Customer Reviews

Grace Notes

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This book is not what it seems. First: the subject matter is gloomy: composer Catherine McKenna, recovering from a postnatal depression, is returning to violence stricken Northern Ireland for the funeral of her father. Not a glimmer of humour in sight. Seems depressing, but does not leave you depressed. I find that remarkable.

Second: it may also seem a simple little book, with not much happening. But go to the trouble to read between the lines, and you will get a lot in return. Because grace notes are the unobtrusive notes that seemingly hardly have a function, but that in some subtle and undefinable way make a piece of music into something special. MacLaverty writes in this way. His book has the same effect that a beautiful piece music has: you can't tell exactly why, but you are deeply moved by it.

What does happen in this novel is that Catherine must try to reconcile the Northern-Irish heritage she has tried to leave behind with the motherhood she can hardly cope with and reconcile both with her work. In the end it is the music that makes her whole again. In a beautiful finale we are shown the healing effect of art. Not a book for those who want a page-turner, but warmly recommended for those who like a deeply felt and subtle insight into a woman's soul. It is amazing that it was written by a man.

Each year, I await the Booker Prize shortlist with baited breath. My personal taste tends to run pretty close to that of the panel, and some of my favorite books have been winners of the award. So, I approached Grace Notes, a "frontrunner" for this year's prize, anticipating a great read. By and large, MacLaverty delivered. His protagonist is a profoundly depressed young woman who makes her way to the light through the power of music, and specifically through the act of composition. Along the way, she overcomes the death of her father, the constriction of her Irish Catholic upbringing, and the disappointment of a failed relationship that leaves her a single mother. MacLaverty's description of her depression is truly masterful, and the best literary evocation of mental illness that I have encountered in some time. Similarly, the climactic passage where she emerges from her darkness has the emotional impact of the "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven's Ninth. And yet...I found the two major sections of the book to be of uncertain relationship one to the other. I couldn't even place them in the correct chronological order. This discontinuity detracted from my otherwise great pleasure. A good book, worth a read, but not a great one and, I think, not a Booker Prize winner.

This book has almost everything to become a highly successful novel. Based on short phrases, its amazing style, seemed unthinkable in the serious literature of post-Faulknerian age and appertained only to pulp fiction, is clear and efficacious in precise descriptions of nuances of human feelings and wee but important details. The story of Catherine McKenna, an Irish talanted pianist and composer, her struggle against 'a testosterone brigade' (masculine world) for independence in private life and art is an extremely advantageous theme nowadays. A process of musical creative work with its culs-de-sac, agonies and estasies is depicted thoroughly. Telling only about several crucial moments in the heroine's life (such as her father's funeral, a birth of her daughter, a breaking-off of distressing relations with her boyfriend-drunkard, a performance of her first orchestral composition) and masterly supplementing them with pertinent flashbacks, Bernard MacLaverty relates the story of every flesh: being a child with a genuine love to her parents and simultaneously with a hate for freedom restrictions; acquiring long-expected independence from them only to be held in servitude of passions and actualize worst parent's nightmares; becoming herself a mother with the doomed desire to save her own daughter from all evils and pains of the world.

This novel was ill-starred: if it were published a year later, it could be awarded with the Booker Prize. But in 1997 it had to yield the Prize to A.Roy's wonderful book. 'Grace Notes' is a novel of calculated beauty (even an appearance of Protestant drums in Catherine's composition was anticipated), 'The God of Small Things' is a novel-flash overwhelming its readers with unpredictable gamut of human emotions.

This book is a short read, but not as easy at is seems at the first sight.

Catherine McKenna is a young girl, an only child struggeling to be free from the bounds the her Northern Irish parents. She has a very special talent for music, and her music teacher from childhood becomes a very special person in her life. She teaches her to read the notes between the notes, the Grace Notes, and this gives special meaning to Catherine's life and music. And also special meaning to the book. The book can be read as words within words, which makes the book full of grace notes.

What fascinates me most with the book is the way Bernard MacLaverty shows us how to read or look at music just like we read or look at paintings. Having read several books about the stories behind Vermeers painting, MacLaverty also uses a Vermeer painting to show music.

I can fully agree with a the reviewer Tobias Hill from The Times: "The strongest impression left by Grace Notes is that of its central image-og the 'notes between the notes' which seem to compose themselves - of a life happening while it's heroine is busy making other plans...If architecture is frozen music, Grace Notes is the literary equivalnt, full of its own powerful rhythm.

Britt Arnhild Lindland

Bernard MacLaverty was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, but has lived for many years in Scotland. An accomplished fiction writer, he is the author of two novels: Lamb, and Cal (both of which were made into successful movies), as well as several collections of short stories. This year, his third novel, Grace Notes, was short-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize.

