Artigo original publicado no The Telegraph
Chris Harvey
The fearless author on the ‘disadvantage’ of being male, ‘evil’ hate speech laws and why universities are ‘destroying’ themselves
“You cannot survive as a civilisation in a state of cringing shame,” says Lionel Shriver, as she launches into a broadside at the self-loathing that people are supposed to feel about the colonial sins of the West. “I am very suspicious of this whole pose of guilt,” she says, explaining that it’s usually used by white people to “assert superiority over other white people”. I’m with the writer of We Need to Talk About Kevin at her house outside Lisbon; she moved there in October after living in the UK for 25 years. She’s not holding back.
“Real guilt is a terrible sensation. It is not something that you parade, shame. That is not what these people are experiencing. It’s proud guilt. It’s used to shut people up, to essentially deprive you of your right to free speech. You know, you’ve been privileged, so we’re taking all your privileges away, and we’re giving them to other people. That doesn’t work. It’s all to do with heritable guilt. And I reject that out of hand.”
We’ve been chatting about her latest novel, Mania, which digs into the way that social manias have come to dominate our world. They’re insidious, she believes, from the clamour for Covid lockdowns (“the biggest public health mistake in history. And the biggest economic mistake in history”) to the response to the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis (“they were marching down the street in Korea. They don’t have any black people. This was just social contagion”) to global warming (“anyone who is not on side with climate change is evil”).
The 66-year-old lives with her husband, the jazz drummer Jeff Williams, who is off playing in Slovenia; their life together is punctuated by periods at home and away. She misses her friends in London, but spends so much of her time reading and writing that she doesn’t feel lonely – “not consciously… I am very comfortable spending long periods of time alone.”
There’s a pool and a lemon tree in the garden. Inside, there’s a simplicity to her home; it’s unfussy, and so is she, in a cardigan and boot slippers. She has an infectious laugh. “My sensibility has an element of wickedness,” she says. It surfaces in her books and her columns, giving them their provocative edge. “It’s kinda the point,” she says. “Otherwise, someone else might as well write them.”
The worldwide success of We Need to Talk About Kevin, which won the Orange Prize in 2005, made her famous. She’s written other talked-about novels since, though none that has captured the popular imagination in quite the same way. “I don’t know whether I will ever pull it off again,” she says.
In her 2016 novel, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047, she imagined a near future America, with its first Latino president, experiencing complete economic collapse. In Mania, she goes back in time to depict an alternative history that begins in 2011, “because I think that’s when things started really going to s—”. It’s a dystopian satire, dark and funny in uncomfortable ways, about how society is radically transformed by the Mental Parity movement – “the last great civil rights fight” – which maintains that “stupidity is a fiction” and that it’s “discriminatory” to suggest that anyone is more intelligent than anyone else.
Uttering any words that suggest otherwise leads to public rebuke – calling something “dumb” can mean losing your job or having your children taken away. An intermediate step involves attending a six-week re-education course, in which participants learn never to refer to a room as “dim” and that because people cannot be “thick”, nor can planks of wood. Gooseberry fool is off the menu.
Of course, this mirrors the sort of changes that have been made to existing works of fiction, removing references to anyone being “fat”, “plump”, “mad”, “nuts”, or even “rather pretty” in Roald Dahl, for instance. Has anyone ever suggested Shriver’s own work be combed by a sensitivity reader? “No one,” she says. “I mean, I’ve been with HarperCollins for a long time, so nobody in that company is that stupid.”
Beyond the comic set pieces, there’s a serious intent in how Shriver depicts society being hollowed out from within, and it’s clear that it is no imaginary world in her sights. “Things start falling apart because functionality no longer matters; all that matters is ideology. And that’s what we’re dealing with right now. You’re watching grand storied universities destroy themselves because they no longer believe in themselves, they don’t believe in the canon they’re supposed to be transferring to the next generation.” The students now have the power, she says. “It was bad enough that the universities had converted into supermarkets, which were offering products. But the administration and faculty are now terrified of their own student bodies.”
Cancel culture, Shriver believes, “is getting worse… there’s nothing moderate about it. It’s aggressive, hostile, angry, deliberately disruptive, vengeful, perhaps vengeful above all… it’s about hunting people’s careers for sport.” The goal, she says, “is to utterly destroy you. And that is the appeal of this stuff – that satisfaction of destroying other people’s lives. And also, in doing so, you don’t have to take any responsibility for being a destructive force. You are the force of righteousness.”
We talk about JK Rowling, whom the Telegraph has described as “the woman who can’t be cancelled”. “Of course, they would have taken her down if they could,” Shriver says. “That’s why she’s been so important. Because she hasn’t apologised, which has been the format, traditionally. She’s stuck by her guns and has helped make it more possible for people who are in less powerful positions to also be forthright about their reservations about this consuming social mania for transgenderism.”
What has particularly disturbed her is “the personal disloyalty between individuals who maybe go back decades,” she says. In the case of the Harry Potter cast, “it’s been really hideous to watch. It’s almost always someone to the Left disavowing someone who’s a little bit to the Right,” she adds.
It happened to Shriver after an appearance on Question Time in 2019: “There was one person in particular who ended our friendship… for purely political reasons. We’d been friends for 13 years, and then suddenly she couldn’t. I always thought there was an undercurrent of she couldn’t afford to be associated with me.”
