Product Description

Returning to Belfast after a long absense, to attend her father's funeral. Catherine McKenna - a young composer - remembers exactly why she left: the claustrophobic intimacies of the Catholic enclave, her fastidious, nagging mother, and the pervading tensions of a city at war with itself. She remembers a more innocent time, when the Loyalists Lambeg drums sounded mysterious and exciting; she remembers her shattered relationship with the drunken, violent Dave, she remembers the child she had with him, waiting back in Glasgow. This is a novel, about coming to terms with the past and the healing power of music, "Grace Notes" is a master story-teller's triumphant return to the long form: a powerful lyrical novel of great distinction.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10764 in Books
• Published on: 1998-04-30
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Composer Catherine McKenna has more of a gift for music than happiness, but she has long since been driven beyond harmonies (musical and personal) that her Belfast family can comprehend. 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.

Review
A lyric novel about music and motherhood. Catherine McKenna is an Irish-born pianist and composer whose emotional turbulence sets the tone for a significant part of the story's soft yet visceral verbal music. Catherine's unusually delicate sense of psychic balance is thrown off by two events in particular: the birth of her first child, Anna, and the sudden death of her estranged yet beloved father. Catherine is not married; her mate is a (mostly) lovable drunkard. As an iconoclastic only child who left her family's home in a small town near Belfast for a university education and career in Scotland, the adult Catherine rarely visits or phones her disappointed parents. Her musical career, though, is flourishing, with the BBC broadcasting her work and commissions coming her way at last. Using flashbacks, interior monologues, and dialogue, MacLaverty very gradually creates a complex, dimensional character, until the third-person narrative seems to speak directly to us from Catherine's struggling soul: "It gave Catherine a strange feeling, this invisible cascade of darkness. She felt suffocated by it quilting downwards - whatever it was. This diminuendo of light brought about by something intangible - odourless - invisible." The drawback of MacLaverty's mildly impressionistic approach is the slow, even anticlimactic pace of some scenes, those portraying the domesticity of Catherine's relatively cloistered life, for example, or those, especially, involving her father's death, which open the story. Catherine's character, as it emerges from the fragmentary narrative, tends to overshadow everyone else in a novel guided less by "story" than by musical tides and perturbations. It's clear that MacLaverty (Walking the Dog, 1995, etc.) has tried to do something rather difficult: to suggest the interior life of an artist struggling to balance the urgent demands of creating music and the equally pressing demands of life. Very often, he succeeds in this complex portrait of a woman who is, first and foremost, an artist. (Kirkus Reviews)

Synopsis
Returning to Belfast after a long absense, to attend her father's funeral. Catherine McKenna - a young composer - remembers exactly why she left: the claustrophobic intimacies of the Catholic enclave, her fastidious, nagging mother, and the pervading tensions of a city at war with itself. She remembers a more innocent time, when the Loyalists Lambeg drums sounded mysterious and exciting; she remembers her shattered relationship with the drunken, violent Dave, she remembers the child she had with him, waiting back in Glasgow. This is a novel, about coming to terms with the past and the healing power of music, "Grace Notes" is a master story-teller's triumphant return to the long form: a powerful lyrical novel of great distinction.

Customer Reviews

Beautiful, moving novel of music, love, sadness and more...
It's hard to do this exquisite novel justice without giving too much away..

Catherine is a young composer, coming from the background of "The Troubles" in northern Ireland, and a family of an overbearing unempathetic mother and recently died father, whose funeral the novel opens with

She has recently given birth and is suffering from severe postnatal depression.
Before I read this novel, I was fairly sceptical as I thought "what can a man know about post natal depression?" Having read this novel, I can only assume that McLaverty's wife maybe suffered, or he suffered from depression himself.

I have experienced depression myself, and I have never read such an exquisitely crafted, beautiful, moving and ultimately inspirational fictitious account of depression.

This novel contains some amazing passages, including one of my favourite passages ever:

"She got in the lift to go up, and looked at the people in there. Any one of them could have a story to tell as bad as her own. With a weight like that, the lift should be going down"

I think there is a comparison between depressed thoughts and "Grace Notes" Grace notes being the notes between notes, that take the piece of music to another place and make a world of difference.. and depressed thoughts maybe being "The thoughts between thoughts" that take your mind and heart to another place?

I would recommend this to anyone, and especially to someone who is or has suffered from depression. It is comfort to know that you are not the only person to have felt that way, and that wherever there is life there is hope.

A convincing work of fiction
Catherine McKenna is a composer and a music teacher. She flies back home to Northern Ireland to attend her father's funeral. She is about to spend a few difficult days with her mother and sisters, a strictly catholic family, who run a pub. This is the occasion for Catherine to remember her childhood, her Granny Boyd, her first piano lesson with Miss Bingham, her musical studies in Belfast and the award she won for the excellence of her work which allowed her to travel to Kiev to visit the famous composer Melnichuck.
She remembers how she met Dave, the father of her daughter Anna aged 18 months, a charming man who became a violent alcoholic. Catherine had to leave him and take refuge with her friend Liz in Glasgow.
Catherine's sad and depressed existence is described with a very elegant delicacy. The 30 or so pages devoted to the way Catherine had to travel to the mainland to give birth to her daughter in the absence of Dave are of exceptional literary quality. Another strength of this novel are the numerous references to famous composers and musicians which are highly instructive without adding any weight to the plot. A highly recommended book.

Beautifully orchestrated, gracefully written.
This multileveled novel tells of a young woman who escapes her Irish family, studies music with world class artists and composers, carves out a personal and professional life in a world dominated by men, and then returns briefly for the funeral of her estranged father and reconciliation with her mother. But it is also a search for grace in its various definitions.

As a composer, Catherine looks for the "notes between the notes...graces, grace notes." A Catholic who no longer believes, she sees "music as the grace of God...a way of praying." Appalled by the cruelty and intolerance which "religious" men have shown each other throughout history, she believes that "her act of creation [not religious dogma]...define[s] her as an individual...and define[s] all individuals as important."

She embarks on a series of religious compositions at the same time that she rejects the church and its teachings about marriage and family. Choosing not to marry the father of her child, she nevertheless recognizes her daughter as a miracle, a profound mystery which "there was no form of music to celebrate or mark..." Filled with symbols of Fatherhood, baptism, ascension, rebirth, and ultimate triumph, MacLaverty's Grace Notes is a compelling and sensitive exploration of a young woman's attempt to reconcile her humanity with the universal mysteries of creation. Mary Whipple