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Well, I finished The International by Glenn Patterson.
A good chatty novel.
The action takes place on one Saturday,
in the International Hotel’s Blue Bar.
It tells the story of the people who work in the bar,
as well as it’s patrons.
A truthful funny book,
about a Belfast that no longer exists.
The very next day,
The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association,
would be founded,
in the very same Hotel and bar.
It would mark the start of a quarter century of bloody violence.
The IRA era, the troubles.
What struck me most about this book,
is how ordinary peoples lives are affected,
by political upheavals and violence.
This is not a political or a violent novel,
it’s about real people with real lives and real jobs.
It is about the whimsy and despair of everyday.
It’s beauty and it’s pettiness.
One line ran through my mind frequently as I read it:
There, but for the Grace of God, go we all.
The late sixties were a time of violent protest and upheaval.
Students all over Europe and North America,
were attempting to change the world.
Nationalism and it’s violent manifestations,
were very present in my hometown and my province.
Quebec’s French Catholic majority,
were very much a colonised people.
We were also under the thumb of the Catholic Church.
What is known as our Quiet revolution had started in the early sixties.
With the founding of necessary institutions such as a Ministry of Education.
Some revolutionaries inspired by the Irish, Algerians, Cubans,
took up arms.
They believed things were not moving fast enough.
Bombs were set off in mailboxes in bourgeois English neighborhoods,
and in National Defense recruitment centers,
these were considered symbols of British imperialism and American Capitalism.
Our version of the IRA was the FLQ,
The Front De Liberation Du Québec.
A British diplomat and Quebec cabinet minister were kidnapped.
Sympathy ran high for the revolutionaries,
until Minister Pierre Laporte was assassinated.
Quebec society did not become involved in long drawn out bloodshed,
that would have torn our country apart,
as it did Northern Ireland.
Ultimately,
laws were put in place to protect the French fact in North America.
To achieve a better equilibrium.
The response has not been unanimous,
and did cause political instability.
Some would even say,
the pendulum swung too much to the other side.
But,
today Quebec is a more stable and prosperous society.
We have our problems,
many in fact,
but we are no longuer,
the poorest and least educated part of Canada,
we were up until the mid-seventies.
On a par with Salazar’s Portugal.
After twenty five years,
the IRA and the British government ceased fire.
I don’t mean to draw to close a paralell,
just to say,
talking and laws are a better solution.
This book made me feel for the people of Belfast,
and how brave it sometimes is to simply live your life.
Later girls
BB
**I make no apology for violence. Oppression does however, lead to it**