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Game Control by Lionel Shriver, Faber and Faber, pp 277, £14.99

Lionel Shriver has written a sardonic, sexy, salutary novel about, of
all things, population control.

Game Control, Shriver’s fourth book, is set in Africa – a continent
both beset by Malthusian horrors and scourged by AIDS. Theorists on demographics
who take an extreme view might argue that attempts at remedying Africa’s
AIDS problem are folly, for they will guarantee that populations exceed
the carrying capacity of the land. Dr Calvin Piper, the novel’s protagonist,
would take the argument a step further. His notion is to give AIDS a covert
helping hand at genocide – for the sake of the world at large, of course.

His tilt toward macabre direct action is close enough to plausible
theories like Hardin’s to invest the book with a tantalising believability,
yet sufficiently misanthropic to create Crichton-esque tension. But Game
Control indulges neither the props of the techno-thriller not the emotional
exploitation of the genre suspense yarn. Shriver’s characters and their
aura of feigned sacrifice while living in the Third World simply strike
too true a chord.

Piper’s inscrutable coldness and unabashed celibacy pose a challenge
to Eleanor Merritt, an aid worker adrift in neo-colonial charity and midlife
anxiety. She wants to humanise him by seduction. But Wallace Threadgill,
a rival demographer who blithely celebrates the human potential of every
zygote and abhors Piper’s Ehrlichian doomsaying, cautions Eleanor about
Piper’s demonic persuasion. ‘You’re a woman,’ says Threadgill. ‘Any woman
wants to love one man more than all humanity, and she will sell her entire
race down the river for his sake.’ For scientists, the troubling and elegantly
defended proposition of Game Control is that a technocrat might love a theory
in exactly the same way.

Shriver spent a year in Kenya researching her book. The science shows,
but only as a seamlessly spliced element of plot structure: Eleanor’s attraction
to Piper’s iconoclasm has monumental personal consequences. The connection
between intellect and emotion is neat and natural, and Game Control is admirably
free of stilted dialogue or pedantic narrative.

After enduring a day at an AIDS conference at which Piper dismisses
the epidemic as ‘a drop in the bucket’ and ‘a sad little virus’ inadequate
to the exigencies of population control, Eleanor is fed up. ‘I have listened
until it’s coming out of my ears about the carrying capacity of the land.
Carrying capacity? Well, what about yours?’ Now she is talking not about
good science, but rather about good character. The great achievement of
Shriver’s book is the compelling case it makes that you cannot have the
one without the other.

Jonathan Stevenson has covered East Africa for The Economist, Newsweek
and The Sunday Times. He is writing a book on Somalia.