We Need to Talk about Kevin - about a high school shooting - reaffirmed her instinct that she was unsuited to the gamble of procreation, because ‘you don’t know what you’re going to get’. Shriver is a novelist who uses fiction to help her interrogate her own life choices. She toys with everything from car crashes to cryogenic storage. But that’s when the fun starts, as Shriver uses each subsequent chapter to explore a full range of death/survival scenarios.
This is all established - via the sort of heavy-handed exposition dialogue rarely encountered outside of Radio 4’s Afternoon Play - by the end of Chapter One. Will they depart this life as Britain leaves the EU? Or will they try to renegotiate their deal? They don’t discuss the subject again until their exit date looms and they’re both still in good health - although they’ve blown all their cash. He places a box containing lethal pills on the top shelf of their fridge. He suggests they end their lives on Kay’s 80th birthday. Cyril, a GP, has seen enough geriatric patients to conclude that few people maintain good physical and mental health beyond their seventies. Slugging back sherry, the former nurse is furious that her abiding memory of her once erudite and dapper dad will be a vision of him ‘naked below the waist, purple with rage and covered in faeces’. We meet them in their early fifties as they return home after Kay’s father’s funeral. The characters Shriver charges with assessing the options are Cyril and Kay Wilkinson. Should we allow ourselves to shamble, with gentle optimism, into decades when mental and physical decay are statistical probabilities? Or should we Take Back Control, and off ourselves before revolted strangers are required to wash our private parts at great cost to our struggling NHS?
It’s how long a person should choose to live.
Although she makes merry with the parallels, her subject isn’t Brexit. Leave or remain? That’s the question hanging like a cartoon sledgehammer over Lionel Shriver’s 17th novel.
0 kommentar(er)
