Matthew McGuire

The "Troubles" and Modern Memory: Remembering and Forgetting in Glenn Patterson's That Which Was

Set in the wake of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, Glenn Patterson’s sixth novel That Which Was (2005) departs from a remarkable and highly original premise. The book centers on a young Presbyterian minister named Ken Avery. One day, after Sunday service, Avery is approached by a stranger who tells him he needs to talk. The readers are introduced to Larry, a man who looks “crushed, from the inside out.” In the privacy of the minister’s office, Larry makes a startling confession: he has blood on his hands. He killed people during the “Troubles” and is now tortured by the flashbacks. The revelation is made all the more startling when Larry admits that he cannot recall who the victims were, where he killed them, or when these terrible events took place. Thus, at the heart of That Which Was lies a paradox: an act of remembering that is, at the same time, also an act of forgetting. The remainder of the novel sees Avery turn amateur detective in order to discover the truth about Larry’s past, in the hope it will afford some form of relief from his traumatic memory. This episode of post-traumatic memory evokes one of the defining issues of the social and political landscape of the post-Agreement era: the problem of the past—or, to put it other words, the question of how a society like Northern Ireland ought to come to terms with the legacy of its violent and traumatic history. In recent years, a critical consensus has emerged about the need for such societies to confront what the human rights scholar Louis Bickford has called “the demons of the past.” It was in addressing this context that Kofi Annan, former secretary general of the United Nations, wrote that “national healing can be a halting and painful process. But ultimately, it seems our natural instincts are confirmed: while the truth is painful, burying the past is much less likely to lead