“On this accumulating wave the drumming has a fierce joy about it…. Musical metaphors fill this book: variations and development of themes. the sun comes out and what she hears in the silence again is music. He glories in plucking out the right word each time: a Scot’s words like “cranching” meaning the sound of teeth on hard fruit.Ĭatherine emerges from the dark of depression after the baby comes, living on isolated Islay contemplating harming the baby until she finds herself on the beach with baby Anna and like in the prozac ad. What MacLaverty has done with this precision of language is to avoid all sentimentality. Teas are poured, awkward jokes are half made, silences left hanging and McKenna’s life is reduced to short steps as the story unfolds in flashback. MacLaverty’s text is made of bite sized, staccato sentences of short, quiet authority that build brick by brick, link by link tightening amidst gloriously naturalistic dialogue. In the second part of the book MacLaverty takes us through the past, the fall and rise, leaving McKenna with, if not a way out, a way up. The book opens with her attending the funeral of her father in her home town in Northern Ireland then returning to Glasgow in panic filled dread to the baby daughter that is both a trigger for her depression and her eventual saviour.
She is a composer, a woman in a male dominated field, and throughout the book picks up her pencil and manuscript only to drop it again and again as she slowly emerges from a disastrous relationship with a feckless charmer and rebuilds a peace with her constricting family. This is the Irish writer’s first full length novel since Cal and in it he brings to life the struggle of Catherine McKenna as she tries to keep afloat amidst post natal depression. ‘Prozac-lit’ rarely comes as uplifting as Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes shortlisted for last year’s Booker. Whether from a deep, stair-less hell or from Churchill’s ‘black dog’ that occasionally comes to visit, they emerge from the dark leaving a note, “Gone for Help”. Home : book reviews : The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcusĭepression produces great books. The Richmond Review, Book Review, Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty
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