{"id":11384,"date":"2025-03-17T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-17T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11384"},"modified":"2025-03-16T13:11:51","modified_gmt":"2025-03-16T17:11:51","slug":"an-irish-classic-the-international","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11384","title":{"rendered":"An Irish Classic: the International"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"hotel
(photo: shankar s, creative commons license)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

\u201cIf I had known history was to be written that Sunday in the International Hotel I might have made an effort to get out of bed before teatime,\u201d writes Daniel Hamilton, an 18-year-old Belfast bartender and narrator of Glenn Patterson<\/a>\u2019s novel The International: A Novel of Belfast<\/em><\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The history he refers to is the meeting to launch the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), an organization formed to focus attention on discrimination against Northern Ireland\u2019s mostly Catholic nationalist minority. We call the succeeding three decades of violence and despair The Troubles, and The International<\/em> \u201cis the best book about the Troubles ever written,\u201d says Irish author and Booker-Prize-winner Anne Enright.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Funny thing is, there\u2019s almost no overt violence in this book, apart from the fact it\u2019s set in a busy bar with lots of coming and going and football on the telly and political shenanigans where money changes hands and gay men and straight women hoping to meet someone and people who should have stopped drinking hours before ordering another and weddings upstairs in the hotel, at one of which the clergyman plays an accordion. In other words, enough latent violence in reserve to keep the average semi-sober person on his toes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The principal action of the novel takes place during on Saturday evening, January 28, 1967, the night before the big meeting, larded with Danny Hamilton\u2019s memories of other times and barroom encounters. His minutely observed portrayal of everyday life as seen from behind the bar is heartbreaking when, with the lens of hindsight, the reader knows how soon it will all be gone, sucked into a slowly unwinding catastrophe of bombs and gunfire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The quote at the top of this piece opens the book, and these words about a barmen who was shot dead, Peter Ward, also age 18, help close it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can\u2019t tell you much else about him, except that those who knew him thought the world of him. He is, I realise, an absence in this story. I wish it were not so, but guns do that, create holes which no amount of words can fill.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wrote about this book and a visit to Princeton by Belfast author Glenn Patterson a few years ago, and it seems apt to return to it on St. Patrick\u2019s Day, especially given his writing\u2019s emphasis on history and politics and his deep sense of place. He said that \u201cwhen history looks back at our present, it will see that what we thought we were at and what we were at, really, were entirely different.\u201d When we think about our current moment in America, that is a sobering thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here’s Glenn Patterson\u2019s list of his top 10 books<\/a> about Belfast, compiled in 2012.

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIf I had known history was to be written that Sunday in the International Hotel I might have made an effort to get out of bed before teatime,\u201d writes Daniel Hamilton, an 18-year-old Belfast bartender and narrator of Glenn Patterson\u2019s … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1288,366,40,266,1749,126],"tags":[1844,129],"class_list":["post-11384","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-drama","category-fiction","category-history","category-international","category-reading-2","tag-northern-ireland","tag-wars-and-conflicts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2XC","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11384","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11384"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11384\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11385,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11384\/revisions\/11385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11384"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11384"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11384"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}