Fiction can change the world. Recently, the success of the Netflix series Adolescence, about a young boy who kills a girl after he’s been influenced by the so-called “manosphere”, led to fierce debate in the British House of Commons on whether they should impose stronger regulations on social media. We should ban social media, we should pay more attention to misogynist content, and parents should check in with their children more often – everyone’s talking about real-world problems inspired by a tv-series. But this is not the first fictional foray into this dark topic.
Years ago, a novel with a similar plot was published, and it’s time we return to it. Lionel Shriver’s chilling 2003 novel We Need to Talk About Kevin was inspired by the US school shootings in the 1990s. It’s written from the point of view of Eva, the titular Kevin’s mother, who tries to figure out what made him kill several classmates and a teacher. Needless to say, that answer is never given. More interestingly, though, it explores the notion of culpability and the idea that parents might have seen it coming – and because it focuses on Eva rather than Kevin, it also shows how parents might respond to such a gruesome event.
For gruesome it is. I know people who claim they haven’t read the book (or watched the movie) because they could not handle the subject matter. Somehow, this is every adult’s worst nightmare – and of course this makes sense. Not only do we imagine the horror of everyone who’d be affected by such a dreadful event, but some of us also wonder what it would be like if someone we knew, or even worse, our children, turned out to be murderers. Obviously, this is something we’d rather not think about.
Still, every once in a while, we should. With mass shootings still happening on an almost daily basis in the United States (I checked; we’re at day 104 so far, and there’s been close to a hundred mass shootings) and the manosphere and their misogynist messages gaining more and more foothold in both the online and the real world, we should acknowledge this is a problem that will not go away by itself. Tv series like Adolescence and novels like We Need to Talk About Kevin remind us of these uncomfortable truths, and we can’t look away from them.
For about fifteen minutes after the final scene of Adolescence, I found myself unable to speak. I remember feeling the same when I had finished We Need to Talk About Kevin. After this initial silence, however, I felt the need to talk about it. For talk about it we must.
That’s because fiction can change the world.
What did you think of We Need to Talk About Kevin? And of the series Adolescence? Do you read books about uncomfortable topics, or do you prefer not to? Which real-world topics should be addressed in fiction? Please let me know in the comments! Also, don’t forget to follow me for more book-related posts!
The Open Book 