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Glenn PattersonGlenn Patterson
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Biography
Glenn Patterson was born in Belfast in 1961 and studied on the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia taught by Malcolm Bradbury. He returned to Northern Ireland in 1988 and was Writer in the Community for Lisburn and Craigavon under a scheme administered by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
He is the author of several novels. The first, Burning Your Own (1988), set in Northern Ireland in 1969, won a Betty Trask Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Fat Lad (1992), was shortlisted for the Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award and explores the effects of the political situation in Northern Ireland through the story of a young man returning to his homeland after an absence of ten years. Black Night at Big Thunder Mountain (1995) narrates the experiences of three people brought together on the Euro Disney construction site. The International (1999), is set in a Belfast hotel in 1967, and tells the story of a day in the life of Danny, an 18-year-old barman; Number 5 (2003), traces the lives of the various occupants of a Belfast house over a 45-year period. That Which Was (2004), is also set in Belfast and explores the interaction between memory, history and society.
Lapsed Protestant, a collection of his non-fiction, was published in 2006.
Glenn Patterson has been Writer in Residence at the Universities of East Anglia, Cork and Queen's University, Belfast, where he currently teaches on the MA in Creative Writing. He was one of two writers (with poet Bernardine Evaristo) selected by the British Council and the Arts Council to attend the 'Literaturexpress Europa 2000' international literature tour, and has twice chaired the Council's annual Walberberg Seminar. In 2006, he was elected on to Aosdána, the affiliation of Irish Artists. His latest books are The Third Party, published in 2007, and Once Upon a Hill: Love in Troubled Times (2008).
Genres (in alphabetical order)
Fiction
Bibliography
Burning Your Own Chatto & Windus, 1988
Fat Lad Chatto & Windus, 1992
Black Night at Big Thunder Mountain Chatto & Windus, 1995
The International Anchor, 1999
Number 5 Hamish Hamilton, 2003
That Which Was Hamish Hamilton, 2004
Lapsed Protestant New Island, 2006
Luxus (with Victor Sloan) Millennium Court Arts Centre, 2007
The Third Party Blackstaff Press, 2007
Once Upon a Hill: Love in Troubled Times Bloomsbury, 2008
Prizes and awards
1988 Betty Trask Award Burning Your Own
1989 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature Burning Your Own
1993 Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award (shortlist) Fat Lad
2006 Arts Council Northern Ireland Major Individual Artist Award
Critical Perspective
Glenn Patterson came to prominence during the late 1980s as one of the younger generation of novelists whose work began to develop fresh perspectives on the representation of the Northern Irish Troubles since 1969. A complex amalgam of the traditional and post-modern, his fiction is characterised by a deep historical sensitivity which emerges most clearly in his evocative descriptions of the development and landscape of his home city of Belfast. This in turn is related to a distinctive urban consciousness which prioritises the city in general, partly as a palimpsest on which changing generations and identities are etched, but partly too as a means of resisting or negating the overarching political claims of national and imperial ideology. 'I have an understanding of what a city is but I don't understand nations', he has said. 'Cities seem to entail a mixture, whereas the nation state and the language of nationalism is about purity, exclusion. That's what I fear most.' Irish Times (17 August 1995)
Having grown up in a place defined almost exclusively by political violence, Patterson's frequent concern in his fiction is to recover the 'lost' history of Northern Ireland's existence before the onset of the Troubles, and to chart the trajectories which ultimately led to the crisis of the present. He has pointed to Salman Rushdie as the writer who most heavily influenced him in his bid to expose the 'collective fictions' of his country, and though Patterson's debut novel shares little stylistically with Rushdie's Midnight's Children, it relies on the same structural parallel between the private life of the individual and the public life of the nation.
Burning Your Own (1988) is in many respects a classic coming-of-age fiction: its protagonist Mal Martin is an ordinary ten-year-old boy grappling with the usual peer pressures and family expectations of adolescence. But Mal's position, living in a Protestant housing estate on the edge of Belfast in the summer of 1969, just as the Troubles are about to erupt, means that all his individual crises are symbolic of a wider catastrophe. The rows between his parents prefigure a general community conflict, the alienation of his Catholic friend Francie signifies the escalation of sectarianism, and the building of the Twelfth of July bonfire becomes prophetic of the conflagration of Northern Ireland in the violent years ahead.
Though well aware of the limitations and expectations frequently imposed on the 'regional' writer, Patterson has no inhibitions about claiming as his primary territory the Northern Irish Protestant Unionist community from which he came. The experience of returning to that community after years spent away from it - Patterson's own experience, in essence - provides the basis for his second novel, Fat Lad (1992), in which Belfast-born Drew Linden returns home from England to take up a managerial job in a bookshop. Drew's perspective, half tourist, half native, provides for an almost archaeological excavation of the city and its inhabitants, as the ersatz and commercial surface of contemporary Belfast is gradually drawn back to reveal its labyrinthine history; its domestic riots, its participation in two world wars, and its underlying industrial heart, emblematised forever in its construction of the doomed liner, the Titanic. Never stable, always in transition, part of an ongoing process of reclamation, Belfast represents the triumph of its founding fathers over the mud and water with which they began:
'They had had to build the land before they could work it. Dredging, scouring, banking, consolidating, they fashioned a city in their own image: dry docks, graving docks, ships, cranes, kilns, silos; industry from their industry, solidity from morass, leaving an indelible imprint on the unpromising slobland, and their names driven like screwpiles into the city's sense of itself. Dargan, Dunbar, Workman, Wolff, Harland ...'
