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Showing results for tags 'Glenn Patterson'.
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Glenn Patterson is one of Northern Ireland's national treasures. His novels over the past thirty years have documented the social history of Belfast, both contemporary and historic, with a great deal of love. Where other writers have focused mainly on the Troubles and the Catholic part of the community, Patterson writes from a Protestant perspective and his novels have kept the Troubles firmly in the background. Serendipitously, his writing has coincided with the Peace Process, allowing him to reflect great social change across his works. Where We Are Now is about middle age. Herbie is some
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Most of us know the bare bones of the De Lorean story - a fantastical sports car with gull-wing doors, manufactured on the Peace Line in Belfast, running into financial difficulties and ending in scandal in a hotel room in the States. Glenn Patterson sets out to fill in the details; adding context, factual information and personal stories. The story as told by Glenn Patterson is, if anything, even more incredible than the sketchy details that most of us know. For a start, we meet John De Lorean himself. His public persona - the slick salesman with the looks of a statesman - is there. But
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Glenn Patterson is described on the back cover by Will Self as "Northern Ireland's Prose Laureate". That's a bold claim, especially since Patterson is almost unknown outside of Northern Ireland (and probably not that well known within it), but he is one of a handful of Northern writers who have something significant to say. The Mill For Grinding Old People Young is basically a history lesson for Belfast. Narrated in 1897 by an old man, Gilbert Rice, looking back at his youth, we find ourselves in Belfast pretty much as the Industrial Revolution arrives. If you love Belfast, it will be a tr -
Glenn Patterson is a long-established Belfast novelist whose works tend to focus on mundane lives with a backdrop of the Northern Ireland sectarian divide. Often these references are subtle, almost incidental. The Rest Just Follows starts out in much the same way – Craig Robinson is a young Grammar School boy. Maxine Neill failed the 11 Plus. StJohn Nimmo is a new boy at the Grammar School with a fondness of cigarettes. All three seem to have dysfunctional families. But unlike some of Patterson’s other novels, the details seem confused and hazy. Patterson has always had a thing where timeline
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"A vicar in Belfast counsels a disturbed man about a crime." But this is no ordinary vicar. He's young and "with it." That's as far as I got before giving up. I didn't like this. It takes a writer of uncommon quality for me to get beyond the lack of punctuation, and Patterson didn't write with enough quality for me to get around that fundamental problem of the lack of grammar. He simply isn't good enough. And the title annoyed me too. Can't god sue him for copyright theft? There's a great novel waiting to be written about the troubles, but this isn't it.
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Glenn Patterson The Third Party - Glenn Patterson
MisterHobgoblin posted a topic in 21st-Century Fiction
Glenn Patterson, for those who haven't come across him, is a giant in the world of contemporary Northern Ireland fiction. So was one of the principle characters in The Third Party - known only as Ike (short for icon). Now the world of contemporary Northern Ireland fiction is not very populous, and its main players are Patterson himself, Robert McLiam Wilson, David Park and Bernard MacLaverty. Inevitably one will try to find elements of these writers in Ike, and I suspect Ike is an amalgam of at least three of them. Anyway, Ike is a leading Northern Ireland writer attending a conference on
