The title of Glenn Patterson’s new book immediately gives itself the lie, raising as it does another question, then another, and another. Our fate, on this island, is, as the poet John Hewitt wrote, to inherit “eight hundred years’ disaster,/crazily tangled as the Book of Kells”. How then, as we attempt to navigate this new phase of post-Brexit complexity and strife, can there possibly be a last Irish question? And if there was, how could it possibly be as glib as “will six into twenty-six ever go?”
Patterson is a fine writer who has produced some excellent novels and some brave and thought-provoking essays and documentaries. He has a light touch, a way of glancing off things and leaving our perception of them changed. He can dazzle. He tells a good story. He has worked with Fighting Words, a great organisation that encourages young people to write, and he runs the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University. He is one of those who feels compelled to try to explain to others his place, which is Belfast, Northern Ireland. It is a place which, he admits in this latest book, he loves “helplessly, a lot”. He is a good soul.
Patterson delights in striding about a stage, dressed in some gloriously age inappropriate suit of gold lamé, making an audience laugh when they had expected only to be enlightened. All this can be wonderful – but in truth at times he can be a desperate flibbertigibbet. I chaired a panel to which he was a contributor once at a literary festival. He struggled with his grasshopper long limbs in his seat, studied his elegant shoes, whistled and appeared scarcely able to contain his nervous energy while awaiting his turn to speak. He admires the Dublin based economist David McWilliams, and has in common with him a blokily witty turn of phrase, and an ability to be entertaining about serious stuff.
Patterson publishes a lot; too much, I think. This new book is marred by superficiality. It is described by its publisher’s blurb as “a social, political and geographical view of the South of Ireland” and a “journey of discovery” at a time when the question of the reunification of Ireland has “returned with a vengeance”. But it has, overall, a spun out, dashed-off feel.
There is a telescoped history of the island by way of preamble, and this is informative though with some striking gaps, particularly when it comes to the 18th century. The Penal Laws that outlawed the religion of 90 per cent of the population and deprived them of education, property and land ownership, do not feature. In terms of the contemporary, he pays little attention to what seems to me an intellectual and imaginative renaissance, with women at its forefront, nor to work that is being carried out by idealistic people, many of them young, to change the character of both jurisdictions.
The pandemic disastrously disrupted Patterson’s travel plans, and he was brave to proceed with the book in such circumstances. However, sometimes his trips across the Border seem needlessly haphazard and brief, and some of the fleeting encounters at bus stops and on bar stools that he describes do not really yield very much in the way of insight into the Republic that lies on the other side of the Border with Northern Ireland. He describes jaunts undertaken “on a whim” or cut short because of some other commitment. There is a lot of recounting of television news programmes.
But some vignettes are poetic and brilliant – as when in a foggy seaside beach in Co Waterford he comes upon “the glowing end of a cigarette being inhaled, from which I infer a smoker in the three foot six to four foot two height range, or a taller one seated”. The invisible man is adamant there will be a referendum, and when Patterson asks which way it will go replies, “Only one way it can go.” His chance meeting in Co Offaly with Belfast native Salters Stirling – who , it is quickly established, went to school with Patterson’s mother – is fascinating. Stirling comments that the parity of esteem that is a plank of the Good Friday agreement has brought about “bi-cultural identity” in the North, something that has not yet happened in the South.
There is a problem with tone. Sometimes flippancy shades into the patronising. Then at the very end his teenage daughter tells him she is thinking of leaving Northern Ireland. He tells her he loves her, then implores her: “The first chance you get, leave, and apart from visiting your mum and me, think long and hard before ever coming back.” You sense that Patterson has grappled in a deeper and darker way with his themes than he has shown.
Susan McKay’s latest book is Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground
