Once Upon a Hill: Love in Troubled Times By Glenn Patterson Bloomsbury, 233pp. £14.99'IT IS AN ANCIENT Mariner, and he stoppeth one of three. 'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye, Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?'."
Replace "long grey beard" with "short blonde hair" and "glittering" with "twinkling" and you have Glenn Patterson's new book. In Coleridge's poem, the Wedding Guest is assailed on his way in to the feast. Patterson as ancient Mariner has made his way in, and, while enjoying the merry din, is just waiting for the wedding guest to turn to him and ask, "So how did you meet your wife?"
This book is his reply, a genial narrative that rambles through history, using archives, libraries, websites, family stories and things overheard in bars. There are jokes, asides and digressions and more aunties and cousins and neighbours than you could shake a stick at. There are talking footnotes, for God's sake. This is a book to drive you distracted. Many times I wanted to shout "Hold off! Unhand me, beardless loon!".
However, in the end, the Mariner hath his way. What emerges is a great story. It is a story of how, through the worst of times and in the worst of places - and here Patterson would insert a footnote along the lines of: "Think the 20th cenury. Think Northern Ireland. Okay? - love survives and finds a way."
Born a Protestant in the overwhelmingly Protestant town of Lisburn in 1962, Patterson grew up with the Troubles, left, and "having exhausted all the options" surprised himself by coming back, not just to Northern Ireland, but to Lisburn, and a flat just around the corner from the house where his father grew up. That was in 1989.
He took to dodging his Aunt Eileen because when he met her on the street she insisted on doing what she'd always done, rummaging in her handbag for a 50 pence piece to give her wee nephew. Aged 27, and one of those routinely addressed in the North as "Big Man", Patterson was six feet tall. He had his first novel behind him and was writer in residence for the local council.
Aunt Eileen would, soon after this, disappear into dementia and a home. Patterson, meanwhile, had begun to poke about in his family's history. When Eileen died in 2004, he decided it was time to go looking for her, and, in particular, for the hidden history of her first 10 years.
As a child, Glenn knew his Grandad, Eileen's father, as a member of the Plymouth Brethren, whose austerities included considering listening to the radio as a sin. Yet he had married a Catholic, Kate, though a full decade after she had given birth to their first child, Eileen.
By the time he decided to write this book, Patterson had married Ali, from Cork. The fact that he was a Protestant, and she was a Catholic, mattered little to them, because neither of them was, really, either, and they were in love.
Back in the North, though, the peace process notwithstanding, "it seemed we were still stuck in the Pentateuch, visiting unto the third and fourth generation the 'iniquity' of them that loved across the religious divide". Loyalists continued to regard "mixed" relationships as grounds for killing the Catholic partner.
Delving into his family's story, also the story of Lisburn, the story of the Troubles, and, as it happened, the story of Cork, the War of Independence, and Ali's family, too, Patterson finds gaps and silences, some of which, with exhaustive research, he can fill, and others he can't.
He prefaces the book with a quote from Philip Roth: "Now that they're dead, nobody can know". Patterson's grandfather might have taken part in the vicious expulsion of Catholics from Lisburn in 1920. Or, he might have shielded his lover and their child. Towards the end of the book, Patterson reflects on Roth's comment, "I am forced to imagine". Roth spoke as a novelist. Patterson, with seven novels behind him, speaks, in this book, as a writer of non-fiction. Face to face with the mystery of the past, he takes a leap of faith.
The garrulous refusal to leave anything out is problematic and should have been attended to by a stern editor. Too much begatting. Still, Patterson's voice, humane, generous, self-deprecating and funny, is a lovely antidote to Ireland's surly and enduring sectarianisms. As the Mariner said, "He prayeth well, who loveth well". This is a good book.
• Susan McKay is a journalist and author. Her most recent book, Bear in Mind These Dead, was published earlier this year by Faber