7/30/2019 Lionel Shriver on dystopia and The Mandibles

TLS ONLINE FEBRUARY 3, 2017

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Wall Street on Black Thursday, 1929 © Fox Photos/Getty Images

Dystopia in the next room
Lionel Shriver discusses how to create a truly frightening future

LIONEL SHRIVER

While the near-future dystopia may be old hat, I’ve only just tried my
hand at one, and the genre wasn’t stale for me. In fact, writing The
Mandibles: A family, 2029–2047, I had a blast.

I’ve always been a huge fan of science fiction, including the “speculative
fiction” from mainstream literary writers such as Margaret Atwood (The
Handmaid’s Tale is soon to become a television series), Cormac
McCarthy (The Road), and Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go). To make
my own contribution, I steered clear of the environmental dystopia,
handsomely covered by many other authors, including J. G. Ballard (The
Drowned World and High Rise) and T. C. Boyle (A Friend of the Earth);
and I likewise avoided the oft-visited nuclear apocalypse, movingly
addressed in the likes of Neville Shute’s On the Beach.

Instead I described an economic dystopia. In my USA shy of thirteen

years hence, a rival international currency sidelines the dollar; in

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retaliation, America’s president renounces the national debt. Because the

“deadbeat nation” can no longer borrow, the government prints money to
pay its bills. Inflation takes off in earnest. Americans, including the
multi-generational family through whom the story is told, suffer a
massive loss of wealth.

Most futuristic novels are set safely a long way off, often hundreds or
even thousands of years from the present. The setting of David Mitchell’s
The Bone Clocks, the 2040s, thus qualifies as a near future right around
the corner. But I couldn’t resist beginning my novel in October of 2029.
The centenary of the stock market crash heralding the Great Depression
conveys an implicit sense of foreboding. Nevertheless, the extreme
proximity of the date risked obsolescence. I was heartened by the fact
that we still read 1984 and 2001: A space odyssey well after those years
have come and gone. The test of these novels is not whether they make
accurate predictions, but whether they hold together in their own terms.
But I was also willing to see my novel drift into irrelevance in the
upcoming decade. After all, most books drift into irrelevance, and that’s
in the rare instance that they don’t start out there. The trade-off was to be
able to create a feeling of immediacy, an impression that this could
happen tomorrow. Dave Eggers did something similar in The Circle, a
cyber-dystopia that cites no year, and employs technology already more
or less available.

I wanted the reader to enter this story like walking into the next room. In
fiction set centuries from now, the plight of the characters never threatens
to become the plight of the reader, too. In the interest of maintaining my
this-could-be-you sensation, I didn’t want to invoke the chaos and
barbarism of Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse or Antonia Honeywell’s The
Ship. So the biggest challenge of building the novel was to control the
scale of events – to keep a tight rein on the process of social decay. Amid
financial crisis, civilization doesn’t implode all at once. Keeping the
transformation of my characters’ world gradual, and the changes very
small at first, paid dividends. Minor crossings of a moral line could
therefore seem momentous. When my sixteen-year-old nice-guy
protagonist mugs a ten-year-old for his groceries, the scene is meant to be
quietly horrifying – more so than had I set rampaging murderous hordes
through the streets of New York.

While the novel focuses on fiscal matters, even economic collapse doesn’t
occur in a vacuum. So along the way I threw in a variety of my personal
anxieties: about fresh water shortage, food scarcity, population rise,
antibiotic-resistant bacteria, a cyber catastrophe, the end of the publishing
industry and, worse, the end of newspapers. Meanwhile, I ensured that

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the ethnic transformation of the US continued apace. My America has a

Latino president. Hispanics control the swing vote and have marginalized
the now-unelectable Republican Party (maybe after last year’s election
that makes me an optimist). Much of government business is conducted
in Spanish. My characters have strong and opposing feelings about this
ethnic evolution, but the book itself remains neutral.

Given the closeness of my dates, it wouldn’t have made sense to devise

the sort of wholesale rejig of vocabulary and dialect that we find in
Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, which includes a glossary in the
back. Yet any vernacular is constantly evolving new fashionable
expressions, while people quickly discard once smart, modern-sounding
jargon as hopelessly dated. So I especially enjoyed inventing touches of
new slang for 2029, along with a second set of colloquialisms for the
2047 section. For example, instead of awesome my characters say
malicious; a jerk is a boomerpoop; rubbish or crap is roachbar; instead of
hip or cool, they say careless. Mid-century, a jerk is a T-bill; if you’re full
of shit, you’re talking treasury; if something is rubbish, it’s splug. But I
was surprised to discover how infernally difficult it is to come up with
slang that someone else hasn’t already concocted. Time after time I’d
search for a new word, only to find it listed with multiple definitions in
urbandictionary.com. There’s also a fine art to implying the meaning of a
neologism without being clumsy.

The other joy of the form for me was the throwaway. I loved tossing in
one-liners, like casual reference to a major American military invasion of
New Zealand. (I realize this requires a particular sense of humour.)

And then there was the question of technology. H. G. Wells’s The Time
Machine not only depends on the eponymous invention for its plot, but
focuses thematically on the impotence and passivity of a population when
everything is done for them by gizmos. Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror
series is almost solely concerned with the social effects of technological
change. But in The Mandibles, I deliberately refrained from conjuring a
load of innovative high tech. As a matter of formal obligation, I threw in
the fleX, which substitutes for desktops, laptops and smart phones,
watches, and glasses by stiffening into a screen of whatever size you like,
and which wads in your pocket like a handkerchief. Otherwise, I relied
largely on technology already in the pipeline (though my household
management system, Mojo, doesn’t always work; it keeps ordering milk
until the family is drowning in it). I didn’t expect the reader to be floored
that I had invented driverless electric cars. Their insertion is boring by
design. A clutter of novel gadgets would distract from my purpose. This
is a book about money.

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Given the inauguration of the new president, The Mandibles can appear
prescient. In the book, there is a wall between Mexico and the US, and
Mexico does pay for it – though in my future the wall is to keep
unemployed Americans (or Ameritrash) out. Yet in most of its detail, the
book isn’t prophetic. Right now, the dollar isn’t plummeting in value; the
currency is thriving. While the US national debt continues to rise, the
feds are still pretending that they’ll pay the money back. The president in
the novel may not be an economics whizz, but he’s not a reckless,
unqualified jackass. Nevertheless, there may be a centre-not-holding
atmosphere to my most recent novel – a disturbing sense that apparently
just about anything could happen, and all bets are off.

Lionel Shriver‘s most recent novel is The Mandibles, which appears in

paperback next month

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