The author's take on cancel culture and free speech is one extended rant
, the American novelist Lionel Shriver has set out a stall for herself as a writer duty-bound to confront what she views as the coming imagined what it is like to be the parent of a school shooter, winning the then-Orange Prize for Fiction in 2005, subsequent novels have tackled the financial and housing crises and has been described as, anti-woke, and as someone who considers that the #MeToo movement got out of hand.
Consequently, all forms of moral superiority have been outlawed. TV quiz shows have been taken off air, Dustin Hoffman has had to return his 1988because it celebrated intelligence, and nobody likes Benedict Cumberbatch because his Sherlock was a supercilious know-all. Obama is pilloried for being “clever”, while the country is gradually preparing to vote into office someone possessed of distinctly baser instincts, and whose own intellect will challenge nobody.
Shriver’s hero in all this is Pearson Converse, a former Jehovah’s Witness whose first two children, Darwin and Zanzibar, she sourced via a sperm donor with a high IQ, and whose third, Lucy, she had with a non-intellectual tree surgeon. But the tree surgeon was hot, so she married him. In this world gone cuckoo, only Pearson, it seems, sees sense.
Satire can be the lifeblood of fiction, of course. We like to be amused while at the same time feeling horrified. But withShe is fearless, yes, but not particularly subtle. Herein, only Pearson, who we can safely assume is Shriver’s avatar, is capable of still-cogent, independent thought.
And yet, needs must. Because if Shriver isn’t our lone voice of reason, who is? While she certainly conjures up much laughter in the dark, too often does she tip over into a hectoring cackle. It is as though she is standing on her tiptoes at the very gates of Hell, where she surely believes everyone on this benighted planet will end up, telling each of the bemused incomers in turn: “Told you so, told you so, told you so.
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