Thursday book: Pen-portraits of a turbulent city

Thursday Book

The Belfast Anthology

Edited by Patricia Craig

(Blackstaff Press, pounds 20)

THE PRINTING press was a late arrival in Belfast (in 1696, according to JC Kohl) but the embryonic city quickly made up for lost time. The first Bible to be printed in Ireland was published there in 1714, and the city was also home to the oldest Irish periodical, The Weekly Magazine. It seems that Belfast has been puzzling out its reflection in printer's ink ever since, finding angles on itself that range from the most glowingly lit to the most deeply drab.

Herself a native of the city, Patricia Craig has made a timely and fascinating compilation from this wealth of essays, novels, poems, memoirs etc. Her purpose, she says, is "to provide a record of the kind of place Belfast used to be". The 17 chapters are almost mini-anthologies, in which the location provides a shapelier framework than the concept.

Overall, though, the balance struck in the book between the succinct portrait of (say) the Falls Road or the Smithfield Market, and the general cluster of impressions on a wider theme, contributes to its readability. The effect is of a huge jigsaw puzzle, certain sections of which have been filled in, while others of which remain in colourful and enticing pieces.

It has always been a turbulent city, as many of the writers gathered here testify. A Mrs Craik, for example, records in 1887 that she was advised by a friend that "Belfast was quite quiet in the day-time", but it was best to leave before "6pm when fighting began". Thomas Carnduff, whose Life and Writings provides a major source of material, writes that "police baton charges were quite a common occurrence in the early 1900s". A bracing sense of realism ensures that this anthology is no mere "celebration". Horrid Homesteads, Bloody Hand and Black Belfast are a few of the less enticing chapter-headings.

Estyn Evans, remembering his first visit to the zoo-park of Bellevue, writes that, "Incredibly, I saw at the entrance to one path - it was a misty evening - a notice which I read as "Presbyterians Only".

James Douglas dubs the city "Bigotsborough", but he concedes that "Bigotsborough is a city with a soul". He is surely not being sentimental when he says Belfast "has the hunger of romance in it heart, for it has lost its own past and is groping blindly after its own future".

This anthology is a timely one as Northern Ireland embarks on a new stage of evolution and reconstruction. The majority of the writers here, from Thomas Carnduff to Ciaran Carson, are engaged in retrospective work, disinterring "labyrinthine alleyways" and "obliterated streets" that are now the stuff of memory.

Only rarely do the present-day contours of the city emerge - for example, in the extract from Glenn Patterson's novel Fat Lad: "Restaurants, bars and takeaways proliferated along the lately coined Golden Mile, running south from the refurbished Opera House, and new names had appeared in the shopping streets: Next, Body Shop, Tie Rack, Principles."

Even in 1926, the novelist Forrest Reid was nostalgic for the "breath of Rusticity" that once "sweetened Belfast's air". For modern inhabitants and visitors, that breath of rusticity is still palpable. The drive into the city centre from the international airport is wonderfully scenic - a chance to marvel at the city's pristine setting in a wide bracelet of hills and water.

In truth, Belfast is an average Victorian northern city, steadily glazing over into 21st-century blandness. It is handsome in parts, ugly in parts, but Nature hugs the streets more lavishly than usual, and suburban sprawl is minimal.

All that may change. But, for now Belfast can look stunning and, a village at heart, it remains an amazingly friendly one. That both 19th- and 20th- century Belfast has bred poets, novelists, essayists, playwrights and, of course anthologists to rank with the best seems hardly accidental in a city where literature is an endlessly fascinating conversation.

The reviewer has been writer in residence at Queen's University, Belfast