Fat Lad

by Glenn Patterson

When Drew Linden's new job brings him back to his native Belfast, he is determined to remain distant from everything that once tied him there, including his friends and family. But as three generations of family history unfold, it becomes clear that the past Drew has been running from is the very thing he needs to face. And that his sense of self is rooted forever in the troubled city of his birth.

Genres: Irish Literature, Fiction

282 pages, Paperback

First published February 20, 1992

Reviews

[Stephen Buggy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily the best writing about the North I've read since Eureka Street

It rings true. It sounds like the Northern Ireland I know. Unlike so many other Northern novels it doesn't concentrate on the extremists but rather on the moderate middle. It is interested in the whole fabric of being northern not just the stuff that makes the papers. In short: it sounds like it was written for people from here.

And sometimes the mirror Patterson throws up is familiar but not flattering. Take this wonderful passage where Melanine, consider's her boyfriend's circle of expat friends:

In time, though, with Hugh's departure for London, Melanine began to suspect that this pose of ironic detachment only masked an obsession with origins as unsound in its way as anything that the extremists in all their blinkered bigotry could conjure up, and that the Expats had become just a name to gather under to drink Guinness and feel the tragedy of their birth. To hear them talk about the place now, even to traduce it, you'd have thought it was somewhere else, the centre of the significant universe. Not a misshapen little jug of a country teetering on the brink of a continental shelf: one ten-thousandth of the earth's surface.

Wonderfully observed.

It isn't perfect. There seems to be a surprising absence of religion in the depiction of place. It also primarily depicts a Protestant family so there are naturally going to be parts of the Catholic Northerner's experience that are left out.

But wow, what a novel!

[Andrew McDougall · Rating 5 out of 5]

Glenn Patterson is one of my favourite authors – from anywhere – and few, if any, Belfast writers have written as consistently well as he has about his city and the Troubles. Indeed, this list could be entirely made up of Glenn Patterson novels. Fat Lad is perhaps his most ambitious, it sets out to be and is billed as the Belfast novel, with a truly glowing endorsement essay from another Belfast literary big-hitter, Robert McLiam Wilson, featured as an addendum. Fat Lad tells the story of a city over several decades through the history of a family and centres on the life of Drew Linden who somewhat reluctantly returns to his birthplace after studying in England. Although perhaps not as instantly accessible as some of his other books, Fat Lad is well-crafted, rich and rewarding, and, like all Patterson’s work, brilliantly written and full of astute observations.

Full review here

[Mary Lou · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this and although it took a while to get into I did. The setting is my time and my city and I gave the book a pass in all the tests. Very credible and not dated, great characterisation -if anything - too many people and stories. Highly recommended

[Kylie Noble · Rating 4 out of 5]

So far this is the best novel on a Northern Ireland emerging from conflict, I've read. I love Eureka Street more for how it captures the characters and wit and humour of Belfast. But I read this book in a glum year back living in Belfast, after moving to England for postgrad study. I think once any progressive person from NI lives away, and sees how stifling, fucked up and toxic NI is, sees how traumatic your base understanding of normality is...it is very difficult to live in NI. This book deals so well with these themes and the pain and loss and trauma of such a dysfunctional society. And I went to London after that year back, much how I recall the main character did not stay and left again.

[Montse Terés · Rating 4 out of 5]

A young man, originally from Belfast and now living in England, goes back to Belfast to work at a bookstore branch there. This return confronts him with lots of issues from his past, both personal, social and political, which often, more than anything else, make him realize how confused he still is about so many of those unresolved questions.
The city is very present there, the writing is well crafted and makes you want to go on reading and see what happens, but, in my opinion, there may be too many characters and too many stories to resolve and that leaves one expecting a bit more than what is offered.
All the same, I want to read more by this writer, some of his later work.

[Shaul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another Belfast love and loss, not the best of them, but pretty good, with a bookseller backdrop.