Leave or remain? That’s the question hanging like a cartoon sledgehammer over Lionel Shriver’s 17th novel. Although she makes merry with the parallels, her subject isn’t Brexit. It’s how long a person should choose to live. 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?
The characters Shriver charges with assessing the options are Cyril and Kay Wilkinson. We meet them in their early fifties as they return home after Kay’s father’s funeral. 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’. Cyril, a GP, has seen enough geriatric patients to conclude that few people maintain good physical and mental health beyond their seventies.
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