Sympathy

Sympathy is virtually impossible to describe, I'm struggling to do so even to myself and it was a struggle I grappled with all the way through. In the end Sudjic's own narrator says it best when she characterises her tale as a “love story that is mostly made up, from memories that are mostly false, between people who were mainly not there.”

Alice Hare has never really known herself. Adopted as a baby she knows little of her birth parents except that her mother is dead and her father in prison. Her adoptive family also offers little stability, her mother telling and retelling, embellishing and rewriting the story of their history so often after her husband disappears that neither mother nor daughter have any real sense what is true. In an attempt to escape what feels like a vortex of uncertainty and parental neediness Alice relocates to New York and the home of her cancer-stricken grandmother Silvia.

As Alice attempts to find her way and herself in a new city and a new life, her perceptions and expectations constantly shaped by the "lives" she observes online she stumbles across Mizuko Himura, a Japanese heiress, freelance writer and constant user of social media. Alice becomes obsessed with the connections and parallels she comes to see between her history and Mizuko's. Parallels that take on increasingly irrational significance until she manages to engineer an entry into Mizuko's real life. This is stalking in the internet age and it is not pretty as Alice becomes increasingly obsessed, harnessing all the knowledge she has amassed online into manipulating Mizuko into friendship by aping her like, her opinions and playing to her character. Alice in an extremely complex and unsettling character, incredibly self-involved and yet almost entirely lacking in self-awareness and despite her disturbing penchant for manipulation she is almost endearingly naive to the fact that Mizuko's consciously-curated online identity is no more genuine than her own.

Despite Alice's flaws, her obsessive and possessive tendencies, her selfishness, her guile it is testament to Sudjic's talent that she somehow forces a little sympathy, unpicking these unpleasant characteristics in a way that reveals the sad fragility and vulnerability that underpin her neuroses.

The narrative structure is really quite mindbogglingly clever. Alice's fragmentary, disjointed and unreliable reminiscences deliberately invoking those long, convoluted "rabbit-holes" (her name is no accident) with which anyone who has ever accidentally lost hours of their life to the internet will be disturbingly familiar. We follow Alice through many, often fascinating, digressions, from particle physics to the 2011 Japanese tsunami to the disappearance of flight MH370. These labyrinthine tangents draw us in an out of the main narrative forging unexpected connections and consequences that make Alice's bizarre focus on coincidences seem less and less absurd. Because Sympathy is all about our lives online and how the constant presence of undiluted, unsubstantiated data can potentially affect and warp our opinions, our thinking and our identities, you find yourself becoming just a little Alice.

Sympathy is an impressive, immersive and ultimately addictive experience, disorientating and irresistible and Olivia Sudjic is, without a doubt, a young author to watch.

An intriguing story about obsession and stalking in the virtual world of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Alice is fascinated by the beautiful, half Japanese Mizuko who she first sees in 'multiple miniatures' on the internet.  Travelling from the UK to New York she tracks her down and engineers a relationship with her which starts as friendship; but Alice wants to be her lover. Everything goes wrong as 'the solid world around me, the reality of it, [was] starting to slide away, like wet sand sinking beneath the water.' As Alice is caught in a web of her own making, she loses friends, family and a boyfriend. After a drug-fuelled gang rape she spirals into a breakdown. This mesmerising story holds a mirror up to our contemporary world and questions our reliance on 'the life-starting-over sound' of our mobiles and all the rest of our  fascination with 'virtual reality.' A little too long but worth the read.