If there is a recurring premise in Glenn Patterson’s novels, it seems to be a desire to understand the present by examining the past. In his latest work, The Mill For Grinding Old People Young, Patterson, one of northern Ireland’s most accomplished literary novelists, offers a nuanced portrait of Belfast and the forces that shaped the city.

The bulk of the novel is set in 1831, a year before the Reform Act, but opens in 1897, when his protagonist Gilbert Rice is in his 80s. This, says Patterson, allowed him to link the past and present.
“The framing device was actually a way for me to get back towards the 1830s, which initially seemed as though it might be quite daunting. I thought to mediate between the first decade of the 21st century when I was writing the book, and the third decade of the 19th century, there might be a halfway point where I could delve back from.”
By setting the opening in 1897, Patterson evokes not simply the past, but the beginning of the modern city. Landmark Belfast buildings are being erected and technology is changing. The telephone, newly installed in Gilbert’s house, frightens his housekeeper.
“I’m interested in how great technological changes and great physical changes to the world we inhabit take place,” says Patterson. “It is in the nature of the world and in the nature of cities that they change, they escape from us. There is a moment in our lives when we feel ourselves to be in our time and then one day you look around and you realise it is no longer your time or your city – other people have taken over and are defining it. I wanted to get into the book that there are things being built which Gilbert will never see, such as the City Hall, which has been the focal point of Belfast city centre for the past century.”
Religious conflict is not part of the younger Gilbert’s world – 1831 was a relatively peaceful time in Belfast. Patterson notes that, “There was certainly always religious conflict in Belfast, but then you have to add, ‘to a greater or lesser extent’. For quite long periods Belfast was a place that hadn’t been defined by religious strife.”
However, the repercussions of the United Irishmen Rebellion of 1798 are still being felt in the city.
“I think a lot of people here look back to the United Irishmen as a kind of ideal. There is something very attractive for someone like myself who comes from a Protestant background. I have no active religion, I don’t feel defined by Protestantism, but because it is unavoidable, this tag of Protestant, you look for a good role model in that tradition and there is no better role model than the radical Presbyterians of the late 18th century. Not just in terms of their politics, but culturally.”
“You look back to that period as something you can draw sustenance from, and yet the United Irishmen in the period before the Rising, the movement was riddled with informers and they killed informers in exactly the same way that any clandestine organisation deals with informers. I was keen to have a novel that brought the United Irishmen into the narrative and complicate that, that distance period of heroic failure.”
Political actions and their repercussions are the underlying theme of the book. As well as the title, The Mill For Grinding Old People Young is the name of an inn and it is here that the young Gilbert meets a Polish woman, Maria. Driven by unrequited passion and angered by political corruption, Gilbert decides to humiliate the Earl of Belfast. As he considers this revenge on the figurehead of a venal political system, his plans take a more serious turn.
“He thinks she thinks of him as a boy and if he were a man of action she would give him more respect. He misreads what she wants,” says Patterson. “It is an act of pure folly. It is an act of a naïve and self-deluded young man who is convinced that this is what he is expected to do. As he comes back to the town, he looks at the people they pass and thinks to himself that nobody knows what he did that morning and wonders what they might have done in the past.”
“I suppose in that moment the story comes closest to where I found myself at the time of writing the novel. Where 20 years after the first ceasefires here, there is still a discussion about how we deal with what happened. Gilbert says maybe the best thing is to say nothing.”
At times perhaps repression, not confession, may be the best answer, suggests Patterson, particularly in an area as geographically small as northern Ireland, where victim and perpetrator live cheek by jowl.
“I’ve always been keen to find ways to come at the figures of this place. You know, three thousand people dead is actually not an awful lot, but in a population of 1.5 million, that’s quite a lot. It wasn’t a civil war – that would be to misname it – it was an intimate campaign of murder carried out by three separate forces, state, loyalist and republican. It was very intimate – people were killed by people who knew them or who were able to observe them from close quarters. That might be one reason not to have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I was always a great supporter of something like that early on, but as time has gone on I wonder about the value of it.”
“I think that maybe one of the things that this book is about is accommodation – within the passage of time, all past events are accommodated. It doesn’t mean that they have to be retrospectively condoned. The last World War I veteran died not so long ago, but when I was growing up there were numerous people who had fought in the First World War and they’re all gone, they’re gone right across Europe. In time that will be true of people who fought in the Second World War and in our much smaller conflict. Eventually, there will be nobody who lived through a particular time. You know the cliché – time is a great healer.”

Glen Patterson’s The Mill for Grinding Old People Young published by Faber & Faber is out now