Would you agree that one of the greatest challenges facing any serious writer is worming our way into another person’s consciousness and imagining for a moment what it is like to be them? It’s an act of hubris, of course. My consciousness of the world is not accessible to anyone else. It’s the one place, if you can accept for a moment that there are spatial coordinates for consciousness, that is utterly private, inviolable, sacrosanct. Oh, you might wrest my secrets from me by applying...