Grace Notes is the superbly-written story of Catherine McKenna's difficult relationship with her parents, her doomed love-affair with the man who is the father of her child, and her efforts to achieve personal and artistic freedom. The novel begins with a funeral, and ends with the realization of the protagonist's musical ambitions in the form of the successful performance and radio broadcast of her own musical composition. In between this gloomy, inauspicious opening and this triumphant finale lies the rich and finely nuanced story of this woman's struggle for independence.

The novel opens with Catherine's return from Scotland, where she now lives, to the family home in a small town in Ulster. Her father has recently died, and the visit brings back many memories of her childhood. The story is told and her feelings are conveyed with sensitivity and precision. She has grown apart from her parents over the years, and they have been out of communication for some time. Indeed, the last time she spoke to her father they quarreled, and he forbade her to come back again. For this reason, the homecoming, and the funeral, are especially difficult for both mother and daughter.

Catherine is a gifted composer, and recently went on a study visit to Kiev to study with a famous European composer. Her mother, however, is a religiously devout and uneducated woman, and has little understanding of her daughter's musical ambitions. She is also disheartened by her daughter's indifference to the Catholic Church, in which she was reared. There is a dramatic climax to the tension between the two women when Catherine reveals that she has had a child. Angry and confused, the mother is offended and disappointed, but particularly concerned that the baby has not been baptized: "'What's right is right. You don't want the wee thing to spend an eternity in limbo. If it died.' 'Nobody in their right mind believes that kind of stuff nowadays. . .' 'I do.'"

The novel's second half includes a lengthy flashback to Catherine's life on the Scottish island of Islay, where she worked as a music teacher, and where she met Dave, the English jack-of-all-trades with whom she falls in love. Their relationship is portrayed rather well, but it finally collapses as Dave sinks into alcoholism, and Catherine is left increasingly alone, with baby Anna. Her decision to leave her partner comes to her in a moment of inspiration, as she walks on the beach with Anna. At this time she also hears in her mind the first chords of the composition which will mark her emergence as a fully-fledged musician.

The novel concludes with the orchestral performance of Catherine's Mass, which includes a drumming sequence on "Lambeg Drums" performed by a group of Orangemen, Protestant Loyalists from Northern Ireland, which this Catholic composer has deliberately included as an 'ethnic' component of her music. "The Lambegs have been stripped of their bigotry and have become pure sound.... On this accumulating wave the drumming has a fierce joy about it. Exhilaration comes from nowhere." The symbolism is rich. In the final moments of the Mass, and of the novel, MacLaverty has given us a generous emblem of the harmonizing of those noises, which traditionally in Ireland are thought to be in permanent conflict.

The novel's strength lies in its powerful presentation of the character of Catherine, her intense and abiding love for her child, and her obsessive fascination with music. MacLaverty's language is lucid and supple, and his ear for dialogue, and for colloquial speech, is unmatched in recent Irish fiction.

Bernard MacLaverty's "Grace Notes" is a truly absorbing piece of work by one of Ireland's most promising modern writers. It is introspective yet never oblique or indulgent in the way the study of "interiors" has a tendency to be in lesser hands. For Catherine McKenna, a struggling music composer estranged from her parents in Belfast and bringing up her little daughter Anna as a single parent in Glasgow, music is a celebration and a transmutation of the pulse of ordinary life, from childbirth pangs to the sounds of nature. There is a beautiful passage in there which likens the experience of childbirth to an orchestral performance of a musical composition. The prelude is all but theory and practice. You have to experience it to understand its relevance and impact. "Vernicle", the Mass that Catherine finishes, is inspired by her life's highs and lows and the product of her adherence to her teacher's advocacy of the practice of "pre-hearing" and the ability to catch the "notes between the notes". MacLaverty has written a novel that is at once subtle, reflective, poignant and uplifting. It is a consummate achievement that's worthy of its Booker prize award nomination. Not to be missed !

This is one of the most honest, well observed, multi-layered fictions I've read in a long time. It opens up the mind and heart of the creative artist and gets down the details of a woman's life in a sensitive, straightforward way. It tightly weaves setting, metaphors, rhythm and action. Just as the protagonist's inspiration comes first in rhythms, this books seems to have been born in the movement of the sea. The author has an interesting way of ordering his information: you learn to trust early into the book that if something hasn't been explained, the explanation will flow in at a later, more appropriate moment.

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.

As a pianist, I have a special fondness for this struggling artist. This is an extremely well written book, insightful and complex. The way the author layered everything together and then wrapped it up in the symphony at the end of the book was beautifully done.

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.