The End of the Road?

Once again like her penultimate novel, The Motion of the Body Through Space, Shriver presents us with a couple (though British this time, not American) who are in the mid-later stages of life, as our protagonists. And once again, they are a loving couple, very attached to each other, with some less than agreeable grown-up children. It is interesting that once again, there is a daughter who is shrill, self-righteous, bossy, self-conscious; and again there is a son who is a ne’er-do-well, lackluster, grasping, only in this novel, without even charm to redeem him. Shriver seems attached to this particular model of the family: of middle class, capable, responsible, thoughtful, very likeable parents, and children who seem not to be worth a fraction of their parents. 

We meet Kay and Cyrus, an NHS nurse and doctor respectively, in their 50s. The couple watch their own parents’ demise, dementia and cancer and a broken hip amongst the causes of death. This is not what they would relish for themselves. They make a suicide pact that when the younger of the two of them, Kay, turns 80, they will end their lives with Seconal at the end of her birthday. (Cyrus is 14 months older than Kay.) The arguments for such a choice:

chosen to take their own lives whilst still of sound mind and body […] in order to exercise agency over one’s own old age one had to sacrifice a small bit that “wasn’t rubbish.” […] a shorter life vibrant to its very end was surely more desirable than blighting a fine and fruitful existence with protracted decay […] what a terrible burden the escalating number of frail, elderly patients was placing on a health service […]

p47

But Kay also realises this could be

misconstrued as a castigation of anyone who chose to endure beyond eighty as short-sighted and selfish

p48

When she tries to amend this,

to soften the childing self-righteousness of the essay to accompany the service, she merely managed to sound condescending (we’re responsible, but it’s too much to ask for you to be responsible)

p65

Shriver is very sensitive to how our choices can come across as a reproach to others who make different choices. 

The novel then plays out a dozen different possible scenarios – where Kay dies, but Cyrus does not, then the other way round; when they both decide to opt out of the suicide pact, and die of other causes (accident, dementia, etc), or make alternative arrangements – Shiver considers both a top end, posh nursing home, as well as a dystopian one more like a prison than a health care facility – Shriver provides a mind-boggling raft of scenarios, almost as if to dare the reader to select one which is ‘good’. Some are of course more merciful than others, some far grimmer; this novel provides both a set of permutations and combinations, as well as a whole spectrum from merciful to damned. There are some best case scenarios played out here for Kay and Cyrus, where old age is remarkably attractive and rewarding, and some which are pitiful. 

And it is not even that all scenarios must end in death; for e.g. in one version, medication is found which halts aging and people live forever as 25 year-old versions of themselves, and the consequent dystopian world which evolves if humans no longer feel the urgency of time and their own mortality. (Shriver projects that first they will try everything out, because although they can die of accidents, by and large, they have unfailingly good health, eternal youth, and endless time, and so, endless chances to try everything, reinvent themselves in every conceivable way, try on every fad and experience and back again; to the point of ennui, that they just go back to the original, even if rather dull or mundane reality, because there is no real point in endlessly changing themselves anymore.) Or another version where cryogenics actually works, effectively but rather awfully.  

It is great fun that Shriver temporally sites her couple reaching their 80s in the time of the Brexit, and weaves that political commentary into the context of Kay and Cyrus’ old age choices. She also deftly weaves the pandemic and lockdown in the UK into the context, and in some scenarios, projects our protagonists up to year 2039 (but Shriver does seem to enjoy predicting the future, as she did in Mandibles: A Family 2029-47, where economies crash, financial security is wiped out, the world faces shortages of all kinds, and people turn on each other, family and friends alike, turning almost feral in a doomsday scenario anticipating the breakdown of society and even civilisation as the struggle for existence survival becomes everything.) 

However, Shriver has a real sense of humour and does not hesitate to take the mickey out of herself: In a conversation between Kay and Cyrus, she writes,

“Please tell me you’re not listening to that Shriver woman. She’s a hysteric. And so annoying smug, as if she wants civilisation to collapse, just so she can be proved right. I can’t bear the sound of her voice.” There was indeed an annoying American import – another one of these Yankee anglophiles who wouldn’t go back where she came from – who kept claiming on Radio 4 that some book of hers had predicted the whole debacle now supposedly well underway.

p203-4

It would appear Shriver is almost pre-empting criticism, taking the wind out of the sails of her critics by writing the criticisms into her novel herself.  

In the hands of a less able author, this novel could have turned into a laundry list of different scenarios, with a flavour of pic-n-mix thrown in where some bits and pieces of the story keep reappearing here and there verbatim in different chapters, because some scenes have to be repeated before the fork in the path can come some way along, moving the choice or narrative onto a different path and outcome. Even with Shriver’s considerable skill and very judicious, carefully placed repeats of some choice passages to indicate the approach of the fork in the path, nevertheless those repeats still leave the reader with a sense of groundhog day, the oh-here-we-are-again feeling, parallel universes indeed.  

Shriver saves her most compelling argument for the last iteration, where Kay and Cyrus retabulate the inevitability or otherwise of their suicide pact. Practically, they can still draw back with no harm done, downsize a little since they have spent their savings and just rely on their pensions, and no one need know or be alarmed. So only an ideological argument continues to compel them (given they both see no morality problem in suicide, and no duty to continue living). At 80 and 82, they are still in relatively good health and contented with life, but neither think they will remain this way for a lot longer, and when they ask themselves how much better their lives will get from there, they know the answer realistically is that it is a 100% chance everything will get worse for them, possibly, quite a lot worse.

“I want to let all this go when it still hurts to let it go. When we can still feel a sense of loss. When what we’re losing is still whole, and not corrupted, and diminished and made dreadfully sad. When people will still be sorry to see us go. […] Our lives are artworks. Sure, we can do a deal with the devil. We can accept decrepitude in trade for remaining technically alive – as a travesty of what we used to be, a walking – or not walking – self-humiliation. But that’s like vandalising our own creations. It’s like destroying what we love in order to keep it. You and I, we can still talk. Still make sense. We can still enjoy each other’s company. Other people can still enjoy our company. You were a fine tenor. Let’s go out on a high note”

263-5

Shriver knows that she has taken the notion of suicide – not euthanasia under conditions where one is either in such acute pain, or where end of life is anyway eminent and definite, or both – but actually topping oneself in good health and in sound mind – to its extremes, exploring scenarios likely and unlikely, pleasant and unpleasant. In a sense, she uses writing and fiction to do exactly what it does best, explore life possibilities, play out scenarios, track many possible narratives spiralling out from the same starting point. And although Shriver ends up making a compelling case for the suicide pact at 80, or when she judges it to be just about at the turning point where age will increasingly compromise health, one gets the feeling that this is all still theoretical somehow, conceptual rather than actual, still an abstraction, an argument… well, let’s just say having read this book, I feel no compulsion to rush round to Shriver’s house to dash the Seconal tablets from her hands. In any case, old-age is yet a way off for Shriver, and as a reader, I only look forward to many more great novels by this intelligent author and gifted writer before those old-age management choices need to be faced.