With summer on my mind thanks to the upcoming 20 Books of Summer, I very much enjoyed these two linked novellas from Belfast’s finest Glenn Patterson.
Two Summers is a pair of novellas, titled ‘Summer on the Road’ and ‘Last Summer of the Shangri-Las’. The first is set in Belfast in 1980, the second in New York City in 1977. Both feature young men on the cusp of adulthood, and capture the innocence of adolescents, and their confusion and yearning.
In ‘Summer on the Road’, Mark gets a job with Belfast City Council, sweeping the streets. His father had applied for him, without informing him. Mark has a final year at school before facing A-levels and having to decide about his future. The second novella complements and contrasts with its Belfast-based companion. Whereas Summer on the Road speaks to the constraints of life in a city beset by violence – the references to Jack Kerouac’s novel of escape can only be ironic – Last Summer of the Shangri-Las offers a glimpse of what getting away might entail.
In ‘Last Summer of the Shangri-Las’ Gem is 16 when his mother phones his Aunt Hedda in New York and asks her to take him for the holidays. It’s the hot summer of 1977 when Elvis was found dead in his bathroom, serial killer Son of Sam was terrorising New York, and disco and punk are hugely popular. However, in New York, Gem discovers the Shangri-La’s and his life will never be the same again.
While set in different cities, with different protagonists, the two novellas are thematically linked. In both stories, the protagonists are on summer holiday, but what awaits them afterwards are exams and decisions about the future. For Mark in Summer on the Streets, his job sweeping the streets is only meant to be a means to make some money to save towards university, but instead it opens his eyes to different communities and different ways of life, and also awakens his taste for alcohol, something which will trouble him for the rest of his life.
Gem’s summer in New York has obviously opened up a world of music to him, music that he would never have considered before. He comes back to Belfast to sit his exams and immerses himself in listening to the radio and reading music magazines.
This notion of transition and possibility is suffused throughout the prose in both stories and Patterson sensibly keeps the ending of both stories ambiguous. Whether the summers have had a negative or a positive affect on their lives is questionable. Life has clearly not worked out as planned for either boy, but details are kept scarce and that idea of having ‘tried’ means that the reader is left with an abiding sense of hope, that life, for both these men, can still be made right. As Aunt Hedda says to Gem, they all need to try and ‘keep the faith’.
Times Square now is worse than Times Square then and I still haven’t worked out whether I am travelling towards my moment or hurtling away from it but you know what? I have tried Hedda. I have tried…
Two Summers is a perfect summer read, treating heavy themes with a light touch and relishing those precious summers where everything is in flux and life is full of possibility.
