I always enjoy it when someone takes a genre premise and writes a serious literary novel around it, so Lionel Shriver's Post-Birthday World has been on my hit list for a while now. I was a fan of Shriver already from her last two books, Double Fault and We Need To Talk About Kevin , so I knew exactly what to expect - and this didn't let me down.
PBW follows children's book illustrator Irina McGovern as she's faced with a life-changing decision - whether to kiss a man other than her long term partner Lawrence. The man in question is snooker player Ramsey Acton, a volatile, sexed-up bad boy: the complete opposite of Lawrence. In the moment of that decision, Irina's story diverges into two alternate realities: one where she goes for it and pursues the affair, another where she plays it safe and lives with her regret. Neither turns out the way you'd imagine, though both lead ultimately to the same conclusion.
If the premise sounds a little chick-lit or Sliding Doors, then chances are that's exactly how it'd have turned out from a lesser author. Thankfully Shriver brings weight and depth to the storytelling and shines an uncomfortably bright light on modern romantic relationships that should make even the most secure of readers question the decisions they've made in such matters. As Shriver herself points out in the afterword, "I'm as fascinated with the contrast between going to the supermarket with one man versus another as I am in the difference our selection of partners makes to our careers". What happens to Irina in these split realities proves there's no such thing as a black and white / right and wrong decision in matters of the heart. Whatever you choose, things will go wrong... and right... and wrong again. And there's no such thing as a perfect partner either.
Like David Nicholls' One Day, Shriver's excellent novel traces a path through contemporary history, from the death of Diana to 9/11, using such events to highlight the opinions and attitudes of the central characters and draw parallels between their concurrent storylines. It also mixes real people with fictional - most notably snooker players like Ronnie O'Sullivan and Stephen Hendry who clash with Ramsey in his quest to win the World Championship. (I'm never sure how novelists square such usage against the "all characters are fictional" disclaimer that appears in the front of the book.)
The only problem I had with Double Fault was that sometimes Shriver took the tennis metaphors to a corny extreme that distracted from the story. Here though the snooker forms an amusing and well-researched back drop, though the author does keep self-consciously apologising to American readers who probably won't know the sport from tiddly-winks.
