Glenn Patterson is a bit of a renaissance man. Not content with being one of northern Ireland’s best-respected novelists, he is currently working on two different librettos, and he is also a popular essayist. Patterson has just released a collection of non- fiction pieces, Here’s Me Here: Further Reflections of a Lapsed Protestant.
The collection spans nine years of his non-fiction writing and Patterson delves into a diverse number of topics — current affairs, politics, personal history, the trickery of memory and his love of dal. Does he ever look back and realise that his opinion had radically changed between then and now?
“Yeah, there are a couple of things,” he says. “But what’s more depressing about this place is how little has changed in some ways. Reading back over some of the things now, things that you thought would be outdated in a few days’ time, seven or eight years on from writing them, you think, ‘I could have written that yesterday.’”
A case in point is ‘Twelfthish’, which Patterson wrote in 2006 about efforts to rebrand the 12th of July parades. “That’s going well, isn’t it?” he laughs. “This year I saw some posters for the 12th food festival, Orangefest food festival or something like that. The mind was boggling! It’s one of those things that defies rebranding.”
“I was in the car with my daughter just before the 12th and she noticed that there were forklift trucks placing pallets on top of a bonfire on the corner of Sandy Row, practically in the centre of Belfast. I think things like that are worthy of contemplation. What is that? What’s going on? Structurally it was a phenomenal thing so your response is complex, especially as someone who in my youth built bonfires. We didn’t have forklift trucks, we were amateurs frankly in comparison.” One of the major themes in the collection is how the past shapes the present, but that memory is tricky. In ‘Photograph’, Patterson recalls an image from World War II which he had seen in Berlin. Searching for information about it years later, he realised that the photo and his memory of it were at odds.
“I was so scuttled seeing that image for the first time. It absolutely wrecked me. I felt devastated. You see something, it imprints itself on your memory and you carry that away with you. Over the years certain things got made tidier, or there was something gruesomely aesthetic about the reformulation of the photograph. I think it is instructive — almost the moment after something has happened, our attempt to reconstruct it is going to be partial. I think that does have particular resonance for here.”
In a place like the North, intractable social issues and bad blood are often the result of stories that get handed down from generation to generation, he notes.
“Sometimes a lot of that is wilful. As a species we are pretty efficient storytellers and we know that there are certain things that spoil the story so we shave off what gets in the way of the main thrust of a story. Sometimes retellings harden into facts. That’s true of everyone everywhere.”
In ‘Fundamental Things’ Patterson writes that memory should not be confused with fiction, which is “the preserve of writers and political parties.” It’s a funny and cynical line. “Someone suggested I should be made writer-in-residence at the Stormont Assembly and asked me what I thought, which is a difficult one to answer. The answer I tend to give is: why would they need a writer-in-residence in a place that already has 108 fiction makers?
“I hate the word narrative, the way it has been appropriated by politicians. The idea of ‘competing narratives’ is a polite way of saying that there is widespread antipathy. There is no attempt to address it, you just find a nicer way of saying it. A lot of what I hate about politics here is that it is based on evasion and a failure to speak clearly about things. I hate complacency. The politicians are so pleased with themselves for not doing things that they did in the past, and seem to revel in that. Everything that has been achieved could be very quickly undone.” Patterson describes himself as a “short-term pessimist and a long- term optimist” and argues that, like George W. Bush, we are too quick to proclaim “Mission Accomplished.”
“The May 22 referendum was wonderful. It was wonderful in the North as well. It galvanised people here and for a few months all the talk I heard was about popular opinion affecting change outside of the political party system. There was a real sense of what could be done, and then somewhere around the Greek referendum some of that leaked away. I think we are far too quick to proclaim a historic moment. The number of times that has happened with northern Ireland... Just after the news headlines we get congratulations from President Obama or whoever happens to be in the White House and two weeks later there’s deadlock. Hyperbole has entered into the culture and the language. There is a sense that history has been made and cannot be unmade. I don’t think everything is resolved for ever, but humanity is resilient and we go on.”
The title of the book is an odd one — identifying yourself by religion, even one you no longer practise, seems a very ‘Northern Irish’ thing.
“When you write a novel you know what you’re going to call it by the end if you didn’t know before. But for the first collection, I hadn’t a clue. The title ‘Lapsed Protestant’ came from Edward Higgle at New Island. For this one ‘Here’s Me Here’ is my Twitter account name. Not that anyone would ever follow me — I never do anything on it. ‘Further Reflections’ was to signal continuity from the last collection. You know what, it could have been ‘Relapsed Protestant.’ That was my fear — that would have been a terrible thing!”
Not as bad as Prolapsed Protestant?
Patterson breaks out into laughter. “Oh yes! You know what? At my age, I am beginning to worry about that!”