Teatime in London
Why I Spurn My Gerry Adams Mugs for the Cups from the John Harvard Library
THOUGH I’VE NEVER SEEN IT excerpted elsewhere, this novel’s epigraph, from Ernest Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream, is one of my favorite quotations. Were I not to prefer cremation, I’d be pleased for that passage to be inscribed on my tombstone.
For in my young adulthood, I surely qualified as one of those “intelligent people” going around “making themselves and everyone else miserable”—emphasis on the former. As a novelist, too, I believed that I gleaned my most valuable material from my own wretchedness. I harvested dejection like a crop. Should my life ever grow perky and pink, I feared I would have no more legitimate “experiences,” no fervor to drive midnight rants at the keyboard, no meaty melancholy to chew on, and nothing to say.
Veneration of affliction isn’t only a penchant of writers. Younger people of a certain stripe—ambitious, hungry, greedy in a good way—can be prone to perceive contentment as a threat and as a trap. Surely getting too satisfied and too comfortable means you don’t go anywhere or do anything, and condemns you to blindly accepting the status quo. Having heart, living life profoundly, must involve angst, anger, anguish, and despair. Happiness is for suckers.
If through my twenties I largely equated happiness with placidity, stasis, and idiocy, by the time I turned thirty and began this manuscript I had begun to question my elevation of suffering. Petty, pointless suffering, too, as the self-inflicted sort always is. I fasted for weeks at a time, to no particular purpose beyond seeing if I could do it. (If the experience was marginally interesting, I learned what there was to learn, and you will never again catch me going for days on end powered only by coffee in lieu of a worldwide famine.) I undertook cross-country cycling trips of thousands of miles, churning a hundred miles a day in often ghastly weather. (Ever wonder what controls where the wind blows? Apparently it switches to the exact opposite direction of wherever Lionel Shriver’s bicycle is pointed.) I forced myself to decamp to foreign countries when secretly I preferred to stay home. Worst of all, I fell in love with the wrong men—men who didn’t love me back, or who could at least be relied upon to make me miserable in those rare instances that I failed to do the job myself.
Ordinary Decent Criminals is both a consequence and an examination of these predilections. The novel is about people, in or out of Northern Ireland, who require troubles with a lower-case T—to feel important, stimulated, vital. Accordingly, it is also about people who are leery of love, which menaces the edgy, fractious life of discord with its soft, pillowy goo, and entices the adventurer with respite, ease, and the hellish repose of staying in one place. For the restless and willful, love offers weakness, enslavement, and sloth. Love, like happiness, is for suckers.
To set this novel where it belonged—a city where everyone adulated suffering—I moved to Belfast in 1987, with the intention of staying about nine months. The fact that I would be based in Belfast for the next twelve years helps to validate an aphorism coined in this very novel: the temporary becomes the permanent. To call those years formative is an understatement. Ensconced in the attic flat of a ramshackle Victorian manse, I apprenticed myself to the so-called Troubles, effectively earning an ad hoc doctorate in conflict studies. I don’t regret any of the time I lived in Northern Ireland. I don’t regret leaving, either.
Ordinary Decent Criminals was the product of my first couple of years in that town. I arrived with few preconceptions. Presbyterian by upbringing but aggressively lapsed, I harbored no natural allegiance to Protestants. Politically, I was a blank canvas. Both paramilitary extremes soon inspired an aversion, though the Protestant loyalists’ crude, undereducated bumbling tended to trigger a loathing intermingled with pity. By contrast, the slick PR, dissembling, and hypocrisy of IRA-supporting, Catholic-in-name-if-not-in-creed Republicans rapidly aroused a deeper and more perfectly untempered disgust. It irked me that back in the United States the IRA was regarded as liberal, left-wing, whereas in fact the organization was wildly illiberal—nationalistic, right-wing—and peopled by bullies and thugs, some of whom I met, none of whom I liked.
A word on the title. In general, titles either come to me effortlessly right away, or they’re hard work, often up until the very last minute. Having gone through rubbish titles by the dozen, when the novel was about to press I settled in desperation on The Bleeding Heart, which I meant to scan as sardonic. It didn’t. It sounded sappy. The Bleeding Heart is the worst title I have ever concocted in my life. My capacity to make such a grievous mistake—one that cost me in sales, and understandably gave reviewers a bad attitude from the get-go—humbles me to this day. I conditioned the UK foreign rights contract on permission to rename the book Ordinary Decent Criminals, then a real official term in Northern prisons, believe it or not, and a title with which I’m still pleased.
Now, I remained in Belfast many years after this novel’s publication. The longer I stayed in Ulster—a nomenclatural giveaway that my sympathies eventually canted toward moderate unionists, who constituted a majority in the province, and wished for the North to remain in the United Kingdom—the more broadly my disgust spread to just about everybody. Though the touch paper of the conflict was a Catholic civil rights movement, by the time I arrived the Troubles had degenerated to an inconsequential feud over whether a tiny territory the size of Connecticut, with the population of Philadelphia, would remain in one democratic country in the European Union or join another democratic country in the European Union. It wasn’t about civil rights. It was about nothing.
Which is not to say that nothing was at stake. In addition to the appalling waste of nearly 3,500 lives, the Troubles were a crucial test case of whether terrorism works. The short answer is yes. Terrorism won no end of social, economic, and political concessions for both sides of this ugly tit for tat—particularly for the IRA. Because Ordinary Decent Criminals had not fully explored this moral hazard, I was moved to write The New Republic in 1999—which, though set on a fictional peninsula of Portugal and about a purely fictional terrorist group, qualifies as this novel’s sequel.
Just as I relied on self-imposed torment to feel alive, to feel like myself, to know who I was, to regard my life as compelling, the Northern Irish came to rely on bombs bursting in air for exactly these same certainties. For generations, the conflict provided all and sundry with a ready-made identity and a perverse local pride. Disproportionate international attention that, as an American, I myself lavished on this sordid squabble only reinforced the dependency. Yet don’t imagine that locals were grateful for the outside world’s concern, or touched by foreign focus on the niggling details of their provincial problems. As a New Yorker, I never assumed my neighbors in South Belfast would give two hoots about the MTA, MOMA, or the Mets. By contrast, they took it as a given that I would find the fine historical distinctions between the Provisional IRA, the INLA, and the IRSP absolutely fascinating.
Since the conflict was officially—if not, alas, altogether in practice—brought to an end by the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, the Northern Irish have been forced to go cold turkey. In the dénouement since, citizens of every political stripe have gone through a protracted withdrawal from the crack highs of assassinations, riots, and car bombs. Northerners have had to reconstruct not just busted up buildings, but who they are.
Because my concluding “Glossary of Troublesome Terms” was included in the original text and is thus part of the novel, I have resisted updating it. Any references to the present in that dictionary allude to circa 1990. Much has happened since. Most notably, Northern Ireland has gradually accommodated itself to normal life. Despite a handful of retrograde holdouts, locals are decreasingly likely to define themselves by whom they revile and what grievances they bear. Sure, some Prods will still get irked that the region’s license plates alone in the UK do not picture the Union Jack. But Ulster is now largely a land of property bubbles, cancer-charity fund drives, and disputes over water charges. (I find it salutary that the nationally popular 2013–14 BBC series The Fall was set in Belfast, yet the plot about a serial killer was wholly unrelated to Troubles politics.) Frankly, it’s a lovely place to live.
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 Feín 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 Ordinary Decent Criminals 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 