I was both surprised and rattled to find the Audible version of Lionel Shriver’s The Post Birthday World was abridged! What! After a decade of listening to books, I had never come across an abridged version. I don’t want an abridged anything. Give me the real deal. Luckily there is a return policy. I purchased the e-book and duly struggled.
By mid-week with our book club meeting looming, I had to repurchase the abridged Audible to finish the thing in time!
After the meeting (this is a little obsessive) I listened and read at the same time, curious about what had been removed. Not the whole thing. I am not that obsessive. The unabridged version rambles. The internal ponderings of the lead character, Irina were numbing. I am left believing the abridged version is tighter and more enjoyable than the unabridged. I know, contentious.
Most people have heard of Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin, which I recommend, especially for book club discussion. We often still talk about Kevin. This is the third (fourth?) Shriver book we have read together and she has some fans among us – though I have to say I was insulted by her book Big Brother. I didn’t believe the plot read on to find, well, it was all a trick. We went to hear her talk about that book where she talked about how little she ate and how much she exercised which in context seemed judgemental despite her reasons for writing the book. Then there is her inappropriate speech at the Brisbane Writers Festival which made world headlines.
Sliding Doors was released in 1998 and 10 years later, the Post Birthday World is a Sliding Doors story. Irina is a book illustrator living in London contentedly in a de facto relationship with clever Lawrence who works for a think tank. She is awkwardly drawn to their friend, the famous, handsome, debonair, Ramsay Acton. One night, one kiss and everything changes. Well, in one universe. In the other universe, things change too, but not as a result of the kiss. The chapters alternate through the same events in the alternate timelines. How do people live together? Shriver focuses a microscope on the nature of relationships and intimate communication with and without words.
“Lovers communicate not inside sentences, but between them. Passion lurks within interstice. It is grouting rather than bricks.”
― Lionel Shriver, The Post-Birthday World
Oh, and Shriver likes big words that you have to look up.
Irina writes and illustrates a sliding doors book, where a boy is seen living out two career paths, pretty much as a way of telling the reader the underlying message of The Post Birthday World. You might think her decision to leave Lawrence for Ramsay is rash and poor but it is not that simple.
“The idea is that you don’t only have one destiny. Younger and younger, kids are pressed to decide what they want to do with their lives, as if everything hinges on one decision. But whichever direction you go there are going to be upsides and downsides. You’re dealing with a set of trade-offs, and not one course in comparison to which all the others are crap…..There are varying advantages and disadvantages to each competing future. But I didn’t want to have one bad and one good. In both, everything is all right, really. Everything is all right.”
― Lionel Shriver, The Post-Birthday World
We all have sliding doors moments, either decisions we made, or events beyond our control and on reflection, we might wish for a different path, but what would we be giving up for that different path? Everything would turn out both bad and good.