Fat Lad offers a dense and multi-layered narrative, interweaving such urban documentary with the entanglements of its protagonist's love affairs, interrupting the progress of his convoluted family relationships with dark reminders of paramilitary violence and disturbance. While some would argue that these intricate and diverse strands become tortuous, the effect is a novel, which successfully frustrates any one-dimensional reading of Belfast.
A more abstract focus on the city, though in this case of an artificial city at Disneyworld in Paris, determines the shape of Patterson's Black Night at Big Thunder Mountain (1995). An unsettling work, which pits the ubiquity of terrorist destruction against the persistence of the human will towards construction, this is perhaps Patterson's most poetic, and certainly his most conceptual novel, but it confused many of his readers who doubtless regarded it as a diversion. It did provide an important breathing space however, before the publication of his best novel to date, and indeed, one of the most significant and penetrating novels to have emerged from Northern Ireland in recent years.
Set with extraordinary precision on the last Saturday of January 1967, The International(1999) is an account of a day in the life of a leading Belfast hotel, seen from the viewpoint of its barman, Danny. Again, the ordinary leads us to the extraordinary, as the various characters who work and meet in the hotel - including the founding members of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association - become implicitly connected to the processes of history itself, and to the long violent fall-out of the Troubles which would ensue. The novel is brilliantly conceived and technically perfect, but it is its historical exactitude, which impresses most. Patterson painstakingly recaptures every nuance, every colloquialism, every snatch of conversation and even every fashion detail necessary to the authentic recreation of Belfast 'as it was then, before it was brought shaking, quaking, and laying about it with batons and stones on to the world's small screens ...'
The International is an extraordinarily moving yet poignantly arbitrary snapshot of a community framed in its last moments of anonymity and normality. The novel as a whole functions as a validation of Patterson's consistent aim to recuperate - imaginatively - the multiple stories and memories of individuals, and to endorse these as the basis of identity, regardless of political teleologies. It is an approach that defines him as a quintessentially democratic novelist, subtly defying a context that threatens the very basis of democracy.
Patterson’s next book, Number 5 (2003) continues this narrative vein. Less a novel than a group of interlinked stories, it recounts the experiences of five successive occupants of a house in suburban Belfast from the 1950s to the late 1990s. Number 5 is in part an exercise in a slanted re-reading of an over-familiar landscape: although the period it covers was dominated by political violence in Northern Ireland, Belfast is never referred to by name and references to paramilitary groups and public figures are made, for the most part, indirectly. This strategy allows the novel to reclaim something of Belfast from the burden of its political contexts. And like The International, Number 5 shows that Patterson is as skilled at capturing the interior textures of late twentieth-century Belfast as he is at tracing its external urban topography: the city’s shifting tastes, from Chesterfield suites and hearth rugs to stainless steel breakfast bars, are observed with close attention to period detail.
That Which Was (2004) is a more overt account of the city at a particular time in its history, but ultimately this novel is still concerned with questions of individual memory. Ken Avery, a young Presbyterian minister in post-ceasefire east Belfast, is approached by a man who confesses to a killing of which he has no memory but the fact of its happening. This situation pitches Avery himself into a series of painful encounters with his own past, a process which parallels a revisiting of the city’s intimate and difficult history. In its attentiveness to local detail meanwhile, the novel displays once again the value of Patterson’s quasi-journalistic sensibility, a talent also on show in lighter form in Lapsed Protestant (2006), his pithy collection of occasional journalistic pieces on writing, politics and football in a changing Northern Ireland.
Patterson’s most recent novel The Third Party (2007), a story of a Western businessman grappling with cultural difference in a Japanese city, is in some ways a curious departure into existential questions of individual affiliation and estrangement. An unnamed protagonist travels from Belfast to Hiroshima to promote a revolutionary type of packaging and, by chance, encounters in his Japanese hotel a prominent Northern Irish writer (known only as Ike), with whom he develops a prickly rapport. Much of the novel recounts the businessman’s final day abroad, its meandering narrative a play on the book’s themes of alienation and cultural disassociation. For all that, as might be expected from its particular setting, this work remains grounded in some of Patterson’s most familiar preoccupations; conflicts, cities, the relationship between national and individual history. More self-consciously philosophical than any of its predecessors, The Third Party begins by dislocating us, therefore, from typical Patterson territory, yet ends up purposefully and disturbingly revisiting it.
Dr Eve Patten, 2008
Further reading on this site
Walberberg Seminar
The Walberberg Seminar is the British Council's largest and longest running annual literature seminar overseas. The most recent Walberberg Seminar was held in January 2009 at Akademie Schmockwitz, Berlin on... more... (15/12/2004)
Contact information
Related links
http:/ / nigelbeale.com/ ?p=839
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