It has been argued that the short story is the true medium for MacLaverty's peculiar skills. MacLaverty continually evokes what Emerson called a "silent melancholy" - that sense of enormous emptiness that seems to loom largest between the ages of, say, 15 and 21. With the notable exception of Catherine McKenna, the composer of the much-acclaimed Grace Notes, MacLaverty's characters tend to be young, sensitive, intelligent males, whose personal tragedy it is to be young, sensitive, intelligent, male, and living in the north of Ireland. The typical MacLaverty plot is a three-strand cord: loss and hope and disappointment.
There is a sense throughout, in both the novels and stories, that civilisation hangs by a thread, or a twisted skein. The novels are set mostly and often wholly in the north of Ireland, a region - if one might be permitted to say so - of apparently irreducible unhappiness. There are four - Lamb, Cal, Grace Notes and now The Anatomy School - as well as four books of short stories. (Sept.It is possible to read the complete novels of Bernard MacLaverty in a weekend. McLaverty's own music here is restrained and spare, but it swells to a crescendo in the denouement when one of Catherine's compositions is played in concert. The most interesting writing manifests itself in Catherine's expression of her creative philosophy: her sources of inspiration, the process of composition and how the tones, textures and rhythms of sound blend to create what we appreciate as music. The narrative moves gracefully from present to past, as childhood memories provide welcome moments of comfort and comic relief amid Catherine's wry reflections on her craft and her struggles to practice it.
Having left Dave, she battles clinical depression having returned home, she must face the painful, irreconcilable differences of opinion and outlook that for years have estranged her from her religious parents, her Irishness and her church. Along the way, she takes up with Dave, a charming but ultimately abusive alcoholic when she becomes pregnant, the conflict between her music and the endless demands of motherhood force her into an artistic impasse. The novel opens at the funeral of Catherine McKenna's father, a small-town publican, and goes back to trace Catherine's journey from her hometown, through music school in Scotland, into the male-dominated world of musical composition. Rarely the territory of male writers, the travails of postnatal depression and single motherhood get a sober, delicate treatment in the third novel from popular Northern Irish author MacLaverty (Lamb Cal).
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