The New Republic by Lionel Shriver

Posted on: October 07, 2012

The New Republic by Lionel Shriver

Previously published in the Herald Magazine. 

The New Republic was originally written in 1998. Shriver has said that American publishers were not interested in the book then, citing her ‘american compatriots’ dismissing terrorism as some ‘Foreigner’s Boring Problem’. Of course, this all changed after 9/11 though the book was deemed to sensitive to print for quite some years. It has finally seen the light of day. Unfortunately, many a reader will wish it never had. Adjusted slightly for the events of 9/11, a change which Shriver refers to as a ‘small, irresistible addition’, The New Republic is almost too easy to find offense with, especially for Americans. Leaving Shriver’s strange flippant afterward aside, the book is an incredibly struggle to read. This is not a train wreck you can’t look away from - it is a train wreck you wish you’d never even heard about.

The New Republic is about Barba, a fictitious peninsula that hangs off Portugal like ‘a beard’ and is home to the incendiary Os Soldados Ousados De Barba (or SOB, as Shriver insists on reminding us), an incendiary terrorist organisation who claim responsibility for much of the violence taking place around the world. Edgar Kellog is a journalist deployed to cover Barba as a replacement for the much loved Barrington Saddler who has vanished without a trace. Kellog finds himself surrounded by a group of foreign journalists, all braying sycophants to Saddler’s position as alpha of the pack, but alongside Saddler’s own disappearance has been the sudden lack of terrorist activity by the SOB. Perhaps in a more subtle novel this coincident could be played out better, but in the case of The New Republic, it isn’t.

Shriver is best known for her million-copy selling We Need to Talk About Kevin, in which she created Eva with her tight, closed in world of anxiety and intellect, and Kevin with his frightening, wide open world of no limits. They were both extreme in their natures, hard to like - characters Shriver is well known for turning to - but Shriver’s characterisation of them was diamond sharp and flawless. Sadly, The New Republic has characters who are mostly just a collection of idiosyncrasies, simplified down to a single facet. Protagonist Edgar Kellog’s entire personality can be defined by his ‘I was fat once’ dictum. In fact, his past as a fat, lonely teenager is repeatedly so tediously that it stops being a characteristic and becomes a crutch: just a lazy way to support his every action and thought. The only female character of note Nicola is all ‘sharply articulated wrists, clavicle, and cheekbones as exactingly wrought as haiku’ but not much more. Her only moment of pure independent sentience comes when she points out that a riot may be occurring for the entertainment of the press. ‘Without any journalists watching, everyone might just go home’ she says. ‘You’re inciting them. If you keep waiting for a story, they might just give you one’. Sadly this one moment is ruined by Shriver weighty follow up to the conversation. ‘…this is no time to discuss the ‘Observer Paradox’ replies Edgar, ‘I’ve got a job to do’. Thank you, Ms. Shriver, we already knew you were a journalist once. 

After the cold, heart wrenching brutality of We Need to Talk About Kevin, it is just painful to have to trudge through weighed down prose of The New Republic. Gone is the cruel, perfect precision knife of Shriver’s voice that brought us the damaged, arresting Eva and Kevin - replaced instead with a book like the national fruit of Shriver’s imaginary Barba, the hairy pear: bulbous, sticky, messy.