Cathy is hosting #ReadingIrelandMonth at 746 Books, so I hunted through the TBR and found Grace Notes, by Bernard MacLaverty (which had been lurking there since 2010). MacLaverty was born in Belfast, but moved to Glasgow in 1975, and although Wikipedia summarises Grace Notes as a conflict between a desire for creativity and motherhood, I think it’s about more than that. I think it’s also about a desire to escape an intractable conflict which soured every aspect of life in Northern Ireland.

The novel begins with Catherine’s return to Belfast for her father’s funeral after an estrangement of some years. The novel predates the Good Friday Agreement (1998) and though on the bus home she watched the familiar landmarks she used as a child pass one by one, things are not the same in the town.

In the town itself she was surprised to see a Chinese restaurant and a new grey fortress of a police barracks. She stood, ready to get off at her stop. There was something odd about the street. She bent at the knees, crouched to look out at where she used to live. It was hardly recognisable. Shop-fronts were covered in hardboard, the Orange Hall and other buildings bristled with scaffolding. Some roofs were covered in green tarpaulins, others were protected by lath and sheets of polythene.

‘What happened here?’ she asked the bus driver.

‘It got blew up. A bomb in October.’

‘Was anybody hurt?’

‘They gave a warning. The whole place is nothing but a shell.’

She stepped down onto the pavement and felt her knees shake. A place of devastation. (pp.9-10)

Catherine has been living in Glasgow since winning a scholarship and deciding not to come home after graduating. She has been living in safety while her family’s neighbourhood was bombed all around them, and she didn’t even know about it. A vast gulf now separates her from her mother, who, not knowing anything about Catherine’s new life, achievements and responsibilities, is still entertaining hopes that her only child will stay home now. But paradoxically, since it could be bombed at any time, ‘home’ is stasis, predictable, judgemental, rigid and under siege. She grieves for her father despite his flaws; she wishes she could get on better with her mother but she no longer shares her faith nor her values.

In a tense and claustrophobic atmosphere, Part One of the novel traces the brief couple of days of mourning and the funeral, with Catherine trying hard not to react to irritations from her nagging mother, and trying also to work out when and how to tell her mother a piece of news she isn’t going to want to hear.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/03/20/grace-notes-by-bernard-maclaverty/ ( )

Detailed slow opening of 20 something revisiting home and memory and fathers funeral from whom she was estranged. Kept secret her illegitimate daughter and her music career. Stayed with it but rather bored.

Grace Notes: A Novel by Bernard MacLaverty is a marvelous read. McLaverty is one of Ireland's great novelist. It is the story of Catherine Anne McKenna from a small town outside of Belfast. She is a Catholic amidst the Protestants of Northern Ireland. As the story opens she now lives in Glasgow where she went to school and is now a budding composer. Her father died and she went back to Ireland for the funeral. The first half of the book takes place in Northern Ireland and it is the half of the book that most fascinated me. The second half takes place in Glasgow where she becomes a single mother and continues on her composing career. It ends with a new work of hers presented to the public by the symphony orchestra which is well received and redeems her. I enjoyed the book and recommend it especially those sensitive to Irish Catholicism. ( )

MacLaverty is from Belfast but moved to Scotland in his thirties. Grace Notes is partly set on Islay, with some scenes in Glasgow. However, Part One occurs entirely in Northern Ireland to where Catherine Anne McKenna is returning to her childhood home for the funeral of her father. She has been estranged from her Catholic parents for years, effectively since leaving home to go to University. They were very strict when she was young, with an embedded sense of right and wrong, and she drifted away from them, her failure to come home one Christmas causing her father to say she would no longer be welcome. In the meantime she has, unknown to them, had a child, Anna, out of wedlock; a child whose father, Dave, “is no longer on the scene.” She still suffers from the effects of post-natal depression but has begun to ascend out of it. While back “home” she takes the opportunity to visit her first piano teacher, Miss Bingham, showing us the roots of her vocation as a composer. Before she leaves again, her mother seems to be coming round to her situation but is still aggrieved at the thought of a grandchild her husband never knew.

Part Two deals with Catherine’s early composing career while a teacher on Islay, her relationship with Dave, Anna’s birth, the descent into depression, Dave’s increasing distance as his alcohol consumption gets out of control, and Catherine beginning to come out of her despond on a beach as she hears in her head a set of notes which will become the new symphony whose first performance ends the book.

The portrait of Catherine’s feelings as she gives birth and the ensuing onset of her depression is finely done and Dave is a familiar enough character if a little undercooked. In the end though the novel is about music (grace notes being non-essential “notes between notes” but which add colour to a piece - the literary equivalent being detail in description of scene and action.) MacLaverty conveys music’s power and atmosphere very well and at one point deploys that tremendous Scottish phrase “black affronted”.

Throughout we get the sense of Catherine as a real person. So too are her parents and Miss Bingham but Dave seemed less of an individual and more of a type. It has to be acknowledged though that there are many versions of him about.

MacLaverty’s skill as an author means the book is very readable. One of Scotland’s 100 best? Better than quite a few which feature on the list. ( )

Disturbing book about a girl's difficult relationship to her parents and herself. She questions her talent, her thinking and her heritage, her love of everything her parents and the place she comes from. She wants to be free of those influences and at the same time cannot escape them because of the love that binds her to them.

Quote: A girl who doesn't tell her parents of her success is more estranged than one who conceals her mistakes. ( )