The arrival of John Z DeLorean in Belfast to produce his futurist sports car seems just as improbable now as it did in 1978, but to Glenn Patterson the city has always been a place of possibility, one of Italo Calvino’s invisible cities, a place of artificers and dreamers. Inevitably, perhaps, Patterson has drawn on the DeLorean story for his elegant new novel.
Gull opens in Los Angeles, where DeLorean, charming and connected, incorporates a struggling but plainspoken journalist, Edmund Randall, into his slipstream. Randall is dogged and sincere, caught up in his boss's mythology despite himself.
The opening chapters are documentary, fast-paced, caught up in DeLorean’s trajectory of penthouses and television studios, beautiful women and high finance. DeLorean is charming and perfidious, playing one against the other. A Puerto Rican government delegation arrives at the DeLorean Motor Company to sign final contracts for the factory, only to find that the project has been whipped away. Not for the last time, the faithful Randall finds himself knocking back a few Polish vodkas as he lines himself up to deliver grim news.
Throughout the story DeLorean is a high-octane outline, a glittering absence, always on the move. It’s tempting to see him simply as a gambler where the game always means more than the outcome. The hair, the jaw, the charm, the grifter’s ability to keep everyone around him off balance. But DeLorean was also a talented engineer and an innovator at General Motors and Chrysler, responsible for that classic muscle car the Pontiac Firebird, among others. Randall sees him “as though . . . he moved through a different medium, or was being shot on a different speed, to everyone around him”. Patterson doesn’t try to define DeLorean but allows the man’s own properties to delineate the void within.
The early production of the sports car is structured as an Ealing comedy. The slapstick of the job interviews, the disastrous prototype launch, the workers beginning to pull together, overcoming their differences, the Troubles both distant noise and strangely intimate.
Out of the interviews emerges Liz, a married Protestant woman. Liz is no harassed housewife and can hold her own in the male-dominated factory. She’s a cut above and the lonesome Randall is drawn to her.
The episodes with Randall and Liz are vintage Patterson. There’s an easy warmth to the relationship, meetings in rain-soaked parks, middle-aged regrets surfacing. Loyalty, doing the right thing – it’s a Patterson constant – people left to their own devices will come to the correct conclusion.
Randall has been in Vietnam, and has failed under fire, but is gritty and dependable when the chips are down. Courage should be measured not on an epic scale but in accretions of ordinary virtue. Patterson has earned the right to make the point, even if the philosophy buckles when it comes to the Troubles. For too many people, their goodwill was only skin deep.
Gull is brilliant on the textures of 1980s Belfast: the dank mansions of south Belfast, all flock wallpaper and shag pile, the cold war Flugplatz of Aldergrove or the utilitarian interior of an armoured police Cortina, a vehicle as exotic in its own way as the DMC 12. British government functionaries are bumbling and shrewd. Locals struggle to make the best of themselves.
In addition, Liz's west Belfast workmates Anto and TC are vivid and convincing. One has Jack London's socialist/dystopian novel The Iron Heel hanging out of his pocket; the other fights the class struggle through City and Guilds exams.
The factory goes up, the cars are produced (Sammy Davis jnr and Johnny Carson are among the first buyers). But you know it’s never going to last. The car is overpriced, the market is stagnant, Margaret Thatcher disapproves. There is something transcendent about the episode – the gull wing DMC crashing into a muddy field in Belfast like some interstellar fragment – that is more Roswell than Grantham, and the antithesis of Thatcher’s narrow values.
The hard politics are, for the most part, distant thunder. When the hunger strikes do intrude, Patterson typically focuses on the unseen heroes, the holders of the line – in this case the locals who kept riot and destruction from the factory. The employees are ordinary folk trying to make good. It would take a heart of stone not to cheer them on.
As always, however, politics is a slippery business for a writer, and sometimes the tone of Gull falters. You don't have to approve of the act, but to say that Bobby Sands starved himself to death to prove that the bombing of a furniture store is a political act is glib.
It’s hard to see John DeLorean as a visionary when you take into account the cocaine bust, the conversion to Christianity, the staggering amounts of money borrowed and not repaid. And yet there is still that car, the stainless-steel shell, beautiful yet impossibly delicate, the engine underpowered, those doors “like the wings of a bird riding a current”, the whole thing seeming more dreamed into existence than designed.
The structure of Gull is as sleek and wondrous as a DeLorean design. Patterson has always been a determined and decent chronicler of the North. The Troubles are a malign anchor to a writer's ambition and craft and it takes guts to persevere. Art can founder under moral imperatives, but the best keep their nerve and their work draws increasing authority from it.
This is a complex story put together with intuitive ease and panache. And for all that Patterson is a writer of the small intimacies, the everyday graces, he is compelling on the intercontinental sweep of the DeLorean tale.
In the end there may have been more to DeLorean’s affinity with Belfast than the availability of Labour government grants. DeLorean died in March 2005, aged 80. One of his final acts was to append a verse from Ecclesiastes to the title of his motor company. The purpose of the name change was to avoid financial penalty, but the verse itself could have come from a Belfast street preacher’s billboard: “There is no work, nor device nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”
Eoin McNamee's latest novel is Blue Is the Night. He is writer in residence at Maynooth University
