Ruth Dudley Edwards: Why I enjoy having the talented and courageous Lionel Shriver as a friend
Of all the gifts I’ve received as I got to know Northern Ireland, the most cherished are the courageous, open-minded, people who became my friends.
Among them from the late 1980s, was an American called Lionel Shriver, who had just moved here for a planned stay of a year or two researching a novel, and so fell in love with the place that she stayed for twelve.
In 1990 she published The Bleeding Heart, which was set in Belfast and later was wisely renamed Ordinary Decent Criminals.
She loved what she saw as a sleepy, pleasant provincial town, well-stocked with libraries, but interesting for a writer because it was punctuated by bursts of violence and “a visiting circus” of “conflict groupies.”
I was much taken with her sardonic wit, we were both campaigners for free speech and we despised the same people.
In our fiction, we both savaged group think, hypocrisy and fashionable progressive lunacies that involved the denial of human nature.
As she explains, politically she was a blank canvas but she learned fast.
She soon developed an aversion to paramilitary extremes.
“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 US the IRA was regarded as liberal, left wing, whereas in fact the organisation was wildly illiberal – nationalistic, right wing – and peopled by bullies and thugs, some of whom I met, none of whom I liked.”
She had many sharp words for the academics, lazy journalists, peaceniks, conflict resolution junkies, “Amnesty International busybodies”, and all the other outsiders who liked a safe trouble spot with decent hotels where everyone spoke English.
Her The New Republic (2012) is a brutal satire on terrorism aimed at familiar Northern Ireland characters but rendered safe from libel lawyers by being set in a fictional Portuguese province run by a separatist terrorist group.
I’ve just finished her latest, A Better Life, set in a New York being ruined by guilty white prosperous progressives with open arms and wallets who are ruthlessly exploited by rapacious, streetwise Hondurans.
Like all her books these days, it is attracting both delighted and furiously negative reviews.
I loved it, but then I would.
Lionel has a remorseless way of pulling on a thread of absurdity and unravelling the whole garment.
She owes much to Northern Ireland for having given her “an education superior to any advanced degree in conflict studies”.
And she is so grateful to the Lisburn Road library and the others that nourished her when she was poor that she promised to leave her assets to Belfast Library Board.
“If you take six books out of the library,” she has said, “you will only read the ones you like, and then you look back for more and do the same with them.
“You read more widely and more voraciously and become more discerning when you're a regular library user.”
Shriver is not only a good read.
She punctures hypocrisy, naiveté and misinformation better than any advanced degree in politics.
I so enjoy having her as a friend.
l Ruth Dudley Edwards is the author of The Faithful Tribe: An Intimate Portrait of the Loyal Institutions and also of Aftermath: the Omagh bombing and the families’ pursuit of justice