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Life
| 1942- ; b. 14 Sept. in Belfast; ed. Holy Family Primary School, Belfast; worked for ten years as laboratory technician at QUB before taking an English degree there in 1974, followed by Dip.Ed.; awarded bursary by Northern Arts Council for his short stories, 1975; moved to Edinburgh with his wife and four children, 1975; taught English at St. Augustin’s High School from 1975-78; published his first story collection as Secrets and Other Stories (1977), winning an award from Scottish Arts Council; lived on the Isle of Islay as a teacher, 1978-81, before moving to Glasgow as full-time writer; issued Lamb (1980), a tragic novel about a troubled boy’s abduction from an institution by the religious brother who cares for him, marked by sacrificial symbols from scripture and mythology; issued A Time to Dance and Other Stories (1982); |
| issued Cal (1983), a novel dealing with murder, self-inflicted communal violence, and political sacrifice among nationalists in the Northern Troubles, featuring Grünewald’s crucifix as a symbol in the text; later filmed with Stephen Rea acting, dir. by Colin Gregg and scripted by MacLaverty (2003); issued The Great Profundo (1987), a short-story collection; also Walking the Dog (1994), containing 17 stories, each second one being a much shorter post-modernist piece in italics; published A Man in Search of A Pet (1978) and Mochua the Monk (1978), children’s books which he illustrated himself; authored radio and tv plays such as My Dear Palestrina (1980); and a wrote a screenplay of Somerville and Ross’s The Real Charlotte (1989); appt. tutor at Listowel Writers’ Week, 1988; |
| issued Grace Notes (1997), a novel concerning Catherine McKenna, a scholarship musician who escapes her Ulster-Catholic background but returns for her father’s funeral; the novel strikes a non-sectarian note when she incorporates the Lambeg drum in her latest symphony, in appreciation of its approach to ‘pure sound’; shortlisted for the Booker and Whitbread Prizes; acted as successful broadcaster on BBC3 (classical music), 1998-2000, quitting due to erosion of his writing-time; wrote and directed Bye-Child (2003), nominated for BAFTA ‘Best Short Film’; received the Lord Provost of Glasgow Award for Literature, 2005; |
| issued The Anatomy School (2001), a growing-up novel dealing with familial distances, school-leaving, friendship, and sexual initiation; wrote a play, The Woman From The North (2007); a story-collection, Matters of Life and Death (2010), was shortlisted for the Internat. Frank O’Connor Prize; scripted versions of his fiction for as plays for radio and TV, as well as screenplays and libretti - viz., “The King’s Conjecture” with music by Gareth Williams and “The Letter” with music by Vitaly Khodosh, both for the Scottish Opera in 2012; also “The Elephant Angel”, with Williams, an opera for schools which toured in Scotland and Northern Ireland; his Collected Storiesappeared from Jonathan Cape in 2013; issued Midwinter Break(2017), in which Gerry and Stella, a Northern-Irish elderly couple review their life together, past and future, in Amsterdam; he teaches on the creative writing programme of the Irish and Scottish Studies Research Inst. at the University of Aberdeen; his papers are held at Emory University, Atlanta. DIL FDA OCIL |
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Works
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| Children’s Fiction |
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| Miscellaneous (incls.) |
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Criticism
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Bibiographical details
Richard Rankin Russell, ed., Bernard MacLaverty (Bucknell UP 2009), xiv, 192pp. 1. Michael Parker, ‘“Made-Up Truths“: Themes,Tropes, and Narrative Technique in Bernard MacLaverty’s Early Short Storie’; 2. Richard Rankin Russell, ‘Parabolic Plots in MacLaverty’s Lamb’; 3. Gerry Smyth, ‘“Join us“: Musical Style and Identity in ’My Dear Palestrina,”’; 4. Richard Mills, ‘ ‘that orange and green dilemma’: Violence and the Traumatised Subject in Bernard MacLaverty’s Screenplays of Cal (1983) and Lamb (1985)’; 5. Richard Haslam, ‘Character and Construction in Bernard MacLaverty’s Troubles Stories: The Great Profundoand Walking the Dog’; 6. Stephen Watt, ‘MacLaverty’s Holocaust: Affect, Memory, and the #147;Troubles,”’; 7. Marilynn Richtarik, ‘The Personal is Political: Bernard MacLaverty’s Grace Notes as a Peace Process Novel’; 8. Michael Rawl, ‘“Moving from one element to another”: Body and Soul in Bernard MacLaverty’s The Anatomy School’; 9. Neal Alexander, ‘Bernard MacLaverty’s Fictional Geographie’; 10. Laura Pelaschiar, ‘Ireland and Elsewhere: The “Non-Irish” in Bernard MacLaverty’s Fiction’; David Holdeman, ‘Afterword: Looking at Art in Bernard MacLaverty’s Fiction’; Further Reading; Index.
