Review: The Mill for Grinding Old People Young by Glenn Patterson

Emer O'Kelly

March 11 2012 04:46 AM

Glenn Patterson takes his influences and inspiration from his home place. He is not alone in that: it is the source of authenticity for writers.

But Patterson's latest novel, The Mill for Grinding Old People Young, lacks the universality to make it appeal widely. It reads like a historical chronicle of Belfast over 30 years, colourful yes, but without insights into the characters who people the pages.

The novel opens at Christmas in 1897, as the 85-year-old Gilbert Rice, successful industrialist and lonely bachelor, struggles with a household that now includes the new-fangled invention of the telephone. But Gilbert has always been at the edge of modernity, and he spends Christmas with an old friend discussing the importance of the work of HG Wells, chronicler of invention for the forthcoming century. Then we switch back to the 1830s, and the young Gilbert being reared by his grandfather, a sternly loving and righteous Presbyterian. All that Gilbert knows of his lineage is a watercolour of two pretty sisters with their arms around each other. They are his mother and his aunt, the latter who married his father, only to die in childbirth, whereupon her husband married the remaining sister, who was to become Gilbert's mother. But both parents died, leaving Gilbert to the care of his sorrowing grandfather.

Patterson takes us through the turbulent, seething port of Belfast as Gilbert grows up, getting involved with various types of "unsuitable" company around the taverns and wharfs, and learning a lot that his grandfather had been seeking to keep from him, including the reality of a politically divided society where the shadow of Henry Joy McCracken and the men of '98 still looms large.

And when Gilbert joins the staff of the Ballast Office as a junior clerk, with what was to become prosperous Victorian Belfast being built around him, and with the city burghers locked in dispute with the establishment figure of the Lord Lieutenant of Belfast, the Marquess of Donegall, Gilbert finds his instincts lead him to rebellious thoughts and plots. His feelings are intensified when he falls in love with a Polish refugee working as a waitress in a pub called The Mill for Grinding Old People Young outside the city. Maria too has rebellious thoughts concentrated back in her homeland, to which she hopes to be summoned back by a much older lover. But the explanations of how she ended up in a rural pub in Co Antrim, which seem to satisfy the besotted Gilbert, somehow fail to convince the reader.

Much of the novel is concerned with Gilbert's preparations for the grand gesture of an attempt on Lord Donegall's life. Patterson uses his vivid descriptive powers to his advantage as he takes his hero through the dark alleys, uncertain streets and floating population of a great port. But the piece is narrative driven and we never get inside Gilbert's troubled head, or are given cause to fathom the impetuous determination to sacrifice himself on the altar of industrial progress against inherited power.

Nor, unfortunately, does the abortive love affair take fire, leaving us utterly puzzled as we come to the chapters of epilogue, the tributes being paid to Sir Gilbert Rice, eminent citizen and public benefactor, found peacefully dead in bed by his housekeeper after spending a convivial Christmas Eve with friends in the prosperous and great city of Belfast that he served so well. The brief private flirtation with violent nationalism of his youth is never adequately explained nor are the various conversions to righteousness of more minor characters.

Patterson gives us a finality that does not allow for the calm surface ever to have been disturbed in his characters' lives, leaving them curiously outside the chaotic environment of a city threatened by cholera from visiting ships' crews that he describes so well.

Perhaps that is the message: that our lives settle into a pattern that belies the turbulence of our hearts. But if that is the sad message, the author writes it too tentatively.