Warning: this article contains considerable spoilers for the film Avengers: Infinity War and Lisa McInerney’s ‘Unholy Trinity’ – The Glorious Heresies, The Blood Miracles and The Rules of Revelation, which, if you have not, you should read immediately.

Thanos has been searching for the six infinity stones, and now they have given him the power to wipe out half the universe, which he does with a click of his fingers. Thanos is a big pink alien from space and, according to the rules, we don’t like him. He’s cruel and violent, and evidently fond of genocide, and he’s the antagonist of the film we’re watching. But we see a little more of him than that. The viewer is given access to what he gets up to when he’s not directly engaging the Avengers, and not just his scheming. We see that he’s also capable of love for his adopted daughter, and has a coherent motive for his quest of obliteration – to bring balance to a resource-strapped universe. He makes sacrifices to achieve it, including killing his daughter and wiping out the population of his home planet. It’s extreme, but it has a logic that makes sense to him. So he’s a little bit more than just a villain, driven by villainous impulses. It might be a stretch to say we sympathise with his plight, but there’s a shade of humanity, and his mission has the grain of something rational, in his view. He thinks he’s helping, and he needs to make tough decisions to overcome the obstacles in his way. So in Infinity War we watch him struggle to get the stones, defeat his enemies the Avengers against increasing odds, and finally, in the closing frames, see him ‘rest and watch the sun rise on a grateful universe.’

Thanos, as noted, is not the protagonist of the film, yet something about the way in which his side of events is presented makes it feel like it is. He’s more than just an antagonist for the Avengers to battle. He’s got his own story going on, and if we do allow ourselves a change of perspective to make him the main character, then this is a film about him grappling with and defeating his enemies. Well done, Thanos.

Well, perhaps not, not completely, but the filmmakers are at least asking us to do something: to see the struggle from both perspectives. It’s uncomfortable, being asked to listen to advocacy for mass murder, and perhaps unexpected for the fifth highest grossing film of all time, but there it is anyway.

In writing terms, what we’re seeing here is a narrative that moves it’s focus between characters with overlapping and competing motivations, giving each the benefit of vantage point from which to witness events and make their case, in this example on either side of the line dividing good and bad. Infinity War basically has two viewpoints in this respect: those with the Avengers, and those with Thanos. With the kind of story being told, understanding the competing motives on either side of the divide is enough to muddy the waters, morally speaking.

What happens when you expand the number of focus characters to three or more? Harry Bingham, in his How to Write guide, says:

As you multiply viewpoints, you tend to weaken the bonds of empathy with any one character. [If you add multiple viewpoints], at some point that power empathic absorption in a particular character and a particular tale is going to weaken … if you go past four viewpoint characters, you’ve sacrificed something that you won’t get back … Dilute too far, and you may not have a story at all.

There’s a sound argument here. A lot of fiction now seems to be tied to a one-person perspective on events, often first-person, and it makes for a cleaner, coherent, concise narrative. Like John Mullan says: ‘It is as if fiction were duty-bound to be tied to our experience of the world, in which the perspectives of most people we encounter are guessable, but not knowable.’ The emphasis here is on the viewpoint of the individual, a perspective that is necessarily sealed off from those of others. And it is this individual viewpoint that drives the narrative.

But what we gain from concision we lose in nuance. If you’ve got several focus characters, it stands to reason that you can’t have one unifying perspective on the narrative, as each will have their unique personal take on things. And what you get from this as a reader is a sense of ambivalence. The more we know, the less certain of our position we are, as conflicting and seemingly equally reasonable standpoints clash. And it forces us to make a decision about what we want from our entertainment: something that encourages a kind of gratifying sense of knowledge, or something that reminds us that our voice, the one we believe to be right, is just one of many, which all equally believe themselves to be right. Can we put our finger definitively on the correct position to hold?

The more voices there are, the harder it is. The writer, instead of telling us what to think, is just asking us to think. Have a debate, stage a referendum on your own time, see if you can come to a position you’re happy with because you decided on it, rather than just settled on because you’re tired of thinking about it now, OK? Chances are, the writer hopes, you can’t, because reality is complicated, so perhaps fiction should reflect that.

Lisa McInerney’s ‘unholy trinity’ – The Glorious Heresies, The Blood Miracles and The Rules of Revelation – makes moving the vantage point integral to its narrative. She wants to show us that the city it’s set in, Cork, is a mess of competing ideologies and voices, and how each character carries their own perspective around like a weapon.

