Essays: Northerners love home truths, usually missiles packed with prejudice and directed at others. Glenn Patterson subverts this tradition. He tosses out his observations with an easygoing smile, but the best of them hit their target, unsettling firm assumptions, opening up uncomfortable and important questions.
We Northern Irish are "among the most scrutinized people on earth", he remarks. "I've often wondered, though, whether we aren't too busy clamouring to broadcast our own particular version of the truth to listen to what others are really saying about us."
Like many's the lapsed Protestant before him, Patterson has retained that old sense of being obliged to bear witness, and a deep strain of guilt is awoken when he knows he has erred from his own path. He's brave, the honest way he writes about his own life. One of the strongest pieces in this collection of occasional writings is "Just Like Him". It deals with the author's return to Belfast in 1994, after more than a decade's absence, with his new lover, Ali. He has left his long-time partner in England, and his parents are upset for her.
One night when his parents are out, loyalists come to the door of their east Belfast home. They remember Patterson, and he them. "Glenda", they call him, the name he'd got once he'd left for university, coming home with dyed hair, polished nails and a pink shoulderbag.
He wore their ridicule with pride, "determined to be as different as I possibly could to the people I'd left behind". The loyalists demand money for their "kick the pope" band. Feeling vulnerable to their menace, he makes a donation, but tells them it is because his Dad probably would have if he'd been in. When his parents return, he tells them about the callers and his father says he wouldn't have given them a penny. Then Patterson recalls his father refusing to make such a donation back in 1972, when this was a far more dangerous and significant gesture, one that denied the legitimacy of paramilitary claims to represent the community. "It left a space between religion - an accident of birth - and political belief," Patterson reflects. "The very space I have tried all my adult life to live and work in." His parents welcome Ali with flowers. This is a meditation on love, on family, on community, on the Troubles and on writing, but it wears these themes lightly. Patterson's novels have been praised for their "eloquent tact". His caustic humour has been noted. These qualities are evident in the best of these previously printed journalistic pieces. The paramilitaries "talk as though they are disciplined armies and act as though they are crazed biker gangs". George Best's decline into self-destruction mirrors Northern Ireland's own. "Love Poetry, the RUC and Me" is a witty treatment of, among other things, a narrow escape from a potentially fatal encounter in 1979 with a cruising gang. It includes the line, "Hormones, I find, make poor bigots".
The collection is uneven, with some slighter pieces detracting from the excellent ones. There is too much on Patterson acting as a guide to the bars and murals of the brave new Belfast, though his love for that vexed city is engaging.
Political analysis is not his forte and his indignation, while undeniably righteous, sometimes inclines to the rant. The cover photograph is weird, a dark close-up of the author (in life handsome and often smiling) furrowing his brow with his own fist in one eye. However, Patterson is a good writer, a good soul - and this is a good book.
Susan McKay is an author and journalist
Lapsed Protestant By Glenn Patterson. New Island, 198pp. €13.95