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.

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

Take-off towards Eponines bookshelf.

I liked the story of Catherine's life, but in the second half of the book there was a little too much of baby Anna for me. Skipping some pages, the end was good again. It's interesting how the book is written from "the end" to "the beginning". It's not an easy read, but worthwile.

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

On the BC shelf.

Habe das Buch in der OBCZ im Labyrinth in Aachen aufgegabelt. Es klingt interessant, mal sehen, wie es ist.

Thanks for sending this, Halbnomadin! :) I'm looking forward to reading it.

As Eponine364 remarked, this is not an easy read. It is in parts quite sad, in others uplifting, depending on how Catherine feels. Mac Laverty suceeds in making the reader suffer and hope with her. At least I did. This makes the novel hard to put down, once you got hooked.

Travels as a RABCK to Brighton to spend some time with WormyOne.

Thank you very much indeed for the book and for the postcard with information about your town. :-)

A moving and evocative investigation of post-natal depression in the context of Irish identity, domestic violence and, most of all, the process of musical composition. The themes interweave and illuminate each other like the parts of an orchestra. It's a mostly melancholy read but with a note of hope to sustain and uplift. (Do you see what I did there?!)

On the piano on the concourse.