THE INTERNATIONAL ARTS THERAPIES JOURNAL ONLINE
ROBERT KAPADIA
BOOK REVIEW
PROTESTANT BOY by GEOFFREY BEATTIE
Geoffrey Beattie - Protestant Boy, London: Granta Books, 2004
247pp., £8:99, 978162077560
‘That experiences influence subsequent behaviour is,' as The Encyclopaedia Britannica reminds us, ‘evidence of an obvious but nevertheless remarkable activity called remembering.' What we regard as ‘learning' cannot ‘occur without the function properly called memory', for ‘intelligent behaviour demands memory, remembering being prerequisite to reasoning.' As scholars, historians and responsible citizens would assert, an ‘ability to solve any problem or even to recognize that a problem exists depends on memory.'1
Protestant Boy is a memoir. The Oxford Companion to the English Language defines memoir as a ‘written record of people and events as experienced by the author; a form of autobiography that gives particular attention to matters of contemporary interest not closely affecting the author's inner life. It is not a formal personal history, but an assembly of memories.'2 Much of this is helpful, but the second main clause of the definition is inaccurate with regard to the content and concerns of Professor Geoffrey Beattie's Protestant Boy - a memoir, but also a profound meditation on the nature, function and patterns of memory.
The French word genre is a term employed in discussion of literature and the arts for ‘a particular type of performance'. The Renaissance and Romantic view of classical genres as ‘fixed', having ‘boundaries which should not be crossed', has long been deemed ‘prescriptive and restrictive', but, although genre ‘has neither primal truth nor formal sanction', descriptions of type and kind may ‘aid attempts to talk and write intelligently'3 about a book. Protestant Boy is so rich and varied in content, style and tone that there are times when one thinks instinctively of Polonius's words on genre: ‘tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem unlimited'.4 Geoffrey Beattie's memoir of growing up in the Belfast of the 1960s is of course dominated by autobiography, but it also includes erudite passages of cultural history and social analysis, serious accounts of military history, and poignant reflections on family, friendship, childhood and personal growth.
It is of course as an internationally distinguished Professor of Psychology and the long-standing Chair of Manchester University's Psychology Department that Geoffrey Beattie is best known, and Protestant Boy offers much to those with a professional interest in this intellectual realm. ‘Human behaviour', ‘development and emotion'; ‘attention and perception'; ‘the conscious experience of environment'; ‘sleep and dreams'; ‘mental capacity and the processes of thought and learning'; ‘consciousness and conduct'; ‘memory'; and ‘the influence of social and cultural setting on group dynamics and individual behaviour': all of these features of ‘the scientific discipline'5 of psychology are touched upon in a book that will be of especial interest to theoreticians, researchers and experimenters working in the areas of child, developmental and social psychology.
The narrative structure and form of Protestant Boy are particularly interesting and inventive. Professor Chris Baldick describes narrative as ‘a telling of some true or fictitious event or connected sequence of events, recounted by a narrator to a narratee' and adds that the narrative's events are ‘selected and arranged in a particular order'.6 Geoffrey Beattie certainly understands the concept of narrative interest, and his memoir opens with a truly compelling account of his ‘going home' in ‘the spring of 1998' to visit his mother in Ligoniel, North Belfast, ‘in the little protestant enclave' where he ‘had grown up'. The book does not then adopt a linear, sequential narrative, but employs a sophisticated technique of moving between present and past, description and analysis, factual accounts, reminiscence and reflection. As the first-person narrator, Professor Beattie is of course the witness and participant who dominates the memoir, but he is evidently aware that the appreciation of character is one of the central pleasures of reading a narrative, and his first chapter introduces us to the person who is second only in importance to the author in the book as a whole: his mother. From her very first cited words - ‘You always said you would come back when you got your degree but I knew you wouldn't... I knew that you were lying to me.' - it is clear that Mrs Beattie is an unusually complex character. The reader's desire to understand her - she can be proud, intense, provocative, loyal and shrewd - begins as soon as we meet her, sitting ‘with her bad legs up on the blue vinyl chairs in front of the black and white television', ‘hardly' bothering ‘to glance' when her one surviving and by-now highly accomplished son arrives in her house ‘late in the evening'.
One of the many rewarding experiences of reading Protestant Boy is the opportunity to savour Professor Beattie's narrative voice. The chief characteristic of his prose is its pellucid quality, and the writing is an aesthetic delight - many phrases are memorably resonant; some sentences are concise, others sophisticated and refined; and the language is always exquisitely controlled. The tone of the memoir can be witty, contemplative, anxious, sorrowful, playful or grave, but Geoffrey Beattie's concern about the tragedies, brutality and injustice that have afflicted Belfast's history is always deeply felt. His is a book that would be best read immediately before, or straight after, sampling The Gatekeeper, the memoir of another Irishman possessed of a polymathic brilliance, Terry Eagleton. As Professor Eagleton has observed, ‘The Irish, so they say, have to keep remembering their own history because the English keep forgetting it; and it was Sigmund Freud who reminded us that what we do not truly remember we are doomed to repeat.'7
- The Encyclopaedia Britannica, fifteenth edition, 1997, Macropaedia 23, ‘Memory', p. 832.
- Tom McArthur [ed.], The Oxford Companion to the English Language, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, p.650.
- ibid., p.435.
- Cited by Raymond Chapman in ibid., p.435.
- The Encyclopaedia Britannica, Micropaedia 9, ‘Psychology', pp.764-5.
- Chris Baldick, Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, p.165.
- Terry Eagleton, Saint Oscar, in Stephen Regan [ed.], The Eagleton Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, p.373.
