In 2016, I read Lionel Shriver's book, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047. I've been reminded of it so many times since, coming to think of these instances as 'Mandibles moments.' The book is set in the US, beginning as stated in the subtitle, in 2029. It's focused on the Mandible family who are well off and assume that they're secure in their wealth. However, while people aren't paying attention, the world order shifts. The US is now a pariah nation. The dollar crashes. Thriving Mexico builds a wall to keep out US citizens trying to escape economic hardship. A group of countries led by China and Russia, but not including the US, step in with a new reserve currency. The Mandibles are no longer wealthy, people struggle to meet their basic needs, and US society starts to break down. Witnessing the despicable and cowardly ambush yesterday as the weak orange puppet and his slimeball sidekick (yes, I know--insulting to slime) attacked President Zelenskyy and tried to please their minders in Moscow and Beijing was another Mandibles moment for me. It seems that the current administration is working hard to make sure that the US does become a pariah nation. Does that mean I think the dollar will crash? I have no idea--I'm not an economist or a financial wizard. But I do wonder whether this speculative fiction will become less speculative and less fictional as time goes by, as did The Handmaid's Tale. And whatever the underlying crisis ends up being, it seems clear that the current administration is hell bent on creating various crises, real and imagined-- a typical tool used by authoritarians to justify their actions. And as we all know by now, there are plenty of gullible people in the US ready to lap up the lies. It seems less unlikely now that the US will become a pariah nation than it did when I read the book.
In addition to all of the above, the book is simply a great read. There's a lot of economic stuff at the start in order to set the stage for what comes next, but things pick up after that. The book is funny, too. Oddly enough, I could relate to the young Mandible boy, who was almost a teenager, if I remember correctly. He was the one who ended up taking charge as things were falling apart. He could see where things were headed. As he was warning the others about what was coming, his uncle, an economics professor, kept insisting that the boy was wrong because the theory says such things can't happen (clueless academics--I've known several). Besides, it's the good old USA--it can't happen here! But it did and they had to figure out how to exist in a bewildering world. There's a harrowing scene where some of them set out to buy toilet paper, which I thought of as people in the US told me about their own attempts to acquire same during the pandemic. We never had completely empty toilet paper shelves here. It was bread. Whenever any kind of storm or crisis hits, people start posting pictures of empty bread shelves on social media. I just made my own, something I wouldn't have been able to do so easily had it actually been toilet paper I was after! 😀
Lionel Shriver is a hit or miss author for me and I don't always like her books or her public comments. I think The Mandibles was the first book of hers that I read. Shortly after that I picked up We Need to Talk About Kevin in a charity shop and that was also excellent. I got Big Brother from the library and finished it, but wasn't in love with it and I thought the ending was silly. I started one or two of her other novels since and didn't read very far into them before realizing that they weren't really for me and setting them aside. But The Mandibles has stayed with me and will, I expect, for a long time. There will probably be many more Mandibles moments to come. If you want to read more about the book, here's a review from around the time it was published.
Other speculative fiction/post apocalyptic/ dystopian excellent reads include, How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nakamatsu, Station Eleven and Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel, The Unit by Ninni Holmqvist, and Bewilderment by Richard Powers. A couple of books that I highly recommend that are not fiction: Nuclear War: A Scenario by Annie Jacobsen, which I wrote about here, Fascism in America: Past and Present, edited by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld and Janet Ward, and The Heat Will Kill You First by Jeff Goodell. None of them are cheerful, all are excellent. Yesterday I finished a soon-to-be-published book about the history of fascist/far right movements in Ireland, which was excellent and informative. The far right doesn't have a large presence here, although it's getting more visible. These small groups are being advised by the larger and more organized groups in the UK and US.
Today I will be starting something less disturbing--a soon-to-be-published book about the connections between creativity/art and mathematics, which seems like it will be fascinating--at least I hope it will be. I'll let you know.
