Customer Reviews

Number 5

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More domestically situated than some of his other novels--all but one set in the housing estates near the city center of Belfast, not the ghettoes seen on the news for decades, but the more respectable places where ordinary people live, around the corner, so to speak, from the murals and the parades. Patterson employs a wonderful conceit: he follows the families who over nearly five decades each in turn call their home Number 5 in a row of semi-detached houses built after WW2. Their neighbor, Ivy, stays; those in #5 pass as a young woman with children, Stella; Rodney seeks horizons beyond 'the town;' Tan, a young man coming of age; Mel and Toni in their late twenties. The best motif is how a stain on the attic ceiling resembling a geographical feature turns one of the householders into a cartographer of his own mindscape--it's a brilliant set of unfolding scenes.

Patterson explores these families' often mundane lives, while subtly and compassionately charting how those on the street strive to keep sane amid the increasingly insane city whose tensions threaten to overwhelm their efforts to get through not just another day but to survive what used to be rather normal life in a Northern town, as the Troubles crest before they ebb. Subtly and slowly, the sectarian strife that divides other areas of the city enters and leaves those on the row. This is probably the author's calmest fiction, but this does not mean that tensions vanish from these dwellings and their occupiers. Normality and its (dis)contents: this familiar fictional British setting here, by its transplantation to Belfast, gains both similarity and notoriety. A mostly quiet novel, the better to contrast with the sudden bursts of tension that shatter the calm.

Patterson, by now not only a witness of his hometown but its most controlled and careful chronicler of Belfast's quieter corners over the past few decades, in his fourth novel set there again reveals his unassuming but elegant craft. Once you read this, if you have not already enjoyed Patterson, go back to Burning Your Own, progress to Fat Lad, and savor The International: these cover Belfast scenes from roughly the mid-1970s, the late 80s-to the year 1990, and the mid-to-late 60s respectively. (His fifth Belfast novel, That Which Was, takes place around the year 2000.)