John McManus joined the Provisional wing of the IRA, to assuage his conscience. Now he wants nothing more that to escape the world of mindless violence and brutality in which he finds himself enmeshed. Pursued by IRA gunmen, he flees the length of Ireland—by automobile, by bus, on foot—desperately struggling to outrun the consequences of his past.
Two women conspire to help him flee his pursuers: Kate Burker who passion for Joh and her for her country rages even in the shadow of gunmen; and Brendine Healy, an American girl who should never have left Boston. He cuts a wide swath across Ireland, encountering romantics and killers, and the courageous and decent people of both the North and the South.
If one of the tests of a good novel is that its characters stick with the reader for weeks on end, and if another is that it informs him and makes him think, then The Whore-Mother is by both measures a superior novel. In it the agony of Ireland becomes a metaphor for the nature of violence itself.