Lionel Shriver’s modest proposal

Should we commit suicide when we hit 80? This profoundly un-PC satire is surprisingly moving

SHOULD WE STAY

OR SHOULD WE GO by Lionel Shriver

288pp, Borough, T £16.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £18.99, ebook £9.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ

Lionel Shriver’s 15th novel begins with GP Cyril Wilkinson offering a “modest proposal” to his wife, Kay: scarified by witnessing the hideous physical and mental hardships endured by their elderly parents, he suggests they make a pact to commit suicide on Kay’s 80th birthday, some three decades hence – in the year 2020. As Cyril points out, it’s a simple matter of going with the odds – better to depart before, in all likelihood, “we cost our compatriots a mint whilst surviving as grotesque parodies of our younger

selves, or as mere vessels for affliction”. Putting off the fatal day until affliction actually strikes means that you risk being unable to carry it through due to incapacity. Robert Louis Stevenson called suicide “the back stairs to liberty” – but they may not come with a stairlift.

The invocation of Swift in that phrase “a modest proposal” may suggest that we ought to take with a pinch of salt socialist Cyril’s eloquent argument about the duty of the old to off themselves before they start blocking beds. But pleading irony may not be enough to save Shriver from the condemnation of charities for the aged, who lined up to chastise Martin Amis a few years ago when he made the not-entirelyserious suggestion that suicide booths for the elderly be set up on every street corner.

And in any case, although Shriver makes fun of Cyril’s motivations –

“He espoused socialism in the interest of his own glorification, [to feel] superior to everyone else” – few readers will come away from this book thinking she believes in the venerable bromide that old age is better than the alternative. Over the first chapter, the years pass with the expected unexpected swiftness, and Kay finds her 80th birthday upon her. What follows is a series of a dozen alternative scenarios, in most of which one or both of the pair fail to go through with the pact, with miserable consequences.

In one chapter Cyril goes on to be struck down by a debilitating stroke, in another Kay is afflicted by dementia. Another has Kay insist they move into a home for old folk, where boredom proves a fate worse than death – “Cyril would have had them die cleanly at a cliff edge, whereas Kay had them die by degrees down a long messy slope of

scree.” Other scenarios mercifully leave behind the realistic depiction of decay for more fantastical pastures. The pair have themselves cryogenically frozen, waking up in the future – and live to regret it. They take newly discovered drugs with miraculous rejuvenative powers – ditto. Only one chapter sees them both living hale, hearty and contented into their second century, and this is set in a fantasy universe in which all the world’s problems are solved and the most noticeable effect of the rise in global temperature is to improve the quality of English sparkling wine.

If the folly of pursuing longevity is the chief target of Shriver’s satire, it has to budge up to make room for innumerable others,

including identity politics, fervid Remain voters and Covid hysteria. The ever-ranting Cyril shares some of his creator’s well-publicised views but not others; an editorialising narrative voice often intrudes to indicate why he is wrong to oppose Brexit but right about, say, face masks (“preening badges of purity and conformism”).

This is a far from sentimental book, offering no comfortable reassurances that love can survive all that circumstances throw at it. But despite that – and the finger-jabbing opinionating (often expressed through shame-inducingly funny un-PC jokes) – it is very moving, because Shriver has the magic ability to make the reader invested in the fate – fates, I should say – of her characters.

Better than the alternative? Lionel Shriver’s 15th novel plays out in a multiverse