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Commentary
Maurice Harmon, ‘First Impressions: 1968-78’, in Terence Brown & Patrick Rafroidi, eds., The Irish Short Story (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1979): ‘Bernard McLaverty writes with quiet humour and compassion, and above all with a strict concern for craft. “Between Two Shores” is a simple story in essence and develops with deceptive ease. It is an account of an Irishman returning to visit his wife and family. He remembers his loneliness in London, his affair with a nurse, and thinks of his wife waiting eagerly for him. His secret is the syphilis that he has contracted in London and which he has left untreated. “St. Paul Could Hit the Nail on the Head” is an obliquely humorous account of a hardpressed Catholic wife married to a Protestant. Despite the likely consequences, she makes a room available in her home for the lonely priest who comes to visit her in the city. [...].’ (p.68.)
Helen Meany, interview with Bernard MacLaverty [at Montrose Hotel], Irish Times (2 July 1997) [err. 13]; reviewer notes compassionate and sensitive stories in A Time to Dance, &c., with a tone that remains low-key and a style that is spare and clipped ‘with cultivated bareness that mirrors the banality of ordinary life’ and adds, ‘these qualities have now injected with a a linguistic playfulness, an attempt to render into words and images the experience of listening to music’; quotes, ‘the transition from stories to a novel was something that happened without any grat moment of definition. Some of the sotries were becoming quite long and two of them were about the same character, a woman, at different points in her life. I gradually began to expand these, bringing them under the general umbrella of music and religion’; speaks of the loss of a strong Catholic religion and rediscovery of a sense of mystery and transcendence through music; profound joys of childbirth, &c.; quotes, ‘I really wanted to get the female voice right … the women of my childhood in Belfast were extraordinarily strong. My earlier work was full of fathers and sons, but this one is more concerned with the chain of womanhood, from daughter to daughter.’
Elspeth Barker, review of Grace Notes, in ‘Sunday Review’, Independent [UK] (6 July 1997); provides full plot summary and commentary on the language of the novel, here called ‘a marvellous book’.
Bernard O’Donoghue, ‘A Note of peacefulness’, review of Grace Notes [1997], in Times Literary Supplement, 4 July 1997, p.21 [var. 31], remarks on the theme that art has the capacity to assuage suffering and notes that much the most sympathetic characters are the Lambeg drummers. Cites Yeats’s line, ‘what’s the good of an escape, if honour find you in the wintry blast?’, and treats the novel as a story of the musician’s escape from the environment of her parochial and bigotted father into neutral modern space, where she has a child with an English boyfriend, Dave, of whose collection of Irish rock music she is contemptuous; notes her final solitude and cites Arnold (‘we million mortals live alone’). Comments on Heaneyesque language in places, on the ethical quality of the work as making clear Catherine has lost some ‘natural goodness’, while the novelist finds ‘Ulster virtue’ in shopkeepers and Lambeg drummers; notes also the use of punning tags (Linseed Oil/Lynn C. Doyle; Bar Talk/Bartok), and specuates that this echoes ‘Gaeltacht/Gaol Talk’.
