(pp.9-10)Ĭatherine has been living in Glasgow since winning a scholarship and deciding not to come home after graduating. She stepped down onto the pavement and felt her knees shake.
‘What happened here?’ she asked the bus driver. Some roofs were covered in green tarpaulins, others were protected by lath and sheets of polythene. Shop-fronts were covered in hardboard, the Orange Hall and other buildings bristled with scaffolding. She bent at the knees, crouched to look out at where she used to live. There was something odd about the street. In the town itself she was surprised to see a Chinese restaurant and a new grey fortress of a police barracks. 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. The novel begins with Catherine’s return to Belfast for her father’s funeral after an estrangement of some years. I think it’s also about a desire to escape an intractable conflict which soured every aspect of life in Northern Ireland. 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. (Sept.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). At his best, MacLaverty recalls Graham Greene, and his control over arc and character packs a wallop. "The Clinic," a less lively story, features a curmudgeon who turns to Chekhov as his health fails. Terror and comedy coexist in "The Trojan Sofa" when an 11-year-old burglar, caught by his intended victim and held at gunpoint, asks if he can use the bathroom. In "A Trusted Neighbor," MacLaverty expertly mines the tension between ordinary folk caught in a conflict that only seems far away from their suburban enclave. In "On the Roundabout," the short stream-of-consciousness piece that begins the collection, a family outing "like something outa Norman Rockwell" turns into a blood-soaked frenzy of unprovoked violence. Violence is never far off for his characters, and though they may try to distance themselves from conflict (spatially as well as emotionally), it inevitably finds them. , shortlisted for the Booker) exploits the subtle nuances of Irish life in these 11 stories.
From 1970s Belfast during the Protestant and Catholic "Troubles" to the calmer but still tense present, MacLaverty ( Grace Notes
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