Blunt talk

Biography: While not carrying out his duties as professor of psychology at the University of Manchester, Geoffrey Beattie (in whom the Protestant work ethic burns strongly) has somehow found time to hammer out 14 books on subjects as diverse as the meaning of boxing, the history of Sheffield and the role of non-verbal behaviour in conversation.

Sadly, the world being what it is, he will still be known to most readers as the neat man with the Nutella tan who helps viewers decide to which stratum of baboon society each member of the Big Brother house belongs.

Protestant Boy, an absorbing, if somewhat unfocused, meditation on the author's Belfast upbringing, helps us understand where he developed his talent for expressing complex, abstract ideas in language simple enough to be understood by Davina McCall. We Ulster Protestants, proud of the bluntness that others take for discourtesy, have an innate suspicion of anybody with ideas above their (always presumed humble) station. "You're back home now," a menacing figure says to Geoffrey in the book. "None of that fancy talk is going to get you very far."

Beattie grew up in a part of north Belfast, bordered on one side by the Ardoyne and on the other by Ligoniel, that came to be known in the 1970s as the murder triangle. It was, in his own words, "a bleak place" and, if the book is to be believed, was inhabited by bleak people. The strongest presence in Protestant Boy is Beattie's late mother, a woman with apparently bottomless reserves of gracelessness, who comes to stand as - if I may be excused fancy talk - a sort of avatar of Northern hostility.

It is true that she had, in many ways, a miserable life: Beattie's father died young and his only brother was killed in a climbing accident in his 20s. But stories from the author's early life seem to suggest that she was never possessed of the sunniest personality. For all that, his portrayal of her is not without affection. Though he frequently betrays irritation and frustration, his usual tone - towards his mother and the Protestant people generally - is one of amused resignation. Writing in sentences as clean and unadorned as a Presbyterian's complexion, Beattie does a respectful job of paying tribute to a woman who surely must have been harder to like than to love.

Sadly, the book works less well when the author attempts a more wide-ranging investigation of what it is to be what he is. Considering Beattie's prolific habits, it would surely have been possible for him to find time to properly write the four books that have here been uncomfortably crammed into one volume. As well as the story of his relationship with his mother, we get an investigation into the plight of Ulster soldiers at the Somme (moving, but sketchy), a visit to Drumcree during marching season (nothing we haven't read elsewhere) and an amble up the author's family tree (of absolutely no interest unless your name is also Beattie).

Through it all one gets the sense of a man striving to find something to love about this austere people. Occasionally he succeeds: he attributes his wife's fortitude after losing an arm in an accident to her Northern bloody-mindedness. But for this writer, an Ulster Prod from a more privileged part of the city, the passage which most accurately sums up our abandonment to low-level misery occurs during a visit to Bangor. Beattie asks a passer-by what the weather has been like and (with apologies for my italics) she replies: "Not too bad. It hasn't rained every day."

• Donald Clarke is a critic, journalist and film-maker. His film reviews appear regularly in The Irish Times