#Should i stay or should i go series#
#Should i stay or should i go free#
#Should i stay or should i go crack#

In subsequent timelines, the world is much less ordinary and is, in a couple of instances, transformed by medical and technological leaps.

#Should i stay or should i go crack#

Her appetite wasn’t improved by a stuporous lady opposite, who was smearing porridge into her mouth with three fingers as if plastering a crack in a wall.” “The glutinous porridge arrived so cold that, overturned, the oats would have stuck to the bowl. Whatever Shriver is satirizing here (the spirit-crushing anhedonia of the untrammeled nanny state?), she does so at length, as if enjoying the slightly sadistic exercise. No spices, no caffeine, no cream or milk. The menu at Close of Day is even blander. They must also turn over their magazines and iPads and resign themselves to living without books - all part of a strict institutional ban on intellectually stimulating items, which the head matron deems “upsetting.” In one of them, their callous, awful children commit them to a ghastly old-age facility, Close of Day Cottages, whose sadistic staff compels the couple, after 60 years of marriage, to sleep in separate rooms. Some of these parallel realities differ but slightly from the baseline, in the sense they are recognizable versions of the world the Wilkinsons set out in. It all goes on a bit, in alternate universe after alternate universe.

#Should i stay or should i go series#

At the moment early in the book when we think the couple have drunk the hemlock and quietly, sensibly put this world behind them, they magically reappear in the next chapter - the first of a series of branching timelines that cause them to live and die and live again. But that’s not how Lionel Shriver’s novel works. After fully meeting the Wilkinsons, it is hard not to wish them exactly the sort of fate that they’ve devised for themselves: a tidy exit. If a writer is going to hang a story on the question of a suicide pact’s fulfillment, it is probably best if the characters involved are ones whom we fondly desire to see survive. The ponce may have Boris in his thrall, but Neil Ferguson has overestimated the lethality of the virus by at least an order of magnitude.” That weedy, doom-mongering computer modeler at Imperial College London who predicted 510,000 British deaths without draconian intervention - he has his head up his backside.

For example, here is Cyril on the pandemic, which happens to strike in the novel as the Wilkinsons are approaching their long-contemplated last act: Current affairs such as the Brexit vote are the couple’s abiding interest, even more than their own children (or so it seems). It’s not ripped from the headlines, perhaps, but neatly clipped from them, its manner quippy, satirical and arch, its characters capable of op-ed-style rants on the questions at hand, and on many others too. We are reading a novel of issues, a thesis novel concerning euthanasia and medical rationing. With the winding of this fatalistic clock, which requires only a few pages and transpires in the form of chipper banter reminiscent of a Noël Coward comedy, we find ourselves in the realm of the high-concept. Kay is skeptical of this plan at first, but after noticing one day that her mother has started to grow forgetful, she tells her husband: “I’m all in.” When they turn 80 (or rather when Kay turns 80, because she is a few months younger than he) they will down an overdose of sleeping pills that Cyril has already stashed in the refrigerator, 30 years ahead of time. For Cyril, a man who tends to overthink things in a bloodless utilitarian way and is always alert to the interests of the collective, the drawn-out death of his father-in-law was proof that aged people linger too long on earth, consuming medical and social resources that are best devoted to younger folks.Īnd so, over drinks one night, Cyril proposes a plan that he hopes will save his wife and him - not to mention the state - a lot of bother. For Kay, her father’s “infinite dotage” was a demoralizing ordeal that grated on her senses - its smells, its messes - and seemed to take years off her own life. Kay’s father, a victim of dementia, has just expired after a long decline.

#Should i stay or should i go free#

When we meet them in their 50s, the Wilkinsons, Kay and Cyril, a married couple, she a nurse and he a doctor in Britain’s National Health Service, she a blowzy free spirit who likes her wine, he an earnest socialist intoxicated by his own virtue, are considering whether they should kill themselves. SHOULD WE STAY OR SHOULD WE GO By Lionel Shriver