Lionel Shriver writes novels. She called one of them We Need to Talk about Kevin. It was scary. Lots of people bought it. Her new book is called Mania. It is set in the near past. It is about the Mental Parity Movement. Under its rule nobody is allowed to be cleverer than anyone else. The word “stupid” is forbidden. Big words are scorned. No sentence (such as this one minus the parentheses) may have a subclause. The vernacular has lobotomised smartphones. Chess and crosswords are abolished. Qualification points are unnecessary for admission to university. Barack Obama is no longer president. His eloquent oratory proved his electoral undoing. The Three Stooges is banned. Ditto Mr Bean and The Big Bang Theory.

[ Lionel Shriver: ‘I do not want to be told I'm privileged’ ]

Mania breaks every Mental Parity rule. The novel is intelligent, satirical, literary, dystopian and absurdist. But by no stretch of the imagination is it absurd. It’s chillingly plausible because the anti-intellectualism it depicts is already sprouting in our midst. Cork city’s main library had to lock its doors to the public last year during protests over books with LGBTQ content and after agitators entered libraries, filmed themselves verbally accosting staff members and put the footage online. In the pre-internet Dark Ages, books were ritually burned. Shriver sets her story in a town called Voltaire, after the oft-exiled French philosopher and civil liberties advocate whose books were publicly cremated in Paris.

In our age of “bigly” Donald Trump, “fake news”, grade inflation, “citizen journalists”, populist politics and keyboard warriors, the lowest common denominator sets the agenda. If you........

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