Two Summers by Glenn Patterson: Two tales of Belfast teens from a writer at the peak of his powers

I return again and again to Glenn Patterson’s novels, from Burning Your Own to Fat Lad, for their depictions of Belfast masculinities as a heady mix of desperation and deprivation as a byproduct of just about getting by during the Troubles conflict. His latest offering, Two Summers, is a two-for-one – two novellas published under one title. The two separate stories – Summer on the Road, and Last Summer of the Shangri-Las – meditate on the intricacies of the shared experience of being an inexperienced teenage boy, moving through the growing pains into a semblance of adulthood.

In Summer on the Road, Mark enters the world of work, sweeping the roads in the Shankill area of Belfast; and in Last Summer of the Shangri-Las, Gem is sent abroad to New York to keep out of trouble in Belfast. As teenagers are wont to do, they are both obsessed with appearances, of beginning to carve out who their adult selves will be. Mark pulls himself out of bed at 6am for his summer job, but despite that shock to the system, he poses at being a teenage intellectual, walking up the Shankill Road with Jack Kerouac’s On the Road peeping out of his jacket.

Patterson packs so many lives into these two novellas, with the brevity of a single paragraph a background character, such as a man propping up the bar, comes to life, bursting beyond the pages

While Gem restyles himself in New York, taking on a shortened name (though it’s never clarified what he was called at home). He stomps around in lime green faux-alligator-skin boots and becomes obsessed with the band the Shangri-Las, listening to their record on repeat at his auntie’s apartment. In the day, he strikes up a friendship with Vivien as they both hover outside the band’s recording studio, hoping to get close to the action.

The effects of the conflict loom for both boys: Mark routinely passes a pub associated with the Shankill Butchers, while Gem fears “every single random crash or bang [that] sounded like the prelude to a bomb or gun attack”. Patterson packs so many lives into these two novellas, with the brevity of a single paragraph a background character, such as a man propping up the bar, comes to life, bursting beyond the pages. Two Summers showcases Patterson at the peak of his craft. I would have enjoyed them all the more if the novellas sprawled wider into novels.