Mania openly risks offending more people. Its narrator, university lecturer Pearson Converse, revels in taboo language, such as “thickos”, “dummies” and “retards”. Shriver makes a defence of the latter – “it was used very casually [in the US] and it wasn’t a big deal… it was a schoolyard thing, but even when I was a kid, you wouldn’t have called someone whom the state had classified as retarded that.
“One of the reasons I get exasperated with that kind of ‘ooh, ooh’ restriction is because it’s a completely different thing to fling a slur at someone who through no fault of their own has been born with a mental disability. And to throw it at a friend of yours who’s just said something stupid, or even to use it to describe yourself.”
She once “slipped up” and used it about herself at a literary festival, she says, “and boy, did I get it in the neck from a couple of audience members who were just outraged… but I was talking about myself – whom had I hurt?”
The novel is about the phenomenon of cultural revolution rather than an attack on the less intelligent. “If there’s any single social mania that this book is based on, it’s really transgenderism,” Shriver says. “I don’t think it’s that much of an overstatement to say it feels like it comes right out of a Nazi concentration camp. Cutting off people’s healthy body parts. I have grown only more horrified.”
I wonder if her decision to rechristen herself with a boy’s name at 17 was in any way influenced by a gender dysphoria of her own. “No, not really. I mean, I was a tomboy. I was sometimes envious of my brothers, because their lives were less restricted than mine. And my father himself admitted in his eighties that they probably underestimated me.
“I have never relished physically being female,” she continues. “I don’t like being physically weaker. My mental image of myself is taller. I hated getting periods. I didn’t end up taking advantage of the biggest plus side of being female because I didn’t have any children.”
She chooses her words carefully, seriously, apart from “taller”, which she delivers with a laugh. “There are problems with being male too,” she adds. “Right now, being male, I would say, is on a career level, a disadvantage… because of the DEI business (diversity, equality and inclusion), which has been going on for a long time.
“I am very hostile to all this equality legislation,” she continues. “I believe in equality under the law, which is a primitive principle of liberal democratic government. And the UK has abandoned it… This hate speech legislation is evil. It’s about controlling what you can and can’t say. I’m willing to make the sacrifice of living in a world where people are not always nice, because that’s the real world.
“You know, racism shouldn’t be against the law, as an internal state. We all have our conceptions and sometimes misconceptions of groups of people. And we have a right to that. We are now well on our way to criminalising internal states. The Left thinks you should be able to say things that are insulting as much as you want, as long as it’s the ‘wrong person’, someone from the Right. I’m close to a free speech absolutist, and that absolutism is partly reactive. But I would scrap all hate speech legislation.”
She is talking theoretically, not advocating racism as a lifestyle choice. In Mania, Obama fails to win a second term because he’s “too erudite”; Pearson’s most talented student is black. There’s a distinction to be made between the stridency of her opinions and the subtlety of her novels. She wanted Mania “to be fun and playful, and also to have a serious personal element… it’s not meant to be hectoring”.
She’s still thoroughly engaged with British politics, though she remains an American citizen. She’s imported her London routine, too. She still cycles, although the hill is almost impossible to pedal up with full panniers of shopping. She can’t run as she used to because “my knees are shot”, but she exercises with determination. “I’ll do 500 burpees; I do mountain climbers, I use that for high-intensity interval training, so 300 pairs of mountain climbers, 10 times in a row. I can’t tell you how much I hate that. I have a whole set of callisthenics, sit-ups and press-ups. It’s dreary as f—. I’m very, very dependent on the television. I’m still playing tennis in the summer,” she adds, “and that’s the only part that’s fun, but I have a vertebra that is out of alignment – this is going to turn me into a cripple if it gets much worse, but I’m still defying the odds.”
She also sticks to her unusual habit of eating one meal a day, at midnight. She doesn’t have an eating disorder, she says, “the meal that I eat is generous and well-balanced and healthy. I’m just a small person. I don’t require that much food, and if I did eat three meals a day, they would have to be ridiculously tiny. And I’d rather eat a substantial meal once, with wine.
“If I ate as much as I wanted to, I would be very fat,” she adds, “with my genetic background on my mother’s side, I would easily become a butterball.” Her mother, she says, was “a noticeably less happy woman from her forties onward, because she always weighed more than she wanted to.” Her elder brother, Greg, was 24 stone when he died from complications related to clinical obesity. She wrote a novel based on him, Big Brother, in 2013, which side-lined body-positivity to deal with being “fat” as a health problem.
In her essay collection Abominations (2022), Shriver wrote that “there have been three concerted attempts at my effective ‘cancellation’”. First, after she donned a sombrero at the end of a speech defending cultural appropriation in 2016. Next, in 2018, when she took issue with publisher Penguin Random House’s drive to diversify its staff. (Has the publishing world forgiven her? “I think that the Left in general is an unforgiving bunch. And most of publishing is occupied by Left-wing women. So, by the transitive property, I’m not forgiven.”) Third, when she questioned mass immigration to the UK in 2021.
I mention the former deputy Labour leader Alan Johnson’s comment to me that same year on how stopping migration across the Channel via France, Holland and Belgium inevitably got worse because of the loss of co-operation when we left the EU. “I don’t think Brexit has been very determinative of immigration,” she says. “The real problem in the UK is legal immigration, and the Tories, rather than tightening immigration policy, loosened it further.” She doesn’t want to get too deeply into that issue, she says, because “that’s the book I’m writing now.” A pause. “That’s the one that’s going to end my career.” A laugh. “Promises, promises.”
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