It's January, 1967, and Belfast is still "the city that never wakes up". A solid, provincial place, it is coloured with the usual proportion of blessings and blights: local government corruption, industrial decline, the familiar dignity of civic landmarks, a sense of community. And one particular civic landmark plays host to one highly quixotic community.
Occupying the plush interior of the International Hotel are the passing residents, the wedding parties, the one night standers and after-hours drunks, all variously entertained by an idiosyncratic regiment of waiters, cooks, receptionists, maids and barmen. Among the barmen is Daniel "Danny Boy" Hamilton, a young man with an eye for detail who is palpitating with sexual confusion and the customary mix of hopes for his future.
And the future plays a major part in Patterson's latest novel. Danny, our narrator, fills his recollections of Belfast and the International with a powerful blend of personal and communal expectations. Stanley, a struggling children's puppeteer, nurtures impossible daydreams of a career in television, while Ingrid prowls the borders of her ex-lover's wedding, remembering the plans she built around him and incapable of inflicting any visible revenge for his desertion.
Danny flirts with the sexual potential of the hotel's milieu, unsure of just how homosexual he may turn out to be, or of how deeply he may be in love with either Stanley, or Ingrid, or both. Around them all, Belfast is drifting, almost dreaming, towards its future.
Patterson carefully draws his native city as a humdrum place; a home most readers might recognise, something lovably irritating, smothering and comforting, apparently immutable. Councillors and businessmen exchange plain envelopes of cash in its name, redevelopment schemes are mooted and then shelved.
With an admirable blend of humanity and respect, Patterson blends Danny's fictional world with the facts of a Belfast caught on the brink of unwilling notoriety. He has brought us to the International on the winter Saturday one day before the inaugural meeting of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association - the meeting after which, it might be argued, nothing in Belfast would ever be the same.
The choice of ground is masterful. Danny's retrospective viewpoint and our own knowledge of the city's coming decades combine to produce a genuine sense of tragedy, a proper historical weight and an understanding of how few could have predicted the savage repercussions of a handful of actions.
The International is rocked with a sense of how delicate any city's peace can be. In the accidental burning of a local shopping mall, Patterson delicately prefigures the destruction to come. Four barmen from the International have already been gunned down by strangers who waited for them in a "self-inflicted darkness" beneath broken street lamps. Without politicking or theorising, he carefully makes the sectarian divide visible: ripe for exploitation. But above all he makes plain the human beings who will lose themselves in a darkness they didn't choose, the people like Danny, Ingrid and Stanley who will have to abandon their fragile, sometimes laughable, sometimes desperately sustaining hopes for the future.
Danny's story has an inevitable melancholy and sufficient dignity to support the factual additions from Belfast's past. It is a tribute to Patterson's talents that this novel is also wonderfully funny. Danny's voice, beautifully realised, is a joy. Self-doubting, ironic, loving and keenly observant, it leads us through the frailties, the fantasies and the bar room wit of an entirely convincing cross-section of his city's life. This is a timely, intelligent and deeply humane book.
L. Kennedy's last novel, Everything You Need, was published earlier this year