Fat Lad is the second novel by Glenn Patterson and portrays the history of Drew, a twentysomething from Belfast and his family in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. It is written from a Protestant's perspective and set in 1990 in Belfast, when Drew returns to his hometown after an absence of eight years. Patterson manages to interweave personal and official history in a story that spans the period from the construction of the ill-fated Titanic to the resurrection of a city after 20 years of bombings and violence. Don't expect a definite account of the Troubles, the book does not and cannot do that, but it is a very interesting account of the impact of political violence on ordinary people and their struggle to find a working relationship with their families, past and identity. The way Patterson connects private and official history in a web of interwoven stories is reminiscent of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, a novel which Patterson says was very important for his perception of Northern Ireland.

According to amazon.com's subject headings, this novel by the Belfast-based Patterson is "non-fiction" and "non-classifiable." Which is curious: it's about the building of Euro Disney near Paris, yes, but it's also about a speed-addled ex-Imagineer who plots to blow up Big Thunder Mountain there. During the night of his plan, he converses with two hostages: an ex-prisoner from the north of Ireland, and an ex-porn actress from Germany. Both of the hostages are working at Disney when they're captured, taken away from considerably less attention-getting jobs as they muddle through the mid-1990s.

Patterson's novels ("Burning Your Own," "Fat Lad," and my favorite, "The International,") all evoke Belfast in its charm and vitality, getting beyond its the more familiar stereotypes. Far from glossing over the media and propaganda images, Patterson takes them and with the agility of a native son, upends them to examine them coldly but not despairingly. Here, too, Belfast lives in its pages. Unlike his other novels, however, the scope broadens to encompass Paris' seedier districts, postwar Germany, and the Disney think-tank in Southern California.

Seems to me that Patterson has obtained his knowledge of L.A. largely from Mike Davis' "City of Quartz" with its "Narcopolis" and "Narcopolice." I don't think UCLA has theology majors, but otherwise his details, I can attest, seem plausible enough for the American sections of his novel. Similarly, he gives his Parisian settings,notably of the church on Montmartre and Pigalle, a well-observed quality: of one flower-seller enduring her lucrative tourist trade, he tells us of her smile, "of the professionally enchanted."

The reason I only give this book 3(1/2) stars is that the decline of the protagonist. the Disney wonder gone to speed, while told cleverly, fails to convince. His slide from capable and clever worker to strung-out addict happens in too clumsy a manner. While the experimentation shown with prose (a bit of Joyce and Beckett perhaps, if only subtly) and plot is praiseworthy--a pattern Patterson exhibits to his credit in all of his novels--Sam's fall from grace seems too scattered to make us care. While this may be the point, the somewhat distant narration only moves us further away from much sympathy with his delusional predicament.

And I wish I had known much more about his two hostages. If the novel had brought them even more alive, it would have held my sympathy much more. Still, you can never regret reading Patterson, and his work deserves much more attention. If you like him, check out another view of Belfast from his contemporary, the apparently more irascible Robert MacLiam Wilson, in "Eureka Street" and "Ripley Bogle."