Sympathy by Olivia Sudjic review – up-to-the-minute debut

A smart story of obsession and technology investigates what smartphones are doing to our souls

This debut has been acclaimed as the "First Great Instagram Novel", and what it does is both new and strange - and deeply familiar. From the infancy of the industrial revolution, novels have thrived on technological change, dramatising the aesthetics of machines as well as the changes (usually deformations) they make to the human soul. The pantheon of post-industrial writing is Humphrey Jennings's Pandaemonium: The Coming of the Machine 1660-1886, and if there were to be a sequel for our digital age, Sympathy would earn a place in it for its exquisite, sustained observation of our use of smartphones. When the narrator, Alice Hare, takes possession of her loved one's device, she says: "It felt kind of like holding her brain, and I held it like that, my palm flat, my right index finger light and quick, as if the phone were jellied or slimy."

Full of these casually creepy, very 21st-century observations, Sympathy is an astute, quirky, slow-burning satire on emerging codes of behaviour, intergenerational differences, globalisation, the tech industry and the vortex of the dark web. Alice tumbles through an online rabbit hole of absurdities and dream-like connections that ultimately leads into a nightmarish mise en abyme and an illegal, orgiastic rave - rather a long way from Lewis Carroll.