Theo is a man who is almost invisible. He is couch-surfing with people he vaguely considers his friends in Berlin after leaving secondary school in disgrace in England. He does everything in his power to avoid calling himself ‘homeless,’ although after a certain point there is no other way to put it. He is rambling through the streets of Berlin in the middle of the night, looking for a place to sleep, when he stumbles through a hole in reality and winds up in Shenzhen, in China’s Guangdong province not far from Hong Kong. Deeply confused, he meets a man named Gabriel who tells him that he is attuned to magic, and he is attuned because he is invisible to the world, someone who is so easily forgettable. Such is the opening volley of Eóin Dooley’s novella No Sympathy, published in 2024 by Android Press.
So much of the reason why this book works is because of Theo, its main character. This is a man who is aimless, with no ties to anything, no roots anywhere. He is a man who was not able to ‘make it’ in that striving middle class sense due to an inability to truly fit in a late-stage-capitalist education system, and as such becomes invisible to ‘polite’ society. Dooley never states this, but I suspect that Theo might be best read as being neurodivergent, autistic perhaps, as he always holds the rest of the world at arm’s length. I wonder if something more traumatic is lurking in his background. It is his rootlessness that makes him really able to find a use for magic; those of us in steady jobs and with families, given the opportunity to use magic, may hesitate as it may disrupt the delicate balance that stability requires under late stage capitalism. Theo, a man with nothing that is truly his and as such has nothing left to lose, can go all the way with it.
Magic here is heavily associative; the main thing you can do in this particular universe is to teleport between two locations that are similar on some level. It is remarked by Gabriel that, unlike most depictions of magic in contemporary settings, modernity has actually been a boon for magic. The easiest way to use this power of teleportation is to jump between restrooms, or between different outlets of the same fast food joints, which happen to be in different countries. I’ve never seen magic used in a modern setting like this before and I approve.
But this comes at a cost to the user, specifically in the requirement that the wielder be unmemorable. It means you cannot really have friends. It means that you can’t have community. It condemns you to nomadism. It prevents you from ever being able to make a truly systemic change in the world. It means you cannot indulge in local cuisine, as that makes a place less interchangeable with other places, so you cannot teleport nearly as well between that place and elsewhere. Theo ends up, for a time, in a group of magicians who teleport around the world doing small acts of charity and mercy, and eventually snaps at how much this particular way of living alienates him from anything that makes life really worth living at all.
No Sympathy is a book that poses a powerful question but never really answers it - but I’m not convinced that an answer was necessary for the book to work. Indeed, the book works best as a character study of Theo, the consummate drifter. He knows he has no roots, but being in that position makes him all too cognizant of what it means to have none at all. Beyond that, there isn’t an obvious thematic throughline, an obvious stance on alienation that the book is taking, where this nomadic existence is shown with both great benefits and great costs to the nomad. Indeed, this group Theo falls in with makes it almost a monastic enterprise.
Theo asks them if they could use their powers to throw wrenches into the gears of capitalism, to do what they can to bring evil men to justice and thereby prying loose the injustice of the world. The response they give him is something Theo finds to be sanctimonious and without any commitment to the broader well-being of humanity, the magical equivalent of white American church groups that go to Africa and build poorly-constructed houses or water pumps or what have you and do it primarily for the vacation and for the Instagram photos with smiling African children in their arms. His charge is that they have used their powers to become dilettantes, which really is not all that different from those who use magic for selfish reasons.
When not reading I am a swing dancer in my spare time, and as such I have familiarity with a good deal of midcentury American popular music. This book reminds me a good deal of one particular song from the fifties that is occasionally played at swing dances: The Wanderer, written by Ernie Maresca and sung by Dion DiMucci in 1961. It’s a song that, at first, appears to be an ode to an adolescent heterosexual male fantasy of arriving in a town, bedding the local women, and going off to the next town to repeat. But, as Dion has said and Bruce Springsteen has pointed out, the key to the song is in these lines:
Well, I roam from town to town,
I got a life without a care.
And I`m as happy as a clown,
I`m with my two fists of iron but I`m going nowhere.
This is a song about loneliness, about listlessness, about rootlessness. Theo is Dion’s wanderer, but so poor that he doesn’t even have the benefit of mindless hedonism. Both Theo and the Wanderer have discovered the truth of Ubuntu, the philosophy from Southern Africa, of how a person is a person through other people. We are social animals, and as much as we may fantasize of throwing it all away, it can never truly be done without wrecking us. We may try to fill that gap with pleasure or mindless distraction or, in our world, reactionary politics, but it never works. We are all bound together.
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Reference: Dooley, Eóin. No Sympathy [Android Press, 2024]