. D. Rhoades’s unique brand of redneck noir. Friends steered me toward Daniel Woodrell

I learned that once one gets past the superficial differences in language, culture, justice systems, availability of weapons, and which side of the road to drive on, people are pretty much the same. With outliers on either side, the great majority of people pretty much want to be left alone to live their lives as happily as they can, and for their children to have it better than they do. The only thing that made me special was having the foresight to be born in a country that allowed me to do those things.

It’s now easier for me to imagine—and I am grateful beyond words that I only have to imagine—what it must be like to live in a place where those things are denied to people. Even worse, a place where your life—and the lives of your family—is in danger because of things you have no control over. Gender. Sexual orientation. Race or ethnicity. I include religion, too, as the major organized religions all preach peace. (I’ll not hold it against any religion if some of its followers defame the faith by their very existence. These people are apostates, and they exist in every religion.) How would I feel if I lost everything I owned and faced the option of death or flight that took me to a place where I didn’t speak the language and my customs seemed as strange to the current inhabitants as theirs do to me.

It has become fashionable to declare at great length and volume against immigrants and refugees, and every nation certainly has the right to set its own polices for both. When doing so, let’s not forget that the only thing that allows us to pass judgment on who is worthy to cross our borders is an accident of birth. I served in the military, pay my taxes, vote, and comply with summonses for jury duty without complaint. I view them as debts owed that I can never fully repay, but do the best I can.

Let’s remember how we all got to where we are during this holiday season. Some work harder than others, but it’s a sin of hubris for anyone in this country to believe for an instant that he or she has earned what we have. We’ve done our part, but we also started ahead of the game by being born into a situation that allowed—and often encouraged—us to become everything our gifts and efforts warranted. Any “earning” we did came after the fact. With that in mind, let’s take a minute this holiday season to reflect on our great and largely undeserved good fortune and learn a little fucking humility.

The Lost and the Blind US Release

I posted this review of Declan Burke’s latest back in December, on its UK release. It goes live here in the States on April 1, and a reminder may be in order, as this is one you’re going to want to miss, from one

of the handful of authors who move directly to the top of my queue with any new work.

Few people would confuse Declan Burke’s writing with Scott Phillips’s, though they have one critical element in common: no matter how many of their books you’ve read in the past, you’re never quite sure what this one’s going to be like.

So it is with Burke’s The Lost and the Blind.  A German U-boat surfaces near a small island in neutral Ireland during World War II, in search of an English spy. Before the night is over a church full of children will be burned to the ground. The submarine might have been be sunk, its cargo of gold intended for the IRA at the bottom of the lough. Seventy years later, a rich Irish expatriate returns to purge the guilt he feels in the matter through philanthropy. Less sure is whether he should feel guilty at all. Through it all runs a thread of uncertainty: how much of this really happened?

Burke has written a tribute to Raymond Chandler and pulp-era private eyes (Eightball Boogie), and a sequel darker than anything Chandler dreamed of (Slaughter’s Hound); an Elmore Leonard-esque “screwball noir” (The Big O) and its sequel, an even screwier road trip (Crime Always Pays); and a darkly funny and disturbing bit of metafiction where a discarded character comes back to haunt the author (Absolute Zero Cool). In The Lost and the Blind, he uses his considerable talents to channel Alistair MacLean, weaving plot twists over plot twists until you’re not necessarily sure who the characters are, and don’t know how much one in particular should be trusted, even at the denouement.

All the things Burke’s previous readers have come to know are there. He’s as deft with his dialog and use of language as ever. The humor is, as always, well placed and well done, though this is not by any means a funny book in the way The Big O and Crime Always Pays are. The interplay between the characters rings true, which serves to make the plot twists both surprising when they happen and reasonable when you think about them. No mean feat, that.

The Lost and the Blind is a bit of a departure for Burke, with its historical elements and labyrinthine plotting. That he pulls it off at all speaks highly of his talent and diversity. That he pulls it off so well leads one to hope he’ll mine this vein again. But, remember, he’s Declan Burke. He may write a sequel along those lines—he’s done that with Crime Always Pays—or write a sequel with a different tone—as he did in Slaughter’s Hound—or, being Burke, he may do something completely different. There’s only one prediction that can be made about Burke’s next book: it will keep you up late, and you’ll be happy it did.

December's Best Reads

Like December wasn’t a busy enough month, what with the holidays and the college graduation—with honors, no less—of one of my two favorite nieces (Congratulations, Aspen), good books were fighting each other to rush through my eyeballs to permanently imprint themselves on my brianal area. (I may be watching too much TV sports. Ever notice how sportscasters can never just say “he got hit in the face?” It’s always the “facial area.”)

Enough of me. These guys are good:

For the Dead, Timothy Hallinan. Poke Rafferty is back. I discussed this one in detail a few weeks ago. If you’re already a Hallinan fan, you need to read it. If you’re not a fan yet, read it and you will be.

Dead Red, Tim O’Mara. This one won’t release until next week, but is available for pre-order. The third of O’Mara’s successful Raymond Donne series finds Donne on summer vacation from teaching, sitting in a cab when the guy next to him gets his head shot off. I’ll have more to say when the book becomes generally available, including an interview with the author.

The Lost and the Blind, Declan Burke. I wrote on this one at length last week. Available in Ireland and the UK now; the colonies won’t have a shot at it until April. Sometimes one has to wonder if that whole revolution thing wasn’t a bit hasty.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle, George V. Higgins. Yes, I read it again, and, yes, I still think it may be the finest bit of crime fiction ever written.

The Sun is God, Adrian McKinty. A bit of a departure for McKinty, this historically-based mystery tells the story of a murder on a German colony in the south Pacific, in an enclave made up of a handful of nudists who eat only coconuts and bananas. (That part is true: such a colony did exist a little over a hundred years ago.) McKinty uses it as a satire on social mores and manners. The ending gets a little hairy, but McKinty’s story-telling gifts are on full display, and that’s more than enough.

The Good Cop, Brad Parks. My lack of affinity for bestsellers has been previously documented. I’m also leery of comedic crime fiction, if only because such books way too often either trivialize the violence or aren’t actually funny. I met Parks at a conference, he seemed to know what he was doing, so, what the hell? Good for me. Parks has the gift of paying full respect to the victims of violence while populating the cast with enough “characters” to keep a smile never more than a page away. I see why he keeps winning all those damned awards; he earns them. Added to the rotation.

All the President’s Men, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. I read it when it first came out, and, of course, saw the movie. (Learning Robert Redford had been cast to play him had to be the best day of Bob Woodward’s life.) Age and experience have made this an even more chilling read, placed in the context of how government and journalism have changed over the past forty years. Read it with what you know now and see if you aren’t dismayed by how fragile are the walls that protect our ability to have a say in how we live.