The arrival of Paul Carroll’s fine new novel couldn’t have been timed more judiciously: the first reading of the Assisted Dying Bill in Parliament has foregrounded a debate whose ethical complexity has simmered in the public imagination for many decades. The conjunction may be accidental but Carroll’s theme remains astonishingly serendipitous.

Set principally in the nondescript hinterland of Stalybridge – use of a real location gives the narrative a kind of regional currency - Shaking Hands With Elvis introduces Carroll’s dark subject with a comedic flourish. The angle of approach is deliberate for, given the certitude of death whether hastened voluntarily or by propagandised stealth, satire – and this story is presented as a serious satire – is a profoundly apposite form of engagement. Carroll’s pointed humour brings a rapier-corrective to the hideous iniquities and cognitive dissonances of the zeitgeist. As it ought, as we collectively slip, with consummate and ignorant ease, into a new and dangerously unhinged landscape of cost-cutting and tectonic change.

Nor does the narrator’s tableau demand a major suspension of disbelief, merely a short mental leap into an entirely plausible near-future where the collective mindset is wired with a slight differential, and adjusted to assimilate a skewed terrain, that might otherwise be as alien, to the reader’s eye, as the surreal tapestry of American funeral culture in Evelyn Waugh’s perspicacious satire, The Loved One.

The power of satire to persuade the reader to re-address preconceptions is one of its enduring gifts. And here, in a vision of Britain that would have been described as dystopian not so long ago, we find a country where the NHS has been allowed to wither on the vine, where the care vacuum is filled by extravagantly unaffordable insurance provision, and where a credulous population find their inner compulsions leaning towards an, often unnecessary, assisted death in order to save immediate families the burden of ongoing care. Stalybridge’s pioneering ‘clinic’, run by the ‘Go Gently’ organisation is ‘Charon House’ and whilst the latter refers to the boatman who transports the hapless departed over the River Styx, the former is a neat ambushing of the Dylan Thomas poem, where elision of the opening ‘Do not’ entirely reverses the poet’s meaning, cajoling the credulous participant towards the ‘light’, rather than raging against its guttering candle.

The poem has, in fact, been repurposed to fit the agenda of the ‘suits’ who harvest untruths in pursuance of personal ambition, especially the oleaginous figures of Lawrence Pestel (a cabinet minister who has one eye on the top job) and Callan Clay, the American CEO of Go Gently, whose egregious exploitation of individual weakness is both Machiavellian and strangely believable. Almost needless to add, the two despise each other and are supported in their desire to ‘detoxify’ the remit, in the public sphere, by their respective wives whose limitless vicarious ambition renders the appellation ‘Lady Macbeth’, as applied to one, fitting for both.

Carroll’s dialogue fizzes in the company of Pestel and Clay, not least in the modern commercial landscape whose nu-speak seeps into the fabric of every area of life – and death – like a seductive whisper. In this softened semantic universe, ‘Assisted dying’ becomes ‘Final journey facilitation’, different approaches to death are personalised ‘packages’, and, crucially, the process of decision-making is removed, evidently to reduce ‘the pressure on health care’. Callan Clay’s rhetorical claws are sharpened to pristine points, as he subverts the philosophical underpinnings of easeful release with a serpentine smirk:

‘The removal of decision-making in these matters has given doctors a major boost too, eliminating arguments over the interpretation of the Hippocratic oath, and , may I say, what many observers saw as a “God-complex” among certain practitioners.’

Addressed to a journalist, Clay’s words are practiced upon a hand-picked media audience, a prelude to the revealing of a new instrument designed, in Pestel’s word, to ‘off’ the individual in haste and comfort. The ‘Peregrine Pod’, a luxuriously upholstered capsule, is to be the arbiter of final truth for those seeking release, including those, now entertaining last-minute voltes face, who need to be talked ‘back on to the ledge’. Unwittingly sedated prior to the process in order to prevent changes of heart, the pod is a fitting repository for a consolatory ending, equipped, as it is, with sounds and visual stimulations most meaningful to the ‘traveller’, as the nitrogen capsule empties gas into the sealed pod, and he or she succumbs to a state of hypoxic euphoria, prior to death.

Carroll’s rendering of the narrative in the third person present confers an immediacy on rapidly unfolding events, as Pestel and Clay, whose harnessing of this new means of execution is a cost-cutting marvel that will replace reliance on expensive barbiturates, and will make it possible, in the words of the self-serving Pestel, ‘for everyone, even those of the most modest means, to “Choose Death” as and when it suits them.’ The novelist is at his very best when examining venality through a contemporary political lens; the authenticity of his narrative structure and dialogue is reinforced by the efficacy of his research, giving conviction, especially, to prophetic speculation.

Ranged, quite literally late on in the novel, against the infernal machine of the ‘final journey’ and its proponents, is its counterpoint: the three protagonists awaiting departure at Charon House. Disparate, neatly drawn according to character and disposition - Geraldine (Irish, intelligent, unfulfilled, fed up of living), Dawn (widow, mother, terminal cancer sufferer, refusing to be a burden), Jeffrey (widower, prone to episodes, delivered to Go Gently on the mistaken pretext of advanced dementia) – each figure’s motivation is mitigated by a degree of uncertainty and each’s reservation is revealed as the story progresses. The gradual realisation that Charon House, like Hotel California, is a place of no return, dawns on the characters in a series of intuitions carefully drip-fed by Carroll’s narrator. The one other figure, apart from the kindly refugee Adil who is plunged into the moribund drama of the clinic against his own instinct, is Woody, a wrongly convicted prisoner who has signed up for the new ‘release’ scheme as an alternative to festering in gaol. Pestel’s advocacy of the scheme, promulgated in order to thin the prison population, to fatten the state’s purse, and most importantly to gild Lawrence’s self-estimation, is a masterpiece of semantic duplicity:

‘We do not use the word “execution”. Ever. Prisoners condemned to death have no choice in the matter and it is they who are executed. This, on the other hand, is completely different. This is an assisted action, carried out in accordance with the prisoner’s – ex-prisoner by that stage – express wishes. Our partners call it the final journey, and that is the terminology we prefer.’

The exchange, between Pestel and a chaplain, is a fine example of Carroll’s ability to deploy wit in the service of a more serious agenda, and the insinuation of any authorial intention is, for the most part, secured at point of reader persuasion – in, for example, the cut and thrust of dialogue and the beautifully-worked interplay between different vested interests. But the resolution to the story is less convincing. Heartened, though we are, by the perfectly timed contrapasso of Pestel and Clay’s fate – their denouement is poetically fitting – the final pages describing the ‘break-out’ and escape of the four ‘condemned’ are overly sweetened by sentiment and drawn, it appears, to provide a convenient wrap to an otherwise commendably ‘on-point’ narrative.

After being exposed to the viscera of Paul Carroll’s tangential Britain, this reader, at least, is beginning to question the reliability of checks and balances in a world of self-interest and rapid change. Which, I guess, is what he intended.


Shaking Hands With Elvis is published by DreamEngine media (2024)

More information here.