A Conversation with Glenn Patterson

Glenn Patterson was born in 1961 and grew up on a Protestant estate in Belfast. As a teenager he was involved in Orange Marches, and he witnessed the sudden rise in sectarian violence. In order to escape from Northern Ireland, he went to England to study creative writing at the University of East Anglia, but he returned to the province in 1988 to become "Writer in the Community" for the city of Lisburn.

He has since written six novels and been involved in a number of documentaries for both the BBC and RTÉ.His first novel, Burning Your Own (1988), is set in Belfast during 1969. It won the Betty Trask Award as well as the Rooney Prize. His second novel, Fat Lad (1992), won the Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award. It is told from the perspective of a young man who has returned to Belfast after living in England for many years. Black Night at Big Thunder Mountain (1995) involves a character from Belfast who has gone to work at the Euro Disney construction site. The International (1999) takes place in a hotel shortly before the Civil Rights marches begin. Number 5 (2003) explores the lives of different families that live in a particular house over the course of four decades. That Which Was (2004) is set in contemporary Belfast and examines the intersections between memory and history. His most recent publication, Lapsed Protestant (2006), is a collection of his nonfiction. Patterson is currently a writer in residence at the Seamus Heaney Centre, affiliated with Queen's University Belfast.

We met at a coffee shop on Fountain Street in Belfast.¹ Patterson is tall, slender, and his blonde hair is streaked with grey. He stands with his hands in his back-pockets, not quite slouching, and he is immediately friendly. One or two people in the coffee shop wave to him and he smiles back. When our tea arrives and we settle down to talk, Patterson grows suddenly serious and ready to discuss his work.

PH: We had a conversation some time ago about the term "'Troubles' Trash." You mentioned that the violence in Northern Ireland has been exploited by writers of the thriller genre. Since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, do you feel there is a rise or fall in this type of writing about the North?

GP: Well, curiously, when That Which Was came out, there were several novels that year [2004] that had elements of the thriller in them. They all dealt with characters that had been involved with violence in the past and they were trying to come to terms with what they had done: Eoin McNamee's The Ultras, David Park's Swallowing the Sun, and Sean O'Reilly's The Swing of Things. And, you know, it surprises me that I wrote that kind of a book, a thriller, if you will. It surprised me that I wrote a book that had an unheard-of thing called a "plot" or a "genre plot."

These other books had characters that were broadly similar to my central character in That Which Was and I think that represented—and Henry McDonald, a columnist with the Observer, wrote a feature on this—how unusual it was that four novels had characters with terrorist's pasts. I think that this occurred because the past wasn't completely dealt with. The Good Friday Agreement made many people feel that there was an end, and many people felt that we had drawn a line under the past; but I think what happened a half-dozen years after that was that the peace wasn't, actually, as complete as we all imagined that it would be. The present is bedeviled still by issues that have to do with the past and there was a question of how have we accounted for the actions of the past. I think that all of these books come out of that imperfect peace. So, the very short answer to your question is that there are still books in the thriller idiom being written, but I think that the nature of them has changed slightly...