Lionel Shriver is the bestselling author of 15 novels, including the Orange Prize-winner
We Need to Talk About Kevin, and a prolific journalist currently with a fortnightly column in Britain's the
Spectator. Her work has been translated into 35 languages.
Her new novel
MANIA is published April 11th 2024 (Harper Collins).
First of all, I must say I thought MANIA was phenomenal. It's darkly funny and uncomfortably accurate about the appetite our society seems to have for ideas we would have firmly rejected just a couple of decades ago, such as the idea that women can be men and men can be women. In the 'ALT' (alternative) world of MANIA this destructive derangement takes the form of the 'Mental Parity Movement' where discrimination based on intelligence is illegal.The books contains allusions and similarities to manias that people will recognise such as transgender theory, lockdowns, vaccine mandates, critical race theory, the climate catastrophe cult, affirmative action etc. Which of those specifically inspired you to write MANIA? When did you start tracking them and why?A social mania is so all-encompassing that I hardly needed to 'keep track' as one followed the other.
All that's required is to take a step back and recognise: everyone has gone nuts. Everyone is reciting exactly the same thing over and over again. Everyone thinks exactly the same thing and is consumed by exactly the same thing. Any dissent turns people into crazed animals. The media, academia and Government are all disturbingly in accord. Oh, I see. It must be another social mania. One can take some comfort in 'this too shall pass', but it will only pass, apparently, to make way for another mania.
I set the novel starting in an alternative 2011, because it was in 2012 when I identified
the first of the recent hysterias took off — the rage for transgenderism — and I wanted to get behind them and fashion my own mania. If anything, the mania I invented most resembles our sudden obsession with pretending to change sex, because virtually overnight it becomes holy writ that you mustn't ever impugn anyone else's intelligence, much as virtually overnight transgenderism also became 'the last great civil rights fight', and to emit a single discouraging word about 'trans' would be guaranteed to destroy your career and reputation.
But I am passing larger comment on the lot of them: #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, DEI and Covid, which was itself a mania — the infection fatality rate of the disease especially for anyone but the very old did not merit our draconian response —
and which gave birth to sub-manias (the love of lockdowns, the cult of the vaccine, the hysterical faith in masks). The climate 'emergency' or 'collapse' or 'global boiling' or whatever we're calling it now shows every sign of being another one.
Comment: No one has documented Germany's slide into authoritarianism through censorship and legal proceedings better than writer CJ Hopkins - who has been persecuted by the German government for his outspoken (and accurate) political and social commentary: