In
this latest of Belfast native Glenn Patterson's
series of novels from the past couple of decades
that, as he has matured, show the crest and now
the ebb of the Troubles, Patterson turns to the
trauma inflicted on victims- those innocent and
those who have become entangled at young ages into
sectarian and state-sponsored violence for the adrenaline
it provides. Ken Avery, a 34-year-old Presbyterian
preacher of a small East Belfast congregation, tries
to figure out, in the waning days of the year 2000,
if Larry, who comes to him with a confession of
his complicity in a triple murder from the early
1980s that remain (with as Patterson notes, 1800
other NI cases) unsolved, is in fact the guilty
perpetrator.
Patterson,
as he has in his earlier fictional studies, pursues
the less graphic, more psychologically vivid nuances
of the effects of what happens at what the municipal
bureaucrats label 'sectarian interfaces'. Avery,
as he juggles the demands of a five-year-old daughter,
a snappish wife giving birth to their son, and
a fractious group of clerical colleagues, bereaved
supplicants, gawking paparazzi, and invisible
thieves, must try to make sense of his own calling
as he's tested by the aftermath of Larry's revelations.
The novel's blurbs make much of the fact that
this preacher is also a Lou Reed fan; surely by
now a half-century of folks- yes, even Christians-
raised on rock need not be that extraordinary?
Born
in 1964, Patterson lacks the frenetic if increasingly
strained satire of Colin Bateman or the ambitious
send-ups of Robert MacLiam Wilson. But whereas
Ripley Bogle and Eureka Street may
have attracted for MacLiam Wilson more media attention
or at least better lines to quote from their uproarious
protagonists, Patterson by stamina and craft may
yet outpace his louder and brasher peers. Bateman
appears to have remained on the light comic side;
MacLiam Wilson's more ambitious texts have left
his audience waiting long now for a hat trick
to follow his two early scores. Meanwhile, Patterson
keeps producing every couple of years a well-structured,
nuanced, and believable narrative. His career
has concentrated on a steady series of character
studies that over the past fifteen years have
shown him able to leave behind the 'Troubles genre'
into which his earlier novels have inevitably
been placed.
That
Which Was appears to extend his portrayal
of suburban life, anticipated in the previous
novel, Number 5, that contains the tensions
of Belfast survival blocks away from the barricades
or peace walls-- along with a more measured taking
of lower middle-class aspirations to leave such
stresses behind, at least when one returns from
work each evening. His characters are never less
than proud if conflicted natives, yet they refuse
to be stereotyped by their hometown. This humanism
connects such figures to their unassuming but
observant creator, Patterson. (He has released
this summer his first non-fictional book, Lapsed
Protestant.) East Belfast, as in other Patterson
novels, combines the mundane with the awful, and
the mixed legacy of a city preparing the new waterfront
arena, the Odyssey, and a gentrifying civic landscape
for Bill Clinton's visit circa the millennium
plays off against the same city's shadowy figures
unwilling or unable to let faction fights of the
past few decades subside.
This
novel kept my interest; I read it in three long
sittings. It's subtle, and does not leap off the
page with glorious evocations of haunted setting
or whimsical lovable pubcrawlers or dramatic prison
escapes that often overlap in other Northern Irish
novels. But this makes the novel truer to everyday
life, lacking the fireworks of a stupendous climax
and offering instead more a damp fizzle of smoldering
emotions. The novel reaches a rather convoluted
peak and the resolution eludes easy comprehension.
The latter portion of the book, while still satisfying,
becomes rather forced in parts, as Avery's quest
turns into a labyrinth. This may disappoint readers
expecting a tidier ending. But it's a more realistic
treatment even if as fiction it's less perfect.
Patterson
pursues the more introspective plot but more faithfully
rendered path as he follows Avery's attempts to
ease a man's tortured conscience. Avery's a decent
fellow, not a plaster saint. He's probably no
more adept than anyone else as he tries- to be
worthy of his profession- to bring a bit more
peace into the world, and all the more admirable
for his awkward, all-too-human grappling with
questions of faith and medicine and morality--as
all three collide in his effort to figure out
the veracity of Larry's terrible memories that
come back to haunt not only him.
(P.S.
Avery looks up the case that Larry remembers in
a book that's not credited in the body of the
text by name but that remains a necessary source
for anyone seeking real-life accounts from the
Troubles. Lost Lives, ed. by David McKittrick
et al. is a 1998 compendium of brief entries on
all those killed in the decades of violence.)
