That Which Was

In this latest of Belfast native Glenn Patterson's series of novels from the past couple of decades that, as he has matured, show the crest and now the ebb of the Troubles, Patterson turns to the trauma inflicted on victims--those innocent and those who have become entangled at young ages into sectarian and state-sponsored violence for the adrenaline it provides. Ken Avery, a 34-year-old Presbyterian preacher of a small East Belfast congregation, tries to figure out, in the waning days of the year 2000, if Larry, who comes to him with a confession of his complicity in a triple murder from the early 1980s that remained (with as Patterson notes, 1800 other cases) unsolved, is in fact the guilty perpetrator. Patterson, as he has in his earlier fictional studies, pursues the less graphic, more psychologically vivid nuances of the effects of what happens at what the bureaucrats label "sectarian interfaces." Avery, as he juggles the demands of a five-year-old daughter, a snappish wife giving birth to their son, and a fractious group of clerical colleagues, bereaved supplicants, gawking paparazzi, and invisible thieves, must try to make sense of his own calling as he's tested by the aftermath of Larry's revelations. East Belfast, as in other Patterson novels, combines the mundane with the awful, and the mixed legacy of a city preparing the new waterfront arena, the Odyssey, and a gentrifying civic landscape for Clinton's visit plays off against the same city's shadowy figures unwilling or unable to let the faction fights of the past few decades subside. This novel kept my interest; I read it in three long sittings. It's subtle, and does not leap off the page with glorious evocations of setting or whimsical lovable pubcrawlers or dramatic prison escapes that often overlap in other Northern Irish novels. The novel reaches a rather convoluted climax and the resolution seems to elude easy comprehension. The latter portion of the book, while still satisfying, becomes rather forced in parts, as Avery's quest turns into a labyrinth. This may disappoint readers expecting a tidier ending. But it's a more realistic treatment even if as fiction it's less perfect. Patterson pursues the more introspective path as he follows Avery's attempts to ease a man's tortured conscience. Avery's a decent fellow, not a plaster saint. He's probably no more adept than anyone else as he tries--to be worthy of his profession--to bring a bit more peace into the world, and all the more admirable for his awkward, all-too-human grappling with questions of faith and medicine and morality--as all three collide in his effort to figure out the veracity of Larry's terrible memories that come back to haunt not only him. (P.S. Avery looks up the case that Larry remembers in a book that's not credited by name but that remains a necessary source for anyone seeking real-life accounts from the Troubles. "Lost Lives," ed. by David McKittrick et al. is a 1998 compendium of brief entries on a