Unhappy ending
In her latest novel, Lionel Shriver ponders death and the many awful ways it might come to one couple, writes
Lionel Shriver’s latest novel is characteristically contrarian, fiercely experimental and decidedly timely. When Kay and Cyril make a pact to kill themselves on Kay’s 80th birthday – which happens to be 29 March 2020 – they are in their fifties, young and strong. Kay’s father has died following a prolonged and undignified illness, so the decision seems less abstract than sensible. When the date comes around, however, the couple are faced with the reality of following through on their plan. Will they stay, or will they…
Having brought us to the brink, Shriver proceeds into divergent futures – a series of thought experiments, some more sci-fi than others. In one, medicine that reverses ageing does away with the threat of physical decline while prompting a global existential crisis.
In another, Shriver’s favourite panic button of overpopulation is illustrated in a dystopia wherein the elderly couple are hacked to death by a machete-wielding assailant in their attic.
Whether the foray is into cryogenics or nursing homes, each chapter serves as a fable about humanity’s most eternal and inescapable foe: death. No matter what Kay and Cyril do, it always comes for them in the end. Almost invariably, we glimpse a future where expedient death would have been preferable to suffering.
Only once do we travel to an alternative universe where staying alive nets happy decades and success – having taken up new fitness regimes and fulfilling careers, “both spouses were lean, tan and sinewy. If anything, the two were more attracted to each other than they’d been as newlyweds”.
What’s more, “Muslims having joined Christians in a new worldwide religion (‘Jeslam’) meant the end of terrorism” and “antibiotic-resistant bacteria naturally evolved to be resistant to themselves”.
Unsurprisingly for a book that privileges philosophising over narrative drive, Should We Stay or Should We Go features a lot of arguments which, one senses, Shriver herself would like to be having. Snippets of dialogue between Kay (who voted Leave in the referendum) and Cyril (an ardent Remainer) seem more for exposition’s sake than reflective of their intimacy.
“You’re the one who had to go on that big Trafalgar demonstration against the poll tax – which would have raised money for social care and a great deal else,” says Kay to her husband, somewhat formally.
Should We Stay or Should We Go is sometimes funny, often diverting, always driving towards an urgent answer to its question. Of course, it is no more an option to “stay” in any permanent way for Kay and Cyril than it is for any of us. Shriver’s characters are contemplating when and how to die rather than if, and the book has moments of profundity, especially when its characters’ heads and hearts refuse to align.
The timeliness of its plot – the
couple’s D-day overlapping the early days of the Covid crisis – propels an argument that might otherwise have remained opaquely abstract: the past year has proven that life does not promise more joy than pain. You’re as likely to miss something dreadful as something wonderful if it is cut short.
The book tackles agency and self-determination in the face of an unfeeling and chaotic universe. When it is not buried by topical jibes about Brexit, that central conceit is dealt with compellingly.