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A strange restraint
Malachi O’Doherty wonders why Lionel Shriver omits references to her own experience of being targeted by a killer – Michael Stone
The first expert on multiple killings to be pulled out by the London media after the Virginia Tech shootings, was the novelist Lionel Shriver. She has since been vilified on blogs for putting herself forward in this role. What does she know about multiple killers beyond the reading she did to prepare for her novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin? In fact, she knows more about multiple killings than even she claims. The intriguing thing about Shriver is that in her discussion about egotistical mass murderers she omits reference to her own experience of being targeted by one, even though that would enhance her credibility.
Lionel was in Milltown cemetery on that day in March 1988 when Michael Stone rampaged through the funeral crowd firing off Browning 9 mm pistols and tossing grenades about him. Her friends spent much of that afternoon calling hospitals to see if she was among the injured or dead.
Stone, fortunately, was not in the big league of militarised psychopaths and managed to kill only three people. But he is the very model of the self regarding lunatic that Lionel frequently describes in her writings on multiple killings like those at Colombine and Virginia Tech. She must have thought about him many times over the years and when she was writing her novel about such a killer.
Lionel is routinely invited onto television news programmes to share an expertise she appears to derive from her researches into the Columbine massacre and the writing of Kevin. And she often comes across as strangely unforthcoming, as if she senses herself that there is something askew about her being credited with expertise in this.
But nothing she says would ever give you the impression that she has crouched behind a headstone on a spring day in Belfast while our only show-killer performed for the cameras.
Nor was Lionel around to comment when Stone reappeared years later, to get entangled in a revolving door while launching an attack on Stormont parliament buildings last November. Stone appears to be an irrelevance to her development as an authority on the personality of the mass killer. Yet he is the only mass killer that we know of who ever directly pointed a gun at her. And he fits so well with the model of the psychopathic personality which she described in a Guardian article; needing attention, essentially a problem child.
Stone did the things that she predicted the Virginia killer would have done, proclaiming his actions and motives to the world. The type of this killer is a man who would rather be talked about dead than live without fame. He is the very opposite of the traditional, politically motivated terrorist, or at least of the type we had known before the jihadist suicide bomber.
The modern suicide bomber has this in common with Stone, that he declares himself, that he wants to be talked about afterwards. But Stone came out of a time in which a paramilitary got credit for discretion. Nothing that he did was inspired by the local paramilitary culture of the time; his conduct was entirely outside its mores.
Michael Stone was not politically motivated. He was a psychopathic killer using political cover. He would have killed anyway, even had there been no Troubles in Northern Ireland. His violence came out of need to fixate on imaginary fathers. Read his own account of his attack on Milltown and it is obvious that he was showing off before one of those 'fathers', Gerry Adams.
His second attack, in November last, was politically at complete odds with the position he had publicly taken of endorsing the peace process; the common factor was the presence of Adams and, very likely, a fantasy that Adams would see him and be impressed.
Stone is a fascinating subject. Perhaps, hoping to address the wider global market, Lionel knows that a story set against a Northern Irish backdrop would be less interesting? This is a question that Irish writers wrestle with, whether to speak of what they know, even though the world is bored, or to transpose the events elsewhere.
Well, Lionel writes fiction. She is entitled to transmute the nickel of personal experience into the gold of a story with wide appeal. It's what fiction writers do. But she is more than a novelist, she is a columnist and a commentator. And she knows the killer by contact, in a way that almost no one else writing about Virginia Tech or Columbine does. And she doesn't share that. One could imagine, say, a writer who had been in the IRA writing a novel about a similar context, say, international espionage; but never to mention the IRA!
Lionel has been paraded as an expert and derided for allowing that, as
if she was riding the issue for personal advantage. Given that she was
once the target of a multiple killer, Michael Stone, and doesn't mention
that, she has to be judged not as crassly voluble on something she knows
little about, but as strangely restrained in a subject she knows a great
deal about.
Does Lionel Shriver not need to talk about Michael Stone?
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