The expression “Here’s me” is, or used to be, Belfast shorthand for “This is what I said to so-and-so in response to . . .” As in: “Here’s me: Away and give my head peace.” So here’s Glenn Patterson on his home ground, sure footed, clear sighted, quick witted, level headed and even handed, as he addresses topical concerns, raising a sardonic eyebrow or standing back in bemusement in the face of one local peculiarity after another.
Moving between astute whimsicality and wry sobriety, Patterson in this collection shows himself to be among the liveliest of our social and political commentators. His reflections on contemporary matters are enjoyable and engrossing. Like Lapsed Protestant, its predecessor, Here's Me Here has plenty in the way of backwards-and-forwards momentum to get its teeth into.
The trials and tumults of modern life take a particular form in Northern Ireland, a form that often leaves the rest of the world bewildered and exasperated. If things have improved immeasurably since powersharing came into being, you still find a good deal of backsliding going on, as certain atavistic attitudes prove ineradicable. “All of us,” says Patterson dryly, “as often as not means ‘All of us who think like us’.” He is not unduly impressed by the C-word – C for community – as it is generally preceded by “loyalist”, “nationalist” or whatever. So much, he implies, for integrationist objectives.
“Intense parochialism” – one of Patterson’s sharp phrases – overtook the North, and especially Belfast, in the 1970s, a bad time for stability and progressiveness. Patterson himself, a teenager at that time, didn’t lack his own outlets for parochial bravado – “I . . . used to run around Finaghy . . . writing ‘FTP’ ” – for F*ck the pope – “on lampposts, bus stops, park benches and other street furniture”, before awareness and rationality overtook him. (That something similar is true of many of us makes you wonder if the whole trouble with the North can’t be put down to a widespread state of arrested development.)
Patterson’s aversion to idiotic locutions, such as “participatory settings” for “community arts”, is expressed lightly and deftly. (Although you might believe, as he does, that one of these phrases is as inapt as the other.)
He’s a superb anecdotalist whose self-deprecating and engaging manner covers a capacity for rigorous attention to structure. When he talks about “allowing my mind to wander down paths of its own choosing”, or declares himself to be “ever open to distraction”, you can be sure he is keeping a close eye, all the same, on where such byways are leading him.
Where they are leading him, in most instances, is back to the central point, whether it's contained in a comically rueful evocation of an averted contretemps (as in the very amusing Travels With My Brick, which considers what can happen when you carry an innocent prop into a fraught situation) or is grounded in politics or literature (or, more frequently, politics and literature).
Patterson writes eloquently in praise of libraries (“a library should not have to make a business argument”); indeed, he has praise for anything, initiative or institution, that tends towards the state John Hewitt envisaged as “a tolerant and just society” – something constantly slipping between the cracks of bigotry and savagery.
In 2012 Patterson's historical novel, The Mill for Grinding Old People Young, was published to considerable acclaim. To date it's his only historical novel (the others are all set in the present or very recent past), and it's intriguing to contemplate its genesis. The essay included here with the striking title Two Quacks and a Son of Dust – Patterson is a dab hand at titles – provides insight into the way some facts about 19th-century Belfast came together, and were embellished, in the novelist's imagination. The "two quacks", incidentally, were a pair of inferior architects who nearly ruined John Millar's design for the Third Presbyterian church in Rosemary Street, during the latter's absence from Ireland. (A reimagined Millar gets into the novel through friendship with the main character.)
Patterson, as a resident observer of traits, predicaments, anxieties and antipathies in the North, keeps his head and cultivates a calm (and often humorous) approach. Among the topics under his scrutiny are popular music, politics, home life, literature and the Northern Ireland Assembly, and with all of these the points he makes are exhilarating and judicious.
Some of the pieces he has chosen strike a more serious note than others. Fundamental Things, for instance, Poles Apart? (despite a blip in its opening sentence) and Against Closure 11 all provide much to ponder and applaud.
Patterson deplores a situation in which "complexities and subtleties are replaced by cliches and slogans". This perception, indeed, is a motivating factor underlying the whole collection. But even at its most seemingly throwaway – Names, Wonders – Here's Me Here calls to mind the phrase with which Patterson himself summed up the work of the late broadcaster Gerry Anderson: "deceptively casual and very funny".
Patricia Craig is an author and critic. Bookworm, her memoir of childhood reading, is due to be published in September
