Come in number 5, your time’s up

If walls could talk, chances are they’d enjoy discussing Number 5, the new novel by Glenn Patterson. If they happen to hold up half century old, three-bedroom, East Belfast terraces, they’ll have trouble shutting up – because this is a book that explores the nooks and crannies of a valiantly ordinary domestic space, centring on the different occupants of such a property over the course of five decades.

The merits of loft conversions are debated. Comparisons are made between curtains and Venetian blinds. We wonder where’s the best place to locate a pool table. Patterson gathers around himself the minutiae of working class life in a way that calls to mind the sublime comic worlds of Caroline Aherne and Peter Kaye. But something else is going on. Because this is also an elusive novel, keen to celebrate flux and change. A Belfast novel, where the city is never named. A novel preoccupied by the impact of the Troubles on ordinary lives, where any violence that occurs takes place off-screen.

“The whole thing about using Belfast at all – because it isn’t actually mentioned by name in the novel – was to try to and write about it in a way that rang true with how the characters would naturally have experienced the place,” explains Glenn. “Hopefully to remind people of the degree it was a city just like any other city, and that these things that have come to define it are not necessarily its defining characteristics. They are things that have happened over the course of the last forty years, but they are not necessarily the only story.”

Number 5 draws its inspiration from the kind of lives and stories often subsumed in the avalanche of primary coloured Troubles fiction. Like Stella, a 1950s housewife, struggling with motherhood and libidinous yearnings that her young husband can’t cope with. Or disillusioned autodidact, Rodney, slowly curdling in an increasingly poisonous city. Most interesting of all are Hideg – a Hungarian refugee unable to hide behind otherness as protection, and Chinese Smith’s fan, Chan, who has somehow wound-up with a hooligan as a best friend.

These are characters often hidden in the chorus line that have been given their time at the front of the stage.

“One of the start-off points for me was something I remembered about my childhood. I’d a cousin who was married to a Hungarian guy called Nemec. Here’s someone who came to Belfast in the ’50s from central Europe, at a time when it was still experiencing the massive upheaval after the Second World War and the Soviet occupation of all these wonderful countries. All that history and culture, that he was a representative of, and here he is in post war Belfast. All the world is present in Belfast at any one time – as it is present in any city at any time. That’s what cities are for. There are always other opportunities and realities. We live in a more complex place and have to cope with more complex sets of relationship than we’re sometimes led to believe.”

We’re often told that place is supposed to define you identity. The beauty of Number 5 is the pleasure it takes in showing how this notion is up for grabs.

“We’re always being told what community is – that there are two of them and I really hate that,” explains Glenn. “I’m just really interested in other ideas of communities – estates, streets, blocks of houses. Everything gets defined by the loudest narrative – or at least, the one with the biggest brass neck, and there are no shortage of people here only too willing to say: we’re going to tell you exactly what is what. The other stuff, the marginal stuff tends to get sidelined and forgotten. But at any time – even in the ’70s, during the blackest, most miserable fucking times – there were still all these other things going on. Novels don’t have to be definitive. They don’t have to insist on one reality. They just have to show it can also be like this.”