Game Control: A Novel (P.S.) by Lionel Shriver

Author:Lionel Shriver [Shriver, Lionel]
Language: zho
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: #genre
ISBN: 9780061239502
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Published: 2009-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

race had been awfully fortunate to suffer a cutback right before the species would have burgeoned to destabilizing size, hinting that maybe QUIETUS was not so barmy after all. The poor sod would get shot down as a fascist. So no one would observe that economies were booming, jobs plentiful, hunger and disease rare; that by the time the population returned to six billion its growth rate had safely levelled off; that after the disappearance of a third of their citizens overnight most countries had had enough war for the time being. Matters really much improved would prove politically awkward, and presidents and PMs would rush to take credit for the new world order. No one would thank him, you could count on that.

Except a small, perverse cult of votaries after his death, reviled by the majority but still legal in a democracy after all, would keep his portrait on their walls and trade among themselves in a blackmarket of Piper paraphernalia: old population articles, conference abstracts, crusty condom packets that their owners would claim really landed on Nyrere’s desk.

Driving back, Calvin contented himself that even if this little diet he planned to put the population on turned into a complete and utter horlicks, he would still have done mankind a favour: something (anything) would have happened. How destitute the world would be without tyrants! For wasn’t any event salvation from the simpering daily maw of cups of coffee and go-slow bumps? Weren’t people hungrier for meaning than for virtue? Weren’t world wars, in their very badness, really rather a good thing? So the benevolent Calvin Piper would martyr himself for incident, for a turn of the page.

For truth be told he did feel a bit peculiar about sprinkling Pachyderm over sparsely settled Iowa and the one-child families of France. Calvin consoled himself that Western civilization required regular cathartic upheavals. Wasn’t the First World always stirring up trouble, without which life became one big plumped pillow?

Because give the West a catastrophe and it was Christmas. Anything but lie in the neatly turned bed it had made. Calvin was amused at

wazungu ranting at how nothing in Africa

worked. Why did they imagine they stayed? To wallow in the pleasant obstruction of a country where sending a single parcel took half a day. Suffer any inconvenience to avoid the horrors of efficiency, the grim success of Scandinavia: the racially balanced curricula, the dogged recycling, the healthy salads, the loom of a tall athletic population with white-gold hair, as if fresh from terror. No, give them a little plague, a baptism of disaster and the too-white world would thrive. It needed setbacks to reprieve itself from the organized nightmare of perfectly separated garbage.

As for the Third World, they’d barely notice. Thirty-five per cent of their people dropping dead overnight would seem perfectly normal. They were used to rotten luck.

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