Glenn Patterson: Gull

Still more men had entered behind West. They were helping DeLorean up off the sofa and on to his feet, and a long, long way up that felt, turning him about, pulling his hands behind his back, cuffing them.

The door was open all the while. He wondered that Hoffman and Hetrick didn’t take the opportunity of everyone looking the other way to make a break for it. And then he saw Hoffman smiling, high-fiving a man with a shield on the hip of his white slacks, and only then did the penny drop, this whole thing — from start to finish — it had all been about him.

Or that was the way he told it in court, and that was the story that a jury of his peers went with in the end.

On 22 September 2004 a US federal trademark was filed for DeLorean Automobile Company by Ephesians 6:12, Inc in the category of Vehicles and Products for locomotion by land, air or water. The correspondent of Ephesians 6:12 (also trading as Ecclesiastes 9:10-11-12, Inc) was John Z. DeLorean of the Parsons Village Condominium Complex, Morristown, New Jersey, a twenty-minute drive from Trump National Golf Club, formerly Lamington Farm estate, Bedminster.

John Z. DeLorean died six months later on 19 March 2005 aged eighty, no automobiles, or other vehicles for locomotion by land, air or water, having been built in the interim, or indeed in the twenty-one years since his acquittal in August 1984, on grounds of probable entrapment, for conspiracy to import cocaine.

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Acknowledgements

About Glenn Patterson

An invitation from the publisher

This novel grew out of a play I wrote for Radio 4, broadcast in July 2011. My thanks to Gemma McMullan and especially to Clare Delargy, who first talked to me about the idea.

A great American hustler brought to vivid life in the most unlikely setting imaginable: Belfast during the Troubles.

Randall is a journalist, a disoriented Vietnam vet who’s drawn to the charismatic engineer John DeLorean, already celebrated as the man who turned around General Motors. Now DeLorean has a dream of building a beautiful sports car with gullwing doors. Cities bid against each other to get his factory; the British government of the time wins the race and wants to locate it in Belfast. Randall is the advance man, doing the groundwork and bewildered by what he finds in Northern Ireland.

Liz is a working class woman who applies for a job in the ultra-modern factory going up in the west of the city. Her husband thinks women should stay at home; besides, she’d be working with ‘the Other Sort’. She takes the job, and her life changes.

The figure around whom all the other characters in the novel revolve is the celebrity engineer with his supermodel wife, who can make anyone believe in him — including, unfortunately, himself.

Gull is an intelligent, witty and moving reconstruction of the bizarre circumstances that gave birth to one of the world’s most iconic cars.

‘One of the best contemporary Irish novelists… Glenn Patterson has become the most serious and humane chronicler of Northern Ireland over the past thirty years.’

Colm Tóibín

‘No other novelist has proved as capable of capturing the heart of modern Belfast.’

Sunday Tribune

‘This is an author whose vigour and flair keep us reading avidly as he exercises his capacity to make the everyday engrossing.’

Independent

GLENN PATTERSON was born and lives in Belfast. He is the author of nine previous novels and three works of non-fiction. He also co-wrote the screenplay of the film Good Vibrations , based on the Belfast music scene of the 1970s.