Belfast Boy: Hot Press meets Glenn Patterson

When Glenn Patterson was a precocious teenager coming of age in his native Belfast in the late 1970s, he already knew that he wanted to be a writer. He still wasn’t entirely sure, however, exactly what kind of writer he wanted to be. He experimented with various genres, but it took a late night encounter with the RUC to permanently put him off poetry.

“When I was around 17, my then girlfriend lived in a very well-heeled part of Belfast,” Patterson recalls, speaking in a soft Northern accent. “There were a lot of judges around there who needed police protection. I was hanging around waiting for her to come out – against her father’s wishes – and the police picked me up. They searched me and found I had a notebook. Which could have contained anything, so when they opened it they found all these poems.”

Once they realised that young Patterson was an aspiring poet rather than a potential terrorist, an unusual deal was soon struck.

“They said that if I read them a poem they’d give me a lift up the road,” he laughs. “So what do you do? I read them a love poem or two. They actually seemed to like them, but I’ve never written poetry since.”

As things transpired, poetry’s loss wound up becoming literary fiction’s gain. Now 52, Patterson – described by Will Self as “Northern Ireland’s prose laureate” – has just released his ninth novel, The Rest Just Follows. Although he published his fictional debut, Burning Your Own, in 1988, it took him a while to discover that he was actually a novelist at heart.

“I was always writing stuff in my teens,” he says, “but it was never quite clear to me what I would write about that would work. There were various moments where you would write something and go, ‘That’s it!’ And then you would quickly discard the notion that you were that poet or that playwright.

“In the end, by the time I got to the novel, I thought I had to do it because there was nothing left. I’d been telling people I was a writer for a few years, but never knew what kind of writing it was going to be.”

As it happens, Patterson has other, more recently discovered, writing talents. Alongside Hot Press’ Colin Carberry (a former creative writing student of his at Queen’s University), he was nominated for an ‘Outstanding Debut’ BAFTA for their co-written Good Vibrations screenplay. Although the gong ultimately went to Kieran Evans for Kelly + Victor, he sounds completely genuine when he explains that the biggest honour was simply to be nominated.

“It was a great night!” he enthuses. “I can’t say that we had any particular expectations of winning, so the evening progressed pretty much as we anticipated. To be honest, what was heart-warming in the weeks leading up to it was the obvious goodwill towards the film throughout Ireland, but particularly here. That took everybody a wee bit by surprise. There was a lot of interest and a lot of people saying nice things about me and Colin, and congratulating us, and obviously delighted for us.

“There were people saying they were just pleased that the film was going to be on the screen at the Royal Opera House along with all those other big budget movies. So the reaction to the nomination was probably what I imagined the reaction would’ve been to us actually winning the thing. The weeks leading up to it were just lovely. It was a really nice thing to happen, especially at this otherwise miserable time of the year.”

Good Vibrations was based on the life of legendary Belfast record store owner Terri Hooley. The Rest Just Follows is also set in the city, as almost all of Patterson’s previous written works have been.

“Well, I live here,” he says. “I can’t think of any strong reason I wouldn’t write about Belfast because that’s just where the stories come from.”

The new novel opens in 1974, as its three central characters start secondary school. Quiet and shy, Craig Robinson winds up sitting beside the unfortunately monikered St John Nimmo, and the two become unlikely friends. Across town, Maxine Neill is reluctantly starting at a technical school, having not quite made the academic grade.

Their lives, and the lives of those around them, gradually become intertwined as Patterson skilfully takes them from their teens to their forties, against the backdrop of Belfast, an ever-changing contrarian city in which some things always remain the same.

“It was in my head that I wanted to write something that revisited a group of characters over a period of roughly 40 years,” he explains. “One of the things in my head was the Up series of documentaries – you know, Seven Up, Fourteen Up, Twenty-one Up. Following people’s lives at different intervals. I always remember, growing up, when those things were on TV, that it was very rare you would hear anybody from here in them. I didn’t hear anybody with our accent.

“I live in Belfast and so was watching BBC and ITV, and it was a rare thing to hear anybody from Belfast, or even Northern Ireland. In my head when I thought about doing that kind of a book, revisiting the lives of a group of characters over a period of 30-40 years.”

Although the Troubles naturally feature – there’s one murder and the occasional punishment beating, threat and explosion – it’s not a political book. Rather it’s the story of three flawed individuals living their complicated lives, making their inevitable mistakes, and yet somehow persevering.

“I knew the headings in advance,” he explains. “I knew that there was going to be, ‘Starting’, ‘Growing’, ‘Making It’, ‘Fucking’, ‘Starting... again’. I wanted it to have that kind of rhythm to it. It would seem to me to be a fairly normal way of life that just as people seem to have ‘made it’ – whatever they have achieved, whatever kind of stability they have in their lives or in their relationships – they go and fuck it up. So I knew there would be a fucking-up stage for them all. Because there were three people involved, I had some notion about what the tensions would be: it would be to do with love and their relationships and the complications that arise from that.”

Craig, St John and Maxine are all in early middle-age when the book ends. So is Patterson planning an eventual sequel?

“I haven’t really thought about that,” he laughs, “but actually, now that you mention it, there could be. It’s a curious one. I mean, they are young people even at the end. Maybe I’m just saying they’re young because I’m 52! But where the novel leaves them all, they are perhaps a little bit buffeted rather than battered. But they are still in their early middle age. I suppose the one thing I was trying to get at the very end was the sense of just... going on. So maybe.”

The Rest Just Follows is published by Faber & Faber.