Of all the many hundreds of people I’ve interviewed down the years, only a handful have ever liked to refer to themselves in the third person, a habit I usually take as a sign of borderline insanity. About Lionel Shriver, however, I see no current cause for alarm. OK, so she does call herself Shriver in the introduction to her latest book (“Shriver supported Brexit,” she writes, at the beginning of a sizeable list of the crimes she has committed in the eyes of the progressive and the pious). But her sanity, it seems to me, is not (or not yet) in doubt. Offer her a glass of fizzing, liberal-left Kool-Aid and her response will be to run, at speed, to the nearest tap in search of a generous gallon of cold water.
In Abominations, a collection mostly of her journalism, Shriver splashes this icy water all over and it’s very bracing; as I read, I thought of those scientists who tell us that a daily cold shower can help to boost the human immune system. It feels ever more vital to me – a matter of simple good health – that people try sometimes to read writers with whom they disagree (though I don’t always disagree with her); to do so is akin to filling the lungs with oxygen. It’s not only that we can’t know what we really think unless we’ve something to push against; it should be possible, just occasionally, for us to change our minds. Almost nothing worries me more about our present culture than the fact that the words “I was wrong” are now almost entirely absent from public discourse.
