"The same sound but with a different meaning": music, repetition, and identity in Bernard Mac Laverty's Grace Notes

Eire-Ireland:Journal of Irish Studies, Fall-Winter, 2002 by Gerry Smyth

GRACE NOTES

I want to suggest that, as a latter-day Irish musical novel, Grace Notes is in implicit dialogue with the developments described above. Which is to say, Mac Laverty's novel is located in the interstices between linked, though distinguishable, cultural-critical narratives--one concerned with a (supposedly) generalized politics of representation, the other with a specific national-historical tradition. My argument here is that Mac Laverty organizes this text in such a way that the latter is resolved in terms of the former, by which I mean that the Irish colonialist problematic is represented as a specific historical instance of a deeper human problematic, one focused on the relations between the unique and the general in human affairs, and more suggestively upon the function of repetition at both the cultural-historical and the phenomenological-individual levels. The musical novel, as we shall see, is the ideal medium for this kind of artistic treatment, for it enables the theme of repetition to be engaged at both the formal and conceptual levels, thereby fostering a quasi-organic cycle of theme, repetition, and variation within the text. Finally, I want to suggest that Grace Notes withdraws from the radical implications it sets in motion, that its musical (and, by extension, political) vision is circumscribed by the classical bourgeois frame of reference within which it operates, and that despite its incorporation of significant musical elements into its form, Mac Laverty's novel eventually succumbs to a "modernist" aesthetic that, in Lyotard's terms, offers the reader "matter for solace and pleasure" rather than a stronger sense of the "unpresentable."

Grace Notes is an unusually structured work, being divided into two almost exact halves. Part One--which in plot terms actually post-dates Part Two--introduces us to Catherine Anne McKenna, a young composer living in Glasgow. At the outset of the narrative Catherine is returning home to small-town Northern Ireland for her father's (Catholic) funeral. We learn of her troubled relationship with her parents, her current depression, her musical education in Belfast, Glasgow, and Kiev, and her encounter with various characters and situations. Part Two takes the reader back to the period preceding the death of her father, during which time she lived on the small Scottish island of Islay with Chris, a feckless English charmer with whom she has a baby. Narrated largely in free indirect discourse, we read of Catherine's pregnancy and labor, and then of the onset of a debilitating post-natal depression caused in part by her inability to compose and in part by her partner's submission to alcoholism. After an epiphany on the Islay beach, Catherine returns to Glasgow, at which point she begins to write a work encapsulating many of the experiences broached throughout the earlier part of the text--sectarianism, familial strife, the joy and terror of motherhood, the apparently universal emotional economy of hope and despair. This two-part work, entitled Vernicle, is commissioned by BBC Scotland for a series celebrating folk themes or instruments; the instrument Catherine decides to feature is one of the icons of loyalist culture, the Lambeg drum. The last few pages of the book describe her nervous attendance at its first performance, as well as the work itself in extended detail. We may infer that shortly after the performance she receives word of her father's death, and returns home for the funeral, which provides the focus for Part One.