The 21st century is rapidly emerging as an era of entropy, of multi-polar power struggles, of concurrent crises the causes of which are little understood, and of catastrophic vulnerability to phenomena such as climate change and artificial intelligence. This is the world into which war correspondent James Brabazon throws Major Max McLean, a UK Special Forces operator, in his 2018 novel, The Break Line. McLean is a hardened veteran of what criminologist Vincenzo Ruggiero (2019) calls the chaotic murder of war, but his mission takes an unexpected turn when Brabazon switches genre from action adventure to supernatural thriller at the narrative’s crisis. This article situates the novel in the philosophical approach to answering the question of moral impact of literature, as proposed by Richard Rorty (1978, 1989) and Iris Murdoch (1999, 2014). Rorty argues that literature expresses the perspective of the victims of cruelty, which is why it has a great importance for helping to eliminate cruelty and improve solidarity in society. Murdoch emphasises the value of individual moral development facilitated by literature’s potential to support ‘unselfing’, i.e. detachment from one’s own personal feelings or interests. In keeping with Rorty and Murdoch, we argue that The Break Line is an exemplary exercise in psychological and political sensemaking, staging the epistemic and ethical challenges of contemporary authoritarian lawlessness in terms of Jacques Lacan’s (1949, 1955, 1973) register theory, specifically the collapse of the Symbolic in the face of pressure from the Real and a retreat to the Imaginary.
