Even empathy won’t save us – review of the book “Empathizer”

Post apocalyptic society

After the pandemic, some countries have become very used to the lockdown, and despite the efforts of environmentalists, the specter of a water crisis hangs over us. Fantasy, which is characteristic of this genre, catches our everyday fears and creates new worlds from them. These are warnings that will hopefully not turn out to be predictions. Two stories, published almost at the same time, followed more or less this way: Łukasz Migura ‘s audioserial Dream about a free world and Aleksandra Borowiec ‘s book Empathizer.

In Borowiec, the title equipment for sharing emotions seems to be the basis for the construction of the presented world. It is a kind of Snapchat that spreads sensations and experiences, moments of joy, delight and the greatest pain. Thanks to this, you can show your loved ones what you think about them. Or give a taste of your life to strangers, followers. The world of this book is incredibly tight, it basically only has one city with four boroughs – of which only one is rich. They say there’s a world out there somewhere, even Europe, but that doesn’t really affect the people of Pattium.

We don’t know exactly what shaped the world of this city-state. There was a plague, the lack of water is an evident and chief problem of this small ecosystem, so there was an ecological disaster. Therefore, a number of regulations and restrictions were introduced, and the poorest were sent to the ghetto and surrounded by a wall. Now, many years later, it is about to be demolished. And it is around this theoretically joyful event that many anxieties arise. At this point in history, somehow the heroes of the book are trying to find each other, or even better, to settle down: a policewoman, her kindergarten girl, a doctor associated with an unfulfilled artist, and a young married couple.

Great fatigue, little spleen

Empathizer is a good text, written in a clear style, able to show the inner worlds of the characters, giving the reader a taste of the dry air of Mizeria, where the poor live, and the apparent comforts of cramped middle-class apartments. At the same time, it is not such a good novel – its construction is based on symmetries, we follow the fate of three unhappy couples who, contrary to Tolstoy’s saying, are wildly similar to each other. Borowiec also tries to touch on too many important topics – access to goods, reproductive rights, interpersonal relations, social inequalities, protests related to them, and finally power, or rather the characters’ sense of their own importance. Due to the accumulation of messages, the heroes gradually turn into paper analogies, and their subsequent decisions or misfortunes that fall on them become predictable in Empathizer .

Another important thread that connects individual stories is the pattium equivalent of Facebook – the title equipment that allows you to share feelings. It seems that the only thing that is “produced” in the city, its prosperity is entirely founded on the idea of ​​the Engineer and Co-Creator. Again, this is a fairly clear allegory of social media and its out-of-the-way creators, and how much feed managers feed on its creators and recipients.

Despite the good style, I did not read this novel easily. Borowiec has accumulated social problems to discuss, which makes it sometimes difficult to know where a given thread should lead. And whether it leads anywhere at all, or is it just a kind of loud thinking that should be omitted in the editorial office. Perhaps the most redundant for me was the theme of a young marriage, or rather a young husband, whose wife is very paper-based and stereotypical. These chapters are to allow you to look at the company that produces empathizers, which could be easily shown without creating additional heroes. The whole would then gain dynamics, and perhaps there would also be more space to show why empathy cannot save the world.

Empathizer very successfully shows the reader the hardships of living in the limitations of Pattium. You will feel the weariness of the heroes, perhaps you will be moved by their choices, sometimes completely unethical. At the same time, in terms of criminal intrigue or metaphor, this book does not bring any major surprises, and the author could successfully abandon some of the plots in order to develop them in a completely different novel or a continuation of this story.