The Novel Cure: Literary prescriptions for lack of empathy

Ailment: Lack of empathy

Cure: Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo

Besides opposable thumbs and the capacity for language, the ability to feel the pain of others is what sets us apart from animals. And, crucially, it's what stops us making a mess of our lives. A lack of it at home, and we end up in a miserable family. A lack of it between countries, and we end up at war. All good novels are cures for lack of empathy – requiring, as they do, that we see the world through someone else's eyes. But Dalton Trumbo's powerful anti-war treatise, Johnny Got His Gun, will elicit your compassion, sorrow and horror so utterly that you'll find yourself unable to bear the idea that anyone, even your worst enemy, should endure any pain that can be avoided.

The first thing that Joe Bonham realises, as he drifts into flickering consciousness on a hospital bed in an unknown town (and an unknown country), is that he has lost his hearing. Not by just a little bit, but completely. He can't even hear the beat of his own heart. Next he realises that his left arm isn't there. It has been cut off, he senses, just below the shoulder. And then he realises that it's not just his left arm that's missing. His right is, too. Someone has cut off both his arms.

This, it turns out, is only the start of it. For the full, awful truth of what has happened to Joe Bonham, an ordinary boy from Shale City, Colorado who allowed himself to be roped into a war that had nothing whatever to do with him (the First World War ), is beyond anything Edgar Allen Poe dreamt up. As he moves between consciousness and sleep, unable at first to communicate with anyone around him, unable even to know if it's night or day, we discover a story of deep suffering like no other. Take the most unempathetic heart you know, one that is hard and cynical and stony. Then give it this novel, this achingly beautiful, devastating novel, and watch that heart begin to crack.

'The Novel Cure, An A-Z of Literary Remedies' (Canongate, £17.99); thenovelcure.com