Gavin Extence - The Empathy Problem

Rating: 4/5

Review:
A decent read, but not one of Extence's best

Gavin Extence is an excellent, witty and insightful writer and I enjoyed this book, but I don't think it's in the same class as his previous two.

In The Empathy Problem, Extence creates Gabriel Vaughn, an unpleasant, unfeeling hedge-fund manager who views everything in life as a series of transactions and who has no humanity whatever.  Vaughn develops a terminal brain tumour and, for the first time in his life, forms a genuine attachment to a woman.   The story is set in 2011-12 during the Occupy protest outside St Paul's which is used as a way of excoriating financial skulduggery and social injustice. 

If the idea of a rich, grasping, inhuman  person redeemed by illness, trauma and love sounds very familiar…well, it is.  There have been endless books, films and TV programmes on exactly this theme going back to Dickens and beyond, which means that a new book needs to be original in some way - and I don't really think this is.  Gavin Extence writes very well – his dialogue is especially good, I think – and there are some genuinely touching moments dealing with relationships, humanity and coming to terms with dying, but there are also flaws.

Even though I am in sympathy with Extence's political stance, much of the speechifying about financial inequity (and iniquity) was horribly clunky and contrived, and I found Gabriel's sudden discovery of a social conscience and self-loathing wholly unconvincing, I'm afraid – tumour or no tumour.  The whole thing felt very like yet another Richard Curtis film in style, structure and message, which is fine, but there was a strong sense of knowing where this was going and having been there many times before.

However, I kept reading and I did care about what happened.  There's easily enough about this book to give it a four-star rating; it's just that The Universe vs Alex Woods and The Mirror World of Melody Black were so exceptionally good that this felt like a slight disappointment to me.  It's good enough, but I look for more insight and originality from Gavin Extence, and I hope we get it in his next book.