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Sat 10 Oct 2007Hiding behind the exoticFictionIn his highly entertaining and informative selection of his journalism, Lapsed Protestant (2006), Glenn Patterson has a piece from 1994 titled Never-ending Stories in which he addresses a question which has surely become a frequent annoyance for post-Troubles writers in Northern Ireland: "What are you going to write about now?"Patterson especially recalls the perception among colleagues when he was young that a budding writer from Northern Ireland would have ready-made material to hand: "God, you're so lucky coming from Belfast". The inscribed aesthetic presumption was that subject matter is primary in creative writing, and Patterson rightfully scolds literary critics and academics for their general failure of imagination in expecting or seeing in Northern Irish fiction only this or that quotient of readily identifiable Northern Irish material.