Jan 13

Jan 13 A really good read - Should We Stay or Should We Go

Say what you like about Lionel Shriver’s writing, there’s no denying that the American born, UK resident writer has no fear of tackling difficult, provocative and at times downright unpalatable subjects. Her novels have examined demography and AIDS, morbid obesity and filial duty and, of course, in her multi-million best-seller, We Need to Talk About Kevin, mass murder.

The resulting stories are often challenging and even troublesome, but always memorable and thought-provoking.

And her latest book, Should We Stay or Should We Go, is no exception. It charges headlong into the uncomfortable territory of old age, physical and mental decline and the thorny question of dominion over our own deaths.

I realise that doesn’t, on the face of it, promise to be the most entertaining of subjects, but trust me when I say that Shriver has produced an unexpectedly enjoyable and compellingly page-turning story.

We meet our protagonists, married couple Cyril and Kay Wilkinson, the former a GP, the latter a nurse, in 1991 when they are in their early fifties and Kay’s father is in the end stages of a protracted decline from dementia. Having witnessed and cared for so many patients similarly ‘eroded by ageing’s remorseless decay’, and not wanting to go through the same experience themselves, or burden either the NHS or their children with their inevitable deterioration, the couple agree that when Kay turns 80 - a year after Cyril - they will commit suicide together.

I know, I know - not cheery. But it’s when, in the warp-speed passing of time that we can all relate to, Cyril and Kay reach their self-imposed deadline date, that Shriver’s storytelling takes off in all sorts of unexpected, and at times almost rollicking, directions.

Because, rather than following the couple as their pact plays out to its agreed conclusion, instead Shriver explores a whole variety of alternative scenarios, some frivolous, some dystopian, some deceptively utopian, in which Cyril and Kay meet their ends…..or, not.

In one Kay changes her mind, in another it’s Cyril who ducks out at the last minute. In one the couple end up in a luxurious retirement community by the coast, in another they’re incarcerated in the care home from hell. One alternative imagines a world where the cure for ageing has been discovered, and in another the couple are cyrogenicaly frozen and defrosted at some unspecified time in the far future when mankind has grown feathers and lives in hives.

The novel incorporates a host of current issues from Brexit and refugee migration to, of course, the pandemic and whilst Shriver typically doesn’t shy from being challenging or at times uncomfortably bleak about the deteriorations and difficulties of increasing old age, she also appears to be enjoying probing the potential of future possibilities. And as a result, so do we.

Should We Stay or Should We Go may not always be the most cheerful of reads, but it is one that you won’t forget in a hurry, in plenty of good ways.