Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty
“Music can scourge the heart.” The tone of this novel’s opening is poignant, almost elegiac. Showing the musician through a series of moments that echo and return and flow into her compositions, MacLaverty transports us into the heart, mind, and soul of Northern Irish composer Catherine Anne McKenna.
Along with her, we visit the interior of the iconic Crown Bar, where she shows a visiting Chinese musician the “remarkably preserved Victorian interior with its gas lighting and call bells.”
When Catherine returns to her hometown after a long absence, a former schoolmate asks her what Glasgow is like, she tells her its, “Great, like Belfast without the killing.” With the lightest of touches, we are reminded of this background violence all through the story, culminating in a scene of breathtaking suspense when “ethnic” Lambeg drums are played in a concert hall rather than a Twelfth of July march. On this occasion, Catherine keeps her eyes down, to avoid seeing a jaundiced view — a “Kick the Pope” band.
During a funeral, we walk with Catherine behind the coffin as she observes the Protestant mourners waiting outside in the cold because “they wouldn’t be seen dead in a house where the Rosary was being said.”
Along with her, we see inside the church the white marble altar, “like a miniature version of a Milan cathedral,” seen by Catherine as “decoration obscuring substance.” We see too the green Connemara marble panels and the six candles that burn before them.
Catherine remembers her childhood, with its routine Saturday midday confession for children, their sins “trivial assembly-line stuff,” and their penance—Three Hail Marys, “chicken feed.”
On the journey to the airport at Aldergrove, we are reminded of Belfast blitz of WWII, when the airfield was located near an American camp, arousing fears the Germans “would try for the airfield and hit the town.”
When Catherine crosses the river, “shallow and stony” at this season, she decides against having coffee at a place on the square because it will be embarrassing. “Everybody would want to know why she wasn’t drinking coffee at home.” And thinks of her mother, who used to make a bubble bath for her with “Fairy liquid and an egg whisk.”
With her we see the Christian-pagan ceremony of the May altars, where Mary is crowned “Queen of the Angels and Queen of the May.” We contemplate the shrines pilgrims visit, and the vernicles they wear on their caps to show they’ve been there.
On the plane, her mind recites a litany of the places of death: “Cornmarket, Claudy, Teebane Crossroads, Six Mile Water, the Bogside, Greysteel, the Shankill Road, Long Kesh, Dublin” and many more in Ireland. She thinks of “places of multiple deaths farther to the east, sandwiched between the long-remembered litany of her childhood. “Horse Guards Parade. Pray for us. Tower of London. Pray for us.”
From this contemplation of death, she contemplates life’s mystery. Considering her drive to make music, she knows that “her act of creation…defined her as human, Defined her as an individual. And defined all individuals as important.” She returns to this theme again, marveling as she remembers how she went “down into herself, into the strong-room, seeing what she could come up with.” And remembers Dr Johnson’s comment about “a way of using the mind without the effort of thinking.” The artist’s way. Every creation is new. “She had to begin to learn all over again for the new thing she was setting out to make. So she felt always a beginner.”
After a stormy night on Islay, we see the window glass “covered with a diced green salad” and the barbed-wire fences with “streamers of straw.” By dawn, the storm is dying. “The branches no longer threshed but waved. Perhaps the ferry would sail.”
Later, back home in Glasgow, Catherine ponders over a poster showcasing three hundred important composers, and feels moved to add her own name, joining Hildegard of Bingen (1098 - 1179, no picture included), the only other woman in the “testosterone brigade” of mustachioed males.
Along with lovely turns of phrase as the one mentioned above, the book contains delightful touches of humour. On one occasion Catherine overhears and argument in a pub over Britain and Ireland. “Rolling up her political sleeves,” she “nose-dives” into the conversation, only to discover they’re talking about a dispute between Benjamin Britten and his composition teacher at the Royal College of Music, who was called John Ireland.
I sent away for my copy of this book, which came to me from Goring-by-sea in the United Kingdom. Between its slightly yellowing pages I found a little treasure - the stub of a boarding pass for Scandinavian Airlines flight from Copenhagen to Glasgow (visible in photo). In my mind’s eye I see Catherine McKenna leaving a performance in Copenhagen and taking that flight home.