The Irish Novel 1960 - 2010

1999: Glenn Patterson, The International

is killed, Maeve’s condition remains the same. Yet, despite such damage, the fact that Billy, however unreasonably, is prepared to take the weight of his own world upon himself also has to count both for its spirit of redress and its tormented struggle to reconcile with change. At the end, he writes that ‘all gardens are stories . . . and all gardeners are storytellers ’ (390). Not the least notable aspects of Billy’s sense of his entitlement to his own story is the strenuousness with which it is initially asserted and the change of heart that strenuousness brings about. Supplementary Reading Joseph O’Connor, ‘Questioning Our Self-Congratulations’, Studies, vol. 87, no. 347 (Autumn 1998), pp. 245–51 Linden Peach, The Contemporary Irish Novel: Critical Readings (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 54–8 Tim Middleton, ‘Joseph O’Connor’, in Michael R. Molino (ed.), Twenty-FirstCentury British and Irish Novelists (Detroit: Gale, 2003), pp. 271–8 José Manuel Estévez-Saá, ‘An Interview with Joseph O’Connor’, Contemporary Literature, vol. 46, no. 2 (Summer 2005), pp. 161–75 Also Published in 1998 Sebastian Barry, The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty; Maurice Leitch, The Smoke King; Colum McCann, This Side of Brightness; Mike McCormack, Crowe’s Requiem; J.M. O’Neill, Bennett and Company; Keith Ridgway, The Long Falling 1999 Glenn Patterson, The International A native of Belfast, Patterson is the author of seven novels, including Burning Your Own (1988), Fat Lad (1992), Black Night at Big Thunder Mountain (1995), Number 5 (2003), That Which Was (2004) and The Third Party (2007). Set mainly in Belfast, these works dwell on the ostensibly plain people of that city with a subtle and humane regard for their inimitable individuality and the wide variety of their experiences and perspectives. Patterson (b. 1961) is also the author of a memoir – Once Upon a Hill (2008) – and a collection of non-fiction. ‘I wish I could describe for you 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’ (61), says Danny Hamilton, this novel’s gay, eighteen-year-old narrator, a barman at the International Hotel in the heart of the city. He is speaking in 1994, in the wake of 140 THE IRISH NOVEL 1960–2010 the Loyalist ceasefire which effectively brought the major hostilities of the twenty-five previous years of civic unrest to an end. And the time that Danny has in mind is typified by the Saturday in January 1967 in which the action is set. Even then, the status quo is showing signs of change. According to Eddie McAteer of the Nationalist Party, ‘things were looking up in the North’ (31). On the other hand, ‘Ian Paisley was basically a joke that became less funny each time you heard it’ (88). Plans were in hand for the Belfast Urban Motorway, but that development is more the basis of a derisive acronym than of a sense of social progress – Danny recognises the road’s destructive geographical and communal potential. And the previous summer has seen the murder of a barman, Peter Ward (thought to be the first of the sectarian killings that were such an appalling feature of those years when ‘Belfast disgraced itself’ (311)). Generally speaking, however, in 1967 a win on the football pools remains the likeliest way in which lives would be ‘changed utterly’ (26). The fire with which the novel opens is merely a fire, not a terrorist exploit. And the city’s fame rests more on a figure such as Ted Connolly, a soccer player with a noted career in England behind him (a salute to The Hollow Ball, perhaps), than on bullets and bombs. If the name of the hotel has changed from the Union to the International, no symbolic weight has evidently accrued. Life seems much the same as it has always been – ‘We were going to be modern tomorrow’ (62) – and the novel is in part a knowing and unsentimental toast to local expressions of the civic virtues of geniality and gregariousness. Neither Danny nor anybody else pays particular attention to the fact that the following day the first meeting of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association will be held in the International. What this meeting might entail is the furthest thing from the minds of the novel’s politically well-connected trio of Councillor Trevor Noades, entrepeneur Clive White, and a Dublin operator called Fitz. And the careers of...