Grace notes Book

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 1997

I first read this book many years ago, and remember liking it a lot at the time, but I wouldn't have recalled enough to write more than a cursory review. It is the final book that I am reading or re-reading as part of the Mookse and the Gripes project to revisit the 1997 Booker shortlist, and I was a little apprehensive about rereading it because others have been rather critical of it. For me, it still works very well, though it is rather slow moving and the plot is minimal.

The book is divided into two parts, and both are told chronologically, though both parts dwell quite heavily on earlier events, and it is a little unusual in that the first part describes what happened after the second part.

MacLaverty's heroine Catherine Ann McKenna is a young pianist and composer from a Catholic family in Northern Ireland, and the first part describes her rather awkward homecoming for her father's funeral after a number of years in which she has not communicated with her family after an argument with her father. The action in this part takes place over a few days.

The second half spans several years, initially on the Scottish island of Islay where she took a job as a music teacher and then with a friend in Glasgow after she has fled the drunken and violent father of her infant daughter.

For me the book's greatest strength is the writing about classical/serious music, and I loved the way the book ended on a triumphant note with a description of the first performance of her biggest work yet, her first return to writing after motherhood and post-natal depression. The idea of a Catholic composer integrating the Lambeg drums of Orange marchers into a piece may seem a little fanciful, particularly for a book written before the Good Friday agreement, but it is a nice idea.

I also related to Catherine's problems as an atheist dealing with dogmatically religious parents, and liked the way she found relief from her problems with her mother by visiting her old music teacher.

I can see that this is not a book with universal appeal, but for me it was well worth revisiting.