Burning Your Own

My review title isn't a put-down. Patterson, born in the early 1960s in Belfast, has been ideally if fatefully placed for a vantage-point from which to explore his city's past decades, This debut novel, published when he was 27, has the hallmarks of such fiction: a protagonist's bildungsroman, the voice of a narrator that delves into his young character's inchoate mind in a manner beyond that character's means of expression, and a stress on violence and alienation that goes with this urbanizing territory. This stands out most in my recall: the wasteland where Mal and his role model Francy play and square off: symbols of the larger divisions as summer brings explosions and battles. Patterson strips down the plot to detour from heavy-handed messages or naive journalistic appeals. As a native, he has the advantage of few of his competitors in this crowded corner of "troubles" fiction. He keeps it real. Less common among those who have tried to enter the northern Irish psyche, he looks out from the unionist side but feels no "loyalism" to all it represents. While his later novels roam about the city with less apparent duality and a subtler employment of symbol, for a beginner, Patterson here shows the talent he has sustained in Fat Lad, The International, and Number 5.