The Annulment: A Novel of Ireland and Los Angeles

In The Annulment, a faint cry of moral stubbornness curses a powerful university sports culture built upon legal corruption, money and greed. A novel in the tradition of the postmodern gothic, The Annulment is at once a love story, a horror story and a deep investigation of that fiction constructed for us called modern society.

Our hero, Tom Fergusson, is a writer living in Los Angeles. Recently divorced, Fergusson seeks an annulment through the Archdiocese of LA. Late one night a stranger leaves him a book belonging to a learned man in a backwater of Europe. He tries to return the book to its owner but gets into trouble: with the IRA in Belfast, in Prague and finally by inadvertently uncovering a cheating scandal at an L.A. university as ethnically territorialized as the Balkans. What he eventually learns about the book and its owner profoundly affects his life. Totally abandoned in his hours of need by his several girlfriends, he is finally saved through the interventions of a whore.

Where unity and equality are replaced by diversity and special treatment, how easily the myth of the citizen comes to be a tool of oppression. Horrific for its exploration of jealousy and treachery in the workplace under the veil of law, The Annulment portrays, in realistic steps, an easy descent into a Hobbesian world of sexual betrayal and ethnic conflict: a war of "all against all."

The Annulment is a picaresque gothic romance. Its setting is the dark side of college sports. It is written by an author who has experienced it all first hand: Christopher Thomas Cairney began as a wrestler at California State University Chico and, following that, continued in college sports for ten years as an advisor while teaching in both the Big Twelve and the Pac-10. He was the man closest to the players, their advocate and their friend. Based on a true story, The Annulmentt is an experience: of horror and betrayal, of ethnic strife and racial power within an American Division-One sports program.