Book Interview: Glenn Patterson melds Troubles-era tumult with girl-group fascination

Author Glenn Patterson

• Two Summers
• Glenn Patterson
• New Island: €15.95 Kindle: €8.34

When Glenn Patterson was a teenager in Belfast, he took on a variety of summer jobs. He worked in a bar, and at one stage, he swept the roads.

And it’s this job that he gives to Mark, the protagonist in the first of his two novellas, Summer on the Road. It marks a time on the cusp of the 1980s, 10 or 11 years into the Troubles; a time when security checks and bomb scares were part of normal life.

“If you were my sort of age, you’d never really known what it was like to be in the city centre, without these restrictions to your movement,” Patterson says.

“You did what you had to do. It’s not that you accepted it wholly, but it was this thing you had been handed, as part of the fabric of your normal life.”

Incredibly youthful looking, lithe, and wiry, with a mop of fair hair, Patterson’s exuberance, enthusiasm, and warmth, is as evident through the screen, as it is in real life.

He’s clearly a man who extracts joy from day-to-day living.

Like his protagonist, Patterson was brought up on a working-class housing estate, and like Mark, he attended Methody (Methodist College) on a scholarship.

And though Mark’s experiences bear some resemblance to the author’s own; both worked on the roads and did their best to fit it with their workmates — while dealing with humongous hangovers, the piece is by no means autobiographical.

The second novella, Last Summer of the Shangri-Las, was sparked by Patterson’s abiding fascination with the New York group.

“My three elder brothers bought singles every week,” he says.

“Leader of the Pack sounded like a novelty song from another era. I kind of went and listened to every CD by them. They fascinated me.”

He read that in 1977, by which time one of the group’s members had died, the remaining three spent time in a New York recording studio.

“They’d been out of the limelight for nine years, but were still young,” he says.

He tried several times to write about the group, and tried a screenplay, before settling on a troubled Belfast teenage fan’s story as a way in. Gem has been packed off to New York, to stay with his aunt, because in Belfast, he’s driving his mother demented.

“I wasn’t like Gem,” he says.

“I didn’t spend a summer in New York, and I didn’t refuse to put on clothes because I was scared to go out. But 1977 was a scary time in Belfast, and Gem’s impulse is recognisable to me.”

Patterson wrote the two novellas separately, before realising how well they went together, and this publication, Two Summers, is a fascinating look at life in Belfast during the Troubles, but not focused on them.

By the time he was 17, Patterson was already a dedicated writer.

But he deferred his place at university and became a bookseller in the centre of Belfast for a couple of years, because his girlfriend of the time, who was still at school, would have chucked him if he went away.

“It was a glorious time,” he says.

“I was dispatched to run to the bank; to the wholesalers or to deliver a letter, and I’d encounter people from professions that I didn’t know existed.

“I was discovering history about the city.”

Glenn Patterson on the steps of the former Sire Records building where the pic of the Shangri-Las was taken in the summer of 77.

But after two years, he felt he had to get away if he were to write the things he wanted to write, and he secured a place at the University of East Anglia. He’d heard about the writing initiative there, but at the time, the only creative writing course was an MA.

“I applied for English and American studies, but from the moment I got there, I spent my time writing fiction.”

And he was lucky.

“A series of curriculum changes meant that they offered an undergraduate creative writing class for the first time, and I was in it.”

It was taught by Malcolm Bradbury, who also tutored the MA class Patterson moved on to.

“The first day Bradbury said, ‘I have no way of knowing what you will do with the rest of your lives, but for this year, I want you to think of yourselves as writers. He told us to read what the others had written, to understand the genre, and to engage with it as a piece of writing.

“We talked a lot about our work and smoked a lot. He and Angela Carter, who also taught, were generous and non-prescriptive. It was enabling.”

At Christmas, in his second year, Patterson embarked on a novel.

“We finished the course in May, but my novel wasn’t complete, so I stayed on to finish it.

“I was going out with someone who was taking the MA the following year, and she was working in a restaurant in Norwich. When she went to work, I was at the desk, then we went to the pub.”

Later, the pair moved to Manchester, and it was while he was there, working for Waterstones, that he heard that his first novel, Burning Your Own, had won the prestigious Rooney Prize.

That, along with a grant from the Arts Council in Northern Ireland, and a Writer in Residence post in Dundalk, enabled him to keep writing.

“All I wanted to do back then was to write novels,” he says.

“I’ve diverted into other things since, but I’ve always had a novel on the go.

“When you’re trying to make a life that’s writing-centred, you need other things to put around it.

“You had to have six months in your account. If it fell below that, you’d run out of money before you completed your novel, unless you got a Writer in Residence or something else.”

He was trying to complete his third novel when he applied for a six-month post, at University College Cork. It was there that he met his wife, Ali Fitzgibbon.

The couple moved to Belfast in the spring of 1994, and Patterson helped set up an undergraduate creative writing course at Queen’s University.

“It’s developed into a Masters, and I’m now supervising the PhD programme.” He’s delighted that Belfast now has such a strong community of writers, citing in particular, Jan Carson, Wendy Erskine, and newcomers, Michael Magee and Rachel Donnelly.

“When I was in my teens, I felt I couldn’t stay in Belfast if I wanted to write. And later, I used to feel invisible and not seen by London.

“It’s great that that’s all changed.”

Patterson co-wrote the script for the film Good Vibrations, which was later developed into a play.

“My co-writer, Colin Carberry and I are working on a couple of other stage things,” he says.

He’s also working on a script of Louis McNeice’s Autumn Journal.

“It was important to me at school, and was the only book I took to Toronto, when I had a residency there in 2013.”

When I interviewed Patterson back in 2012, he told me that he planned to retire from writing at 75. Now 62, he’s not so sure.

“I can’t imagine I’ll ever stop,” he says. “Writing is part of who you are in the world. On the train back from Dublin recently, I found myself writing stuff into a notebook. You’ve seen something and you’re trying to put it into words, and then into better words, and then you’re trying to think what would go with that. I can’t imagine not doing that.”