Book Review: Making Sense by Jim Murdoch
Unlikely as it may seem in this clangorous world, there are scientists studying those quiet little questions, and the first, best answer is one word: Empathy.
To my mind, empathy is what Making Sense, Jim Murdoch’s fifth published book, is all about. This book is a showcase of the uniquely human ability to understand the interior life of another conscious being; to transcend the limits of the self.
Making Sense is a slender collection of 19 brief stories, each exploring a different character, who is also usually the narrator. These are not plotted stories, but character vignettes and voice-driven monologues. Nearly half the narrators are women, and the range of ages and types is wide; they are not just thinly disguised versions of the author. All but two of the stories are narrated in first person, but even the third-person omniscient narrator uses a very conversational, first-person-like voice and even addresses the second person (the reader) with lines like, “Do you see that man over there….”
The whole collection is full of a lively energy, like meeting real people. Murdoch has a gift for imagining himself into the minds of others and capturing their ways of speech. The differences in the subjects, in their voices and their lives, is what provides the empathic spine of this collection. All these engaging voices show us that the Other is really just like ourselves, and that is one of the most crucial messages for a divided, brutal world.
George Ovitt explored this subject rather brilliantly in his Atticus Review article “Fiction and Empathy,” which I highly recommend.
And to dig a little deeper (getting back to my earlier statement about scientists): a series of experiments support the fiction/empathy claims above, and show that the empathy effect is strongest with literary fiction as compared to genre fiction, factual non-fiction, or not reading at all. Perhaps the first empirical data on the subject, the studies were recently published in a top journal, Science, and subsequently well covered in Scientific American and the The New York Times. (Thanks to the On Fiction blog for bringing it to my attention.)
So it’s true: stories that delve deeply into characters’ internal worlds, depicting the complexity and unpredictability of real life, effectively teach us how to empathize. Our world leaders desperately need to read more literary fiction!
In the never-ending struggle between dark and light forces, Murdoch’s Making Sense adds to the positive side.
There is just one more aspect to the book I want to address. Murdoch uses a few of these stories to experiment with technique: how to create distinct regional dialects or accents on the page so that they will sound authentic in the reader’s inner ear. While his urge to capture a unique voice is admirable, I found these stories less successful. As I struggled through the altered spellings and syntax for Scots, Cockney, and New York accents, I lost the fluid rhythm of the speech and even the line of the story. A lighter touch, just hinting at the dialects, would have been more to my taste (especially for New York, where I’ve lived for 25 years without hearing an accent like the one depicted here).
In the end, this is a valuable investigation. I respect the care and thoughtfulness with which Murdoch approached his dialect stories, and perhaps the effort serves best to illustrate how thoroughly immersed each of us is in the speech we hear every day. Language is indistinguishable from thought; it’s like the air we breathe.
In other words, there are simple, universal human sensibilities under the complex exterior of such stories, like the root language of which the dialects are just surface variations. This entire book supports the idea that we are One.
This is an excellent review, Brent. Expected no less of course. Knew you’d treat the book seriously and I appreciate your comments. All the dialect stories started off with much tamer versions and they worked just fine. I changed them later on because I realised I wasn’t reading what was on the page. I was embellishing based on my knowledge of the voices. I would read, ‘just thinking’ but in my head I was hearing ‘jist hinkin’. Now that fine for me as a native Glaswegian but as we only make up about 0.01% of the world’s population most people will read what they see on the page. I did provide a glossary for the Scots since it is a language as opposed to an English dialect but I do accept that all the four stories will take extra effort on the reader’s part. I’ve just finished reading a novel where much of the dialect is written in Medieval Scots and there’s no glossary nor even the occasional footnote—seriously would you have a clue what ‘mortfundyit’ might mean? (the context is little help)—and that is a hard read. I defend the author’s choice to write in dialect but you have to draw a line. I think authors like Irvine Welsh take things too far. It’s a contentious point, I give you that.
ReplyDeleteThe collection is called Making Sense and the first thing you have to do with these four dialect stories is literally make sense of them. This was a deliberate choice on my part. I wrote the stories in the accents that came to me. I did toy with changing one of the others to give the daughter a Lancashire accent—my parents were from Lancashire—but I didn’t feel confident enough to tackle it. So why take on a New York accent and what kind of accent is it supposed to be anyway? You know full well that there are many shades of accent in a big city like New York, there is in Glasgow, but what I was aiming for here was caricature. If you imagine Tony Soprano reading ‘Monsters’ then you’re there although to be honest the voice in my head belongs to Steven Van Zandt in the role of Frank Tagliano from the Norwegian television series Lilyhammer. When I first wrote the story I’d not seen the show but after I had no other voice would do although I’ll be honest when I try to read it aloud—which people say you should do when reading a dialect you’re unfamiliar with—I sound Jamaican. I did get a native New Yorker to help me with my construction (plus my wife lived in New York for a while) and it took a lot of work between the three of us to decide just how far to go. After the first rewrite Vito recorded the story for me reading quite fast so we could see where he slipped up and we gave those areas of the text a bit of extra attention.
Of course I can tone it down as I did in Milligan and Murphy but I had a point to make and that point has been made. In the next collection there’ll be one story in Glaswegian. I’ve not decided yet whether I’ll rewrite it so that it’s in the same style as the other two but as I intend to release the whole collection eventually as an e-book I probably will to be consistent.
pretty nice blog, following :)
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDelete