A new edition of one of bestselling author Lionel Shriver's early
novels, reissued 25 years after first publication--an engrossing
commentary on the intersection of politics and human relationships, set
in turbulent Northern Ireland
For ten years, Estrin Lancaster has fled Philadelphia. From the
Philippines to Berlin, she's been a traveler without a destination, an
expatriate without a motherland. In each of the cities Estrin favors,
she manages an apartment, a job, a lover, and never tarries past the
first signs of ennui.
Her latest destination is Belfast, in Northern Ireland. After twenty
years of ritualized violence, this city, too, is exhausted--a town where
when one more bomb explodes in the city center, old ladies blow the dust
off their treacle cakes and count their change. Here the lanky and
spiteful Farrell O'Phelan, former purveyor of his own bomb-disposal
service, technically Catholic but everyone's aggravation, wrangles
through the maze of factions in the North by despising every side.
Farrell's affair with the curious Estrin is nonetheless a meeting of two
loners; like hers, Farrell's marathoning around the planet has become a
running in place. In deadlocked Northern Ireland, it has become harder
and harder to believe that anything is happening at all.
A grand tragi-comedy--one of the earliest displays of the ambition and
intelligence that has since earned Lionel Shriver worldwide
acclaim--Ordinary Decent Criminals is about conflict groupies, people
terrified of domesticity, who stir up anguish in their lives and their
countries to avoid the greater horror of what lies closest to home.
