For my own part, soon after quitting Belfast for London, I became strangely repulsed by the totems of a conflict that had once seemed so captivating. I stashed away the paramilitary posters from both sides that had festooned my Victorian flat with dry mockery; they remain in Tate Gallery tubes in the cellar, irremediably curled. For my afternoon tea, I spurn my extensive collection of Troubles mugs—emblazoned with self-important portraits of Gerry Adams, or a tongue-in-cheek cartoon of gun-toting “Reservoir Prods” in dark glasses—preferring the pleasantly anodyne cups with matching china spoons from the John Harvard Library in Southwark. On my several trips back to my old home, I’ve never been tempted to seek out the barbed-wired Peace Line, slip into Sinn Fein headquarters, or locate another Orange Order march. I stop in the secondhand shops on Balmoral Avenue. I stroll through the Botanical Gardens, or repeat my ritual run along the Lagan Towpath. I visit my dentist.
Thus what was initially written as a contemporary tale has mercifully foreshortened into an historical novel. Yet as the era in which ODCs was set recedes, the book itself becomes only more broadly pertinent, more allegorical. The tension the book explores is eternal: between a thirst for excitement, meaning, energy, purpose, passion, camaraderie, and high drama—all fostered by friction, by war and other forms of peril—and a yearning for peace, tranquility, rest, calm, stillness, safety, self-possession, harmony, and simple joy (embodied in this novel by “The House in Castlecaulfield”). Anyone drawn, say, to fighting in Syria would still wrestle with those opposing inclinations.
I do think the implicit parallel this book makes between the addiction to political upheaval and an addiction to romantic upheaval is sound. The same kind of person who tosses petrol bombs at barricades throws plates at home. Learning to settle into a place where not much happens and people basically get along requires the same spiritual maturity as a successful long-term marriage.
Latterly, I myself am unabashedly happy, and if that makes me dull, I can live with it. The arc I have travelled has doubtless been governed by age. Younger, like my protagonist Estrin Lancaster and her bête noire Farrell O’Phelan, I enjoyed a greater appetite for turmoil, in my environs and in my personal life. In my latter fifties, I enjoy a greater appetite for serenity. But I don’t believe that’s purely due to having calcified into a stodgy old fart. The cherishing of serenity feels like—dare I say it—wisdom.
I no longer regard happiness as a threat, or as a trap. Happiness is an achievement—“more exciting than any other thing, with the promise of as great intensity as sorrow” to those of us who are, however briefly, blessed with the sensation. Contentment is also a skill, and the folks who have mastered it tend to make superior company. If what you require for exhilaration is peril, life entails peril by its nature, since at any moment it can be snuffed out. Contentment is not the threat; illness, physical decay, penury, human malice, a host of planetary calamities like floods, earthquakes, and drought—those are threats. Even as a writer, I needn’t harvest my own misery for material. The rest of the world festively obliges with a superabundance of suffering, and all I need do for material is look out the window.
There’s peril galore. We’re not going to run out. So if, between putting out fires and reporting for chemotherapy, you manage a glass of wine, an engaging book, and a hand to hold, good for you.
Lionel Shriver, 2015
About the Author
LIONEL SHRIVER’s novels include the National Book Award finalist So Much for That, the New York Times bestseller The Post- Birthday World, the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin and the Sunday Times bestseller Big Brother. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2014. Her journalism has appeared in the Guardian and the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and many other publications. She lives in London and Brooklyn, New York.
ALSO BY LIONEL SHRIVER
The Female of the Species
Checker and the Derailleurs
Game Control
A Perfectly Good Family
Double Fault
We Need to Talk About Kevin
The Post-Birthday World
So Much for That
The New Republic
Big Brother
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The Female of the Species
Checker and The Derailleurs
Game Control
A Perfectly Good Family
The Post-Birthday World
So Much For That
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