The music of quiet lives

LIFE appears to be crushing Catherine McKenna, the central character in Bernard MacLaverty's Grace Notes (Cape, £14.99 in UK) - nothing too dramatic, just the cumulative effect of trying to survive the confusions created by various competing pressures. She is a small-town County Derry-music scholarship girl, and university and her subsequent travelling have alienated her from her publican father and God-fearing Catholic mother, the sort of mother who complains: "You'd gone away to that University his talented wee girl and you'd come back a heathen." If Catherine's talent began the process of freeing this only child from her parents, her ambitions and personal unhappiness have done the rest. When we first meet her, she is returning home for her father's funeral. Eyes puffy with crying, "She wondered what it would be like to face the mirror in a moment of joy. But this seemed such an impossibility."

Memories take over, and against a back-drop of funeral preparations, Catherine remembers her father and his specific form of wisdom. Referring to the local Orangemen, he once said to her: "You're looking at a crowd whose highest ambition, this year and every year, is to march down streets where they're not wanted. Nothing to do with the betterment of mankind or the raising of the human spirit ... the whole problem, Catherine, is racist. I've heard Protestants saying, `the one side is as bad as the other.' It's just not true. It's the Protestant side's bigoted. The Catholics are only reacting to being hated." Asked "what's Glasgow like?" by a former girlhood, Catherine replies, "Great. Like Belfast without the killing."

Although MacLaverty introduces the theme of the ongoing political unrest in Northern Ireland - and indeed later makes effective, even symbolic, use of the Lambeg drum as a metaphor of self-assertion - domestic not tribal tensions dominate the narrative.

Grace Notes could be the story of an individual poised on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but MacLaverty is a calm, deliberate writer. He does not takes risks, but is .unafraid of relying on the ordinary rather than calling upon extremes. So there are no surprises, no linguistic tricks or flourishes; the book instead revolves on the relentless inevitability of life as lived, not life as portrayed in the more exciting world of the imagination. Catherine soon reveals herself to be quite adept at retreating into an interior world of facts and references in order to escape her present circumstances. And while MacLaverty does not deal in surprises, he does make subtle use of detail. The flat, cryptic exchanges between bereaved mother and daughter point to the distance which has developed between them:

"So you've moved off the island?" "Yeah."

"To Glasgow?"

"Yeah. How did you get my number?"

While her mother has kept the hot water bottle Catherine used as a child, indeed has not even discarded the toddler's reins she once used, the resentments are apparent. When Catherine comments: "That was terrible about the bomb", her mother's retort is swift and barbed: "I like the way you phoned to check we were all still alive." Slowly, laboriously, MacLaverty builds up a complete picture of a mother and daughter estranged as a result of the daughter's unintentional flight. "It wasn't so much that she's left - she just failed to come back after her postgraduate year in Glasgow."

Childhood and girlhood memories drift across the narrative like clouds; Catherine is torn between the relentless ordinariness of her life and her dreams of becoming a famous composer. A sense of her awkward, ambitious personality emerges from her reactions to situations. Her preoccupations are easy to guess. By the end of the second page, Catherine, while walking through the airport waiting for her flight home, observes a sign for a baby-changing room: "If only it was as easy as that. `Don't particularly like this baby, would you mind changing it?'"

When she finally mentions to her mother that she has had a baby, her mother's careful politeness collapses into shocked outrage. "I'm just glad your father's dead . . . If the heart attack hadn't killed him, this certainly would."

The visit home ends predictably. Catherine leaves and, arriving back in Glasgow, collects her baby. While MacLaverty accurately portrays the complex tensions of the home-coming, his language, particularly the dialogue, falters between dialect and formal speech. The narrative then moves into a detailed flashback, a lyric sequence about life on the island and the days leading up to the baby's birth. More important is the hazy account of the disastrous relationship which has resulted in Catherine's living on an island with a man who does not love her and certainly never bargained for a baby.

Dave, the casual lover, becomes a violent drunk and his behaviour eventually forces Catherine to assert herself. The descriptions of her early struggles with a small baby while attempting to compose her music is efficiently handled.

Grace Notes is a curiosity, not because of anything remarkable about the style. In its quiet way, it is a far more effective study of a woman in turmoil than many more defiantly feminist tracts. It is true that his descriptions of the ritual of baby care are more text-book than experienced, but his understanding of the psychology of a mother's fears and concerns are sympathetic and convincing, as are the passages in which Catherine's ambitions compete with the more mundane and exhausting realities of her child's endless crying.

This is MacLaverty's first novel in fourteen years. It is another quiet, intense, crafted narrative, and will confirm him in the special place he shares with writers such as Deirdre Madden. Several times throughout the book the world of ordinary practicalities, and the specialist music references favoured somewhat self-consciously by MacLaverty, jar stylistically as well as emotionally. Yet if Catherine's moment of self-assertion does not quite convince, no one would could deny her her moment of triumph, which does gain credence from her friend's well-intentioned, if backhanded comment: "Good for you . . . there's no booing. They really liked it. I've no idea why, but I liked it. The effect is more life-like than artistic, clearly the way MacLaverty the realist prefers.