Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 17, 1991                   TAG: 9102200020
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: C-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Reviewed by LISA SOLOD
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SHRIVER DELIVERS A KNOCKOUT WITH `THE BLEEDING HEART'

"The Bleeding Heart" opens with a long, slow introduction, but bear with this marvelous novel's odd beginning, for Lionel Shriver will deliver her most powerful knockout punch yet.

The story is set in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where Shriver moved two years ago. She has taken to the area like the proverbial fish, it seems. She manages to explain the horrible, terrible, wonderful, exciting, confusing and ambiguous situation between the Protestants and the Catholics without really taking sides, as far as I could tell, and with a humor and compassion that are breathtaking.

To this lovingly drawn Belfast comes Estrin Lancaster, thirtysomething expatriate, lost soul, wanderer looking for adventure. Lancaster is already making plans to leave for the Soviet Union until she is sidetracked by love - as has been the case before - in the form of a too-tall, too-odd, too-much-of-a-good-thing bomb-defusing expert.

Farrell O'Phelan is a lapsed Catholic still involved more than he would like in various causes, and, if possible, even more disenchanted with existence than Lancaster. Nonetheless, theirs is a romance of fierce and high passion, and Shriver writes about their sex in scenes of uncommon literary quality laced with true and violent eroticism.

Sometimes the book feels like O'Phelan's story. Many of the pages are given over to explaining his history, but this is primarily Estrin Lancaster's story: a story about what it is like to live on the edge, not knowing why, but having to anyway; about self hatred and self love; about taking things too seriously and not seriously enough; about what it is like to live with bombs like flowers thrown, death constantly around the corner, next door, beside you; about learning to forget to fear that death, about what it is to search out danger and violence and then to be shocked and scared to your bones when you find it.

But what is most important about "The Bleeding Heart" is that the writing does not suffer from the politics, nor vice versa. Some recent so-called political novels have suffered from diatribes about feminism, the environment, Nicaragua, etc. But Shriver takes no easy roads, and doesn't pound us over the head about what we should think. And most wonderfully, she ends her third ambitious novel with an incident that telegraphs itself a little early but still manages to shock and disturb in ways that few novels today have the guts to attempt.

"The Bleeding Heart" is a funny, scary, important novel, stunningly written, elegantly plotted and extraordinarily satisfying for anyone searching for a demanding read that doesn't let down for a moment. Shriver hasn't disappointed yet.