Get me out of here

‘If your time ain’t come, not even a doctor can kill you’ — so goes the proverb that best echoes the dilemma of an ageing humankind as we glimpse the harrowing vista of decrepitude to come: a panorama that first takes in the custard-stained wingback chairs of a soul-extinguishing care home, then yaws off nauseatingly to a vision of the demented and the drooling as they hobble into that good night. How can you swerve incarceration and indignity when you just won’t die — and, more pertinently, when no one is allowed to kill you? How to be the auteur of your own death when ‘self-euthanasia’ proves so tricky you need the help of a loved one, thus implicating them in a criminal act?

This is the puzzler that fell into Guy Kennaway’s lap when his octogenarian mother Susie — ‘certainly no Mrs Tiggywinkle’ — asked him to buy her enough heroin to stun a giant. Her plan was to take to the master bed of her home at the foot of the Pyrenees and kill herself and her frail husband Stanley (90, a former showbiz accountant), before they became utterly infirm.

Notes made over the subsequent two years became this, Kennaway’s fifth book, an irreverent and comical account of the knotty, loving but paranoid relationship with his boastful, glamorous mother, a potted history of suicide (who knew the Roman Senate gave hemlock on the house to anyone who applied?), a sober consideration of how to die on your own terms, and a journey into the unknown territory of finding the least messy route to do it.

Susie consults the internet for advice and her son asks anyone who’ll listen. Cocaine, pure nitrogen (‘the brain doesn’t panic’) imbibed through a Spitfire gas mask, a poison-tipped umbrella, even revivifying the CIA’s former interest in Susie are all mooted (America really did tap the family phone in the 1980s, when Susie’s anti-arms-trade activism peaked).