Ryan Cusack is the main character: all aspects of the story derive from or impact him in one way or another. But McInerney also focuses on girlfriend Karine, father Tony, neighbour Mel, quasi-role model Maureen, gangster JP, and terrified, abused former sex-worker Georgie. If there’s a single story-spine running through the trilogy, it’s Ryan’s struggle to define himself and his own future against the one mapped for him, into which he tumbles after a terrible decision he makes aged fifteen. His options evaporated on expulsion from school without qualifications, Ryan heads into Cork’s underworld with no other choice but to make his way and adapt to a life he is in no way built for. Beginning with a serious breakdown in The Glorious Heresies, he unravels and is physically unravelled by stronger forces than him in The Blood Miracles.

Underpinning it all is his true calling of music, a skill nurtured by his late mother, an opportunity denied to him, symbolically and actually, when his father sells his mother’s piano to gangland boss JP. The third book, The Rules of Revelation, is the story of Ryan’s emergence from drug dealer as musician, and rapidly ascending local hero. Watching this happen is Georgie. Back in The Glorious Heresies she is to be murdered, the task falling to Ryan. Finding himself incapable of killing one of his former customers, he puts her on a plane to London, with strict orders to never return. From Ryan’s perspective, this in an act of mercy: Georgie, after all, has done nothing wrong except get mixed up in manouvres she cannot perceive. From her perspective, however, and not knowing that she was to be killed, it is the latest in a long line of crimes against her, involving losing custody of her infant son. So she returns to Cork with the aim of discrediting Ryan, removing from him his hero status the same way he removed her from her own country, or so she sees it. As far as she’s concerned, he’s a gangster, preying on vulnerable people like her. But the reader is privileged with information she is not by way of our experience with Ryan as focus character, and we know her picture is partial. It doesn’t make what Ryan did right, of course, but her view of him is skewed also. Who do we sympathise with? Well, both, inevitably. Is Ryan a gangster? Yes, demonstrably. Did he have much of a say over the direction of his own life. Not much, it seems. Does Georgie have the right to anger, her need to establish herself as she wants to? Of course. So how do we feel? Like it’s complicated.

Georgie enlists the help of journalist Mdbeh to help tell her story and reveal the ‘true’ Ryan Cusack. When pinned down for an interview and Mdbeh invokes his past, he sets the record straight:

I was a little bollocks at school, my mam died and I was fucking miserable, I was constantly fucking angry, I didn’t work hard at school, therefore I must be a lazy prick. I figured it out after I left, wait, I’m not a lazy prick …

And when I was growing up, like fourteen, there or thereabouts, I didn’t have fucking anything. My dad couldn’t keep a hold of money. He’d just piss it away … when it was time to buy schoolbooks or uniforms or just fucking everyday clothes or fucking cereal or bread or fucking whatever, he didn’t have a bob. Y’know what that’s like? It is fucking mortifying, Medbh. You’ve to go to school, you don’t have the fucking books, your trousers are too short, you worry you’re stinking coz there was no shower gel, no soap, no toothpaste, and you fucking starving coz there was fuck-all for breakfast. So when I had the bobs I’d buy as much grass as I could and sell it to people who actually were lazy pricks. Middleman at fourteen. Gonna blame me for that?

These were the terms of Ryan’s childhood, the options available to him. Do we resent all that he has done to make something of himself, knowing it all, good and bad, to be true? Is Georgie allowed her vengeance? Can the two things co-exist? They have to, the book is saying. They just do.

There’s a lot going on in these three books, and this is just one strand of it. Taken as a whole, it seems clear that McInerney wants to say something important about her hometown, about the people rubbing shoulders in it. If you want to know the truth, she’s saying, it’s in here, but there are no clear pathways, no easy answers. You’ll like and care about Ryan – angry and confused, devastated by his mother’s death, physically abused by his feckless, drunk father – but you won’t like him all the time because to get from one square to next he’s got to do some abhorrent things. But you don’t need to like him, really, you just have to understand him.

John Mullen says about George Eliot’s Middlemarch, another sprawling book with multiple focus characters, that she aims ‘to unsettle us from the comfort of easy allegiance or antipathy … to do justice to a whole society.’ The same is true in McInerney’s trilogy. Ambivalence, for all its psychic discomfort, is a necessary state of mind if you want to deal with the moral maze. If you focus on one person’s tale, you erase other, equally important perspectives. Listen to the competing voices and, after a while, judgement gets harder, is shown to be almost certainly based on incomplete evidence, and is perhaps in any case undesirable, if you want to get anywhere near the truth.

In the next part I’ll look at how these ideas can be used to force empathy on us in situations where we’d rather not have empathy forced on us.