Irish FictionGlenn Patterson's new novel is set in the summer of 2000, a period in which former paramilitaries were being released from Northern prisons. It explores the difficult accommodations involved in this process and the dilemmas faced by a society which, although on a quest for justice, must endeavour to lay aside the burden of a guilty past.
The title is a phrase from the Book of Judges. But in Patterson's Belfast the Old Testament impetus for equity is foiled by spiralling moral and political complexities.
Patterson's unlikely hero, Ken Avery, is an unorthodox presbyterian minister who polishes his oratory by watching videos of stand-up comics. He is catapulted early on in the novel into the role of confessor-cum-detective when a mysterious man, later identified as Larry, shows up in his presbytery and declares that he is guilty of murder. The problem is, however, that he cannot remember any of the details of the crime. Avery, who becomes obsessed with this stranger's story, is likewise plagued by a patchy memory and has scandalised his parishioners in east Belfast by admitting that he does not know much of the Bible by heart.
He makes it his mission to piece together this man's life and pinpoint the murders for which he was responsible. Where, however, traditional detective stories aim to solve mysteries, That Which Was adeptly thwarts such expectations. The latter half of the novel builds up the familiar momentum of a thriller only to suspend all of the adroitly dangled resolutions. The more we are drawn into imaginative speculation about Larry - who claims that somone has tampered with his memory - the less we seem to know about him. All of the important questions remain tantalisingly unanswered: whether he committed the murders in a Belfast café in 1976, who he was working for - the police, the army or the IRA - and whether he was really the victim of official brainwashing.
In the opening pages, Avery contends that memory and knowledge are not the same. Patterson's text subtly interweaves numerous forms of memory - from Alzheimer's and Remembrance Sunday rituals to post-memory and false memory syndrome - and shows how they rely as much on fiction as veracity. The lingering trauma of the past is movingly captured in Avery's dream that the dead of the Troubles have been let out on temporary release along with their killers. The novel probes the problems of guilt and justice in a society that is trying to heal the scars of conflict and neatly avoids partisanship by inventing two quirky protagonists, a clergyman who sympathetically takes on the cause of a murderer and a double agent who admits to guilt but whose political allegiance is unclear. However, equally the plot suggests that these crossed identities may be as much a result of moral confusion and paranoia as of openness.
By marrying the stylised conventions of the thriller with a more muted but absorbing realist fiction describing the everyday life of a Presbyterian minister, the novel gestures towards the divisions that are the stuff of Belfast life. It captures with precision the way in which the geography of the city has begun to alter but continues to enforce sectarianism and distrust. The road map for peace is refuted by the segragated zones of Belfast topography. Through his skill at storytelling and facility for remoulding novelistic form, Patterson has constructed a slickly executed and resonant fable that depicts the changed moral and political landscapes created by the Good Friday Agreement. A whodunnit that never quite establishes the guilty party proves a compelling vehicle for an exploration of the ongoing upheavals in Northern Irish society.
Anne Fogarty is a lecturer in the School of English, University College Dublin
That Which Was By Glenn Patterson Hamish Hamilton, 275pp. £16.99