'The Mandibles' by Lionel Shriver

This is best described as a hoot.

It is quite a long novel being over 500 pages in length, but it is an easy read and a very enjoyable one too. It was published in 2016 - so before Trump, Brexit, Covid and the other geopolitical instabilities that have rather defined our present times, and it is set in the near future. The novel is best described as a dystopian black comedy, and with one or two caveats it is terrifyingly plausible.

The subtitle is 'a family 2029-2047'. The setting is the USA where a Mexican-born president is struggling to cope with an economic crisis that is far worse than that provoked by the crash of 1929. The US economy has totally collapsed, the government decides to default on its debts and the dollar is no longer the world's reserve currency. Economic confidence plummets as result, savings and investments lose nearly all their worth, strict exchange controls are brought in and, as a start, all gold held in private hands in whatever form is confiscated by the government. This all happens in the first few pages.

The narrative then focuses on the impact of these events on a middle class extended family whose lives are first disrupted and then totally upended. It takes some time to work out who is who and how everyone is related to one another - there are four generations - but once that hurdle is overcome the story swims along at pace. The range of characters is splendid, comprising some fairly well-grounded and responsible central figures mixed up nicely with others who are more colourful, eccentric and, in some cases, unhinged. There are all manner of personality and values clashes, but circumstances and residual family affection mean that over time as the economic crisis evolves and deepens, they are increasingly reliant on one another. Adversity brings unwelcome proximity, and while each person responds in a different way, they find ways of making it work.

There are some great observations. One of the stronger characters in the story is a chap called Willing who starts out as a deeply irritating teenage know-it-all before maturing later one in the story:

Precocious was not the same as smart, much less the same as wise, and the perfect opposite of informed - since the more you prided yourself on knowing already the less you listened and the less you leaned. Worse, with application, less glibly gifted peers often caught up with r overtook prodigies by early adulthood, and meantime the kid to whom everything came so effortlessly never mastered the grind of sheer hard work.

Here are two others I particularly enjoyed:

Now isn't the time for novels. Nothing made up is more interesting than what's actually happening. We're in a novel.

To pass the time, Nollie regaled them with reports from her friends in France, who said that Americans' reputation abroad was looking up. The arrogant, loud, gauche, boastful stereotype was obsolete. The few of their compatriots who ventured to Europe were widely regarded as modest, deferent, deflective. They were increasingly renowned for a sly acidity, dry self-deprecation and black humour. No one tossed off cliches about Americans having 'no sense of irony' when the entire country had become an irony writ large.

Things get more and more unpleasant for the family as the story proceeds. But the tone throughout is light and playful, despite underlying seriousness. This really is a terrific trick that Lionel Shriver has pulled off. The novel manages to be seriously thought-provoking and highly entertaining at the same time.

For the final section we jump over a decade or more later to the aftermath of the economic crisis. It is now 2047 and the USA is trying to rebuild its confidence again and having to get used to no longer holding any kind of sway over the world. Some characters have died, others have become old while the younger ones are now adults and a group of them decide to head to Nevada which has declared independence from the rest of the country. The ending is quite gentle, but satisfying too. I thought that Lionel Shriver might have been a little more ambitious when reflecting on potential technological developments in the 2047 section. There is a brief mention of self-driving vehicles, and a sub plot about a chip injected into a character’s brain. But I think there was scope to have had more fun with this aspect.

Overall I thought this was a very skilfully written novel. It succeeds as a highly original plot, contains a cast of compelling characters and paints an entirely credible picture of what really could well happen in the near future. It is not emotionally engaging – nor does it set out to be – but it is interesting and royally entertaining to read.