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Grace Notes
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Grace Notes
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Catherine Anne McKenna is a successful composer and music teacher, and the mother of an eighteen month old baby girl, Anna. As Grace Notes begins, she is on her way from Glasgow to her home town in County Derry, Northern Island for her father's funeral. The first half of the novel is taken up with Catherine's stay in her home village -- clipped conversations with her traditional mother (alternately affectionate and comforting, and angry and recriminatory), the funeral, a visit with an old music teacher, and revelations -- some veiled, others explicit -- about why Catherine might have needed to leave home to become the person we get to know better in the novel's second half.The second half of Grace Notes takes the reader back in time two years, to Catherine's life as a music teacher on the Isle of Islay, where she first encountered Anna's father, Dave. Dave is charming, alcoholic and -- finally -- violent, which is what ultimately sets Catherine free to travel with Anna to Glasgow, where we found her at the novel's beginning. Near the end of the book, a description of one of Catherine's orchestral scores, A Canon for Ulster, notes: "[i]n places it was a mirror canon, two parts appearing simultaneously the right way up and upside down, one being the reflection of the other". MacLaverty could just as easily have been describing the structure of Grace Notes, a book told in two parts of exactly equal lengths, each describing a mother-daughter relationship, inverted in the second half as the daughter herself becomes a mother. MacClaverty's rendering of Catherine's character is beautifully detailed, from the way she experiences sound (she hears everything, it seems, finding musicality in the noises of day-to-day life), to the intrusive thoughts she tries to block with diverting childhood memories, to her bawdy sense of humour (laughing at the way the soap comes out of the dispenser in the concert hall). Catherine is talented, intelligent and -- nonetheless -- depressed, a genuine, believable 1990s woman, struggling to make her way as a single mother without losing focus on her music. Her Catholicism, her conflicts with her traditional religious upbringing and the religious overtones in her musical compositions were other interesting dimensions of the story. Given some of the reviews I've read (cf. Washington Post's "hagiography" interpretation, linked below), it's possible the underlying message in this novel -- if message there were -- flew right over my head. But I enjoyed it immensely as the story of a life very different from my own, which touched on themes which are nonetheless universal: family conflict, parent-child relationships, addiction, achievement and the importance (salvation, even) of meaningful work. Grace Notes was shortlisted for the 1997 Booker Prize (Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things was the winner that year). You can read the Washington Post's review of Grace Notes here and another in the Richmond Review here. (Top left: author Bernard MacLaverty.) |
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