Grace Notes - Hardcover

Maclaverty, Bernard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 022404429X ISBN 13: 9780224044295

Publisher: Random House UK, 1997

Synopsis

Physical description; [4], 277, [5] p. ; 23 cm. Subjects; Women composers Scotland ; Fiction. Families Northern Ireland ; Fiction. Depression, Mental ; Fiction.

About this title

Review:

Composer Catherine McKenna has more of a gift for music than happiness, but she has long been driven beyond harmonies (musical and personal) that her Belfast family can understand. Bernard MacLaverty renders both sides of the equation: Catherine's feminist and aesthetic striving and her mother's more traditional grasp; it's hard not to sympathize with Mrs. McKenna's impatient rejoinder, "You don't cope with music, you listen to it."

Grace Notes, MacLaverty's first novel since Cal, is as much about Irish identity--and possibility--as it is about art. Catherine's newest piece, a mass, includes the huge drums Protestants play in parades. "It was a scary sound--like thunder. Like the town was under a canopy of dark noise." Though her fellow Catholics see the drums as instruments of threat, Catherine is determined to integrate them into her composition.

Her return to Belfast for her father's funeral brings back several ghosts, among them an influential professor who spoke of grace notes--"the notes between the notes." This novel is full of such instances, wry snatches of conversation and unforgettable observations: the new Chinese restaurant that has had to offer chips to stay in business, or the pub that's "on a slight hill. When dogs pissed at the door the dark lines ran diagonally to the gutter." These transcend the occasional passage in which MacLaverty tries too hard to see into the life and rhythms of a female artist. The final section, however, a live radio concert of Catherine's piece, is a triumph for both woman composer and male author.

About the Author:

Bernard MacLaverty is the author of the novels Lamb, Cal and several short story collections including Walking the Dog. A Native of Northern Ireland, he now lives in Glasgow.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House UK
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 022404429X
• ISBN 13: 9780224044295
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256