A matter of life or death: Should We Stay or Should We Go, by Lionel Shriver, reviewed

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. He suggests they end their lives on Kay’s 80th birthday. She agrees. He places a box containing lethal pills on the top shelf of their fridge. 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. Will they depart this life as Britain leaves the EU? Or will they try to renegotiate their deal?

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. But that’s when the fun starts, as Shriver uses each subsequent chapter to explore a full range of death/survival scenarios. She toys with everything from car crashes to cryogenic storage.