Grace Notes [Paperback]

Bernard Maclaverty (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 1998

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Kirkus Reviews

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. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Trafalgar Square (April 30, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0099778017
• ISBN-13: 978-0099778011
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.7 x 7.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,094,900 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Subtle and insightful., January 30, 2002

By 

A. van Gelderen "Anna van Gelderen" (the Netherlands) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Grace Notes: A Novel (Paperback)

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.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Music in Words, October 10, 1997

By 

Mark Robson "MER" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Grace Notes (Hardcover)

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.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Calculated Beauty, February 6, 2000

By 

Andrew Karbovsky - See all my reviews

This review is from: Grace Notes (Hardcover)

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.