The Rest Just Follows

BORN in Belfast in 1961, Glenn Patterson grew up through the Troubles, when virtually everything anyone ever heard about Northern Ireland was violence, bombs and sectarian strife.

His latest novel, The Rest Just Follows, begins in the early 1970s and spans almost four decades, but for an author who says he writes ‘in the spaces in-between’, it is by no means a ‘Troubles novel’.

“What I really wanted to do with this book was to take a group of people and follow them from their pre-teens through to their early middle-age,” he says .

“They were going to have to live through a whole load of other stuff that I’d lived through, but also that the whole city of Belfast went through as well. Some of that has to do with the economy, some of it has to do with the politics and the Troubles — but it’s all just the stuff of the world that they all have to live through and deal with.”

While the Troubles serves as a muted backdrop to the story, it’s much more a celebratory tale of how three teenagers — Maxine, Craig and St John — grow up making the same kinds of mistakes and experiencing the same kinds of joy as kids in cities all over the world. Glenn mentions David Holmes, the Belfast-born DJ, whom he interviewed for a TV documentary a couple of years ago.

“We were talking about growing up in Belfast — for him it would have been the 1980s and into the ’90s, when he was starting to DJ in Belfast. And he said that he was really happy that his children didn’t have to grow up in what he grew up in. But then he paused and he said, ‘But I’m really glad that I did.’ I think it’s very hard to regret your own teenage years. So much of who we are has to do with what happened to us at that age that it doesn’t really matter what was going on in the public domain.

“That’s your only chance to be that age.”

The Troubles, inevitable, impacts on the lives of the characters, but it’s often in a non-direct or tangential fashion.

“You can take statistics and you can talk about the number of people who left during those particular years,” says Glenn, “and you can look at the number of people who were injured during those years, people who knew someone who was killed — and I can include my own family in that, on all of those counts — but there are also many other ways of measuring what it was to be living through those times.

“The novel starts in the early ’70s but it carries on through the decades up until the year before last, so the characters grow through all that. And the messes in their lives are mostly of their own making rather than anybody else’s.”

The Rest Just Follows is Glenn Patterson’s ninth novel, but while most of his stories are set in the recent or historical past, they are less concerned with what actually happened than they are in what-might-have-been.

“My books are, I suppose, alternative histories,” Glenn says. “The phrase I always use is, ‘This also happened’, or ‘Things like this also happened.’ So this book is also a version of that particular time. These are the kinds of things that went on, but they’re stories that maybe aren’t as frequently told.”

Indeed, one of the characters in the novel, Craig, grows up to become a history teacher who questions the official versions of what happened in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

“I think one of the things that has happened in the last 20 years is that versions of history have hardened,” says Glenn. “Everything has become neater.

“There are these ideological straight lines — all this happened because of all of that then, and everything was undeviatingly for that purpose. But that doesn’t express the chaotic nature, the opportunistic nature, the vindictive nature of all that went on.

“Things that happened to people’s lives … I just don’t believe any of those official versions. I think they need to be undercut slightly, because it’s all a lie. So many of those neat versions of the past are either lies of omission or commission.”

Wonderfully entertaining, and at times very funny, The Rest Just Follows takes its characters on an odyssey through the Troubles years and the Peace Process and on into contemporary Northern Ireland, a place where stories can be told, and movies made, about topics that aren’t necessarily concerned with sectarianism and violence. One example is last year’s Good Vibrations, a film biopic of Belfast punk impresario Terri Hooley which Glenn co-wrote with Colin Carberry (the pair were last month shortlisted for a Bafta award in the ‘Outstanding Debut’ category). The subtext of the movie was that Northern Ireland’s punks were far more interested in the music than they were in the political or religious affiliations of their peers, a theme that also runs through The Rest Just Follows.

“It was the first time I’d ever been involved in any film,” says Glenn, “and at the start all you hope for is that it’s going to get into the cinemas. So everything else just felt like a bonus, and the Bafta nomination was the most surprising one of all.” He was disappointed not to win the Bafta, naturally, but thoroughly enjoyed the glamour of being in the same room as Tom Hanks, Cate Blanchett et al. “I would be a big fat liar,” he grins, “if I said it was anything but just a very nice place to be.”

Another sign of Northern Ireland’s changing times, Glenn believes, is that it has become ‘a healthier place’ in terms of the diversity of its literature. He has even found himself turning his hand to writing crime fiction.

“I would be naturally quite reluctant to try things that I haven’t done before,” he says, “but then there’s the other side of you that is the eternal optimist. So I thought, when I was asked last year about Belfast Noir [edited by Stuart Neville and Adrian McKinty] that I’d give it a go. It was lovely to be asked, even if it was slightly terrifying. I don’t write short stories at all, and I’ve never written anything that could have been considered even noir-ish.

“But what’s interesting to me,” he adds, “is that a healthy literature is the one that contains many different types of writing — a healthy poetry, healthy playwriting, the novel in all its moods and forms. So it’s a much healthier place now. It’s really, in recent years, taken on shapes that you can only applaud.”

As a Belfast writer who has always employed his home town as a setting, Glenn Patterson knows to his cost that applause wasn’t always the first response when publishers and readers were confronted by Belfast, the Troubles and all that followed from those bitterly divisive years.

“There always seemed, in the past, to be this slightly ambivalent attitude on the one hand, especially with London publishers, when you’d occasionally get this attitude, ‘Oh God, not another thing about Belfast.’ They never knew how to deal with it. You almost had to apologise for having set something in Belfast. Happily, that no longer seems to be the case.”