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.
(Kirkus Reviews)
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 LoyalistsLambeg drums sounded mysterious and exciting; she remembers her shattered relationship with the drunken,violent Dave,she remembers thechild 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.
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