October 30, 2025

159 Glenn Patterson: You Can Choose Who You Are (JP, DC)

1 hour 5 minutes

In Belfast, good fences can make for bad neighbors. David Cunningham ( Wash U. sociologist, author of There’s Something Happening Here and Klansville, U.S.A and frequent RTB visitor) joins John to speak about the Troubles and their aftermath with the brilliant Northern Irish novelist/essayist/memoirist Glenn Patterson. His fiction includes The International (1999) and Where Are We Now? but the conversation’s main focus is his two collections of short non-fiction, Lapsed Protestant (2006) and Here’s Me Here (2016).

Glenn has lifetime of insights about the boundary markers and easy to miss shibboleths that define life in divided places--and in divided times. In Belfast, everyone learns to use words without being marked out: how do you avoid uttering "the one word that gets you killed"?

But Troubles that go cold also have a way of heating up again, if we forget, as Glenn puts it, that you can choose who you are. China Mieville's brilliant novel The City and the City is, says Glenn, an allegory for places like Belfast itself, where you have to learn to “unsee” residents of "the other city" even in shared areas. That kind of unseeing, in fiction and in real life, leads to distorted mental maps.

Glenn sees the so-called “softening” of the peace walls as among the most pernicious occurrences of the last 40 years, since softening coupled with notion that you simply belong to one of two "communities" is what makes real traffic, real conversation, harder to achieve. He and David agree that all over the world, in ways the echo Belfast although it is rarely spelled out, all sorts of invisible architectural extensions of the security and segregation apparatus hover unobtrusively. Glenn also riffs on the names people dream up for what might lie beyond a Belfast wall's other side, spinning off writer Colin Carberry's proposal: Narnia.

Mentioned in the Episode

“Love poetry: the RUC and Me” was Glenn's first nonfiction piece back inthe late 1980s.

Robert McLiam Wilson: Glenn's friend and fellow Troubles novelist, whose work includes Ripley Bogle (1989).

Eoin Macnamie's work includes Resurrection Man (1994).

“The C-word” (2014) Glenn's wonderful essay on the trouble that starts when the word "community" gets subdivided into "communities."

Padraic Fiacc, sometimes called ”the Poet oft he Troubles” finally has a blue historical marker. That makes Glenn ask why are there are so many "blue plaques" for combatants, so few for non-combatants?

The interface zones and the strategic cul de sacs that continue to divide Belfast neighborhoods have been brilliantly detailed and studied by various historians; eg this tour by Neil Jarman,

Glenn compares Civil Rights in Northern Ireland in the 1960s with the US Civil Rights movement and with Paris 1968; the 70’s bombing campaigns lines up with the actions of the Red Army Faction in Germany.

Recallable Books

Glennn says his inspiration to write on partition comes from reading Salman Rushdie’s Shame and Midnight’s Children. He also praises John Dos Passos USA trilogy.

David interested in the long tail of a conflict and aingles out Glenn Patterson’s own novel, The Northern Bank Job as well as Eoin McNamee The Bureau.

Inspired by Glenn's account of how resident learn to see and unsee portions of Belfast, John praises Kevin Lynch's 1960 The Image of the City.

Read the episode here.

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