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Sue Leonard, reviewing Bernard MacLaverty, The Anatomy School (London: Jonathan Cape 2001), in Books Ireland (Nov. 2001, p.289), calls in a coming-of-age novel in which Martin Brennan, an insecure seventeen-year, is facing school-leaving examinations amid uncertainty vis a vis his peers and an enigmatic and incommunicative family; befriended by the new boy Kavanagh and makes a threesome with Blaise Foley, who hatches a plan to steal the exam paper for a sneak preview; loses his virginity to an Australian while conducting a night-time experiment; quotes, from the exam scene: ‘The moist palms. The incredible difficultyu of beginning the first sentence. The writing until his fingers were sore and the blood seemed ot have drained from his arm. The certainty that he was being processed and graded so that society could utilise him.’
Conor McCarthy, Modernisation, Crisis and Culture in Ireland, 1969-1992 (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2000), writes of the film Cal: ‘That Cal was directed by an Irishman (Pat O’Conor) and adapted from his own novel by a Northern Irishman (Bernard MacLaverty) ought to alert us to the degree to which Irish cultural production can be interpellated by traditions or ideologies from outside the island.’ (p.175.)
Christine Madden, notice of The Anatomy School, in The Irish Times(26 Oct. 2002), Weekend: ‘There are different ways to discover the secrets of the human body, as Martin Brenn this book’s young protagonist discovers. one is by dissection (corpses), another is through foreplay (living girl). The first half of MacLaverty’s most recent novel, however, exhibit a Martin in ignorance of almost everything, particularly in contrast to his mates Kavanagh (the charismatic boy perfect) and Blaise Foley (cynical intellectual dissident). As they prepare to undermine the examination system, Martin find himself anxiously juggling schoolboy and civic honour, religious morality and adolescent want, fear and duty. MacLaverty’s ability to craft explosively funny situations and dialogue without caricature, and to retain a beating heart at the centre of each narrative, makes him one of the most enjoyable authors writing today.’
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Quotations
Cal (1983): ‘[T]he feeling of [Loyalist] community that they managed to create annoyed him and the stronger the sense of community grew the more excluded and isolated the McCluskeys felt.’ (p.9.) Skeffington justifies sectarian killings: ‘anybody who enjoyed this kind of thing would have to be sick. But it has to be done by somebody. [...] it is our responsibility. We have to make sacrifices.’ (p.23.) ‘[After the killing] he felt he had a brand stamped in blood in the middle of his forehead which would take him the rest of his life to purge.’ (p.99.) He plans to write to Marcella: ‘he could write to her and if she replied he could begin to hope. [...] he would write to her and try to tell it as it was.’ (p.153-54). (For summary, see under Notes, infra.)
‘The question of pessimism’: ‘I suppose that it’s difficult, coming from the north of Ireland, coming from Belfast, to write work which is optimistic. But then I don’t think that everything I have written has been better than that [viz., “My Dear Palestrina” there are some moments of humour, or charm or enlightment, but by and large I would agree that coming from the north of Ireland and having lived in that situation, I think we have a right to be bleak. Flannery O’Connor says that artists have the absolute right to live in the dark. Nobody can argue on the human condition, it’s a pretty black thing, you know. But there are moments of love, and moments of caring.’ (See Rosa González, interview with Bernard MacLaverty, in Ireland in Writing: Interviews with Writers and Academics, ed. Jacqueline Hurtley, et al., Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi 1998, p.32.)
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‘Just try to write. You can do it better tomorrow’, in “My Writing Day” [series], The Guardian (26 Aug. 2017) Sometimes I think I am very privileged. Setting my own hours. No traffic jams going to work. Just walk down the carpeted hall to the study. It’s the only room in the house I have as I want. Books pertaining to writing above the computer. Dictionaries of all sorts - Brewer’s, Medical, Scots, foreign words, missals, bibles. The room is through-other. Untidy. Little columns of stuff build up on the wooden floor, never to be moved again. Newspapers with articles that at one time seemed to be of vital interest. |
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| Available online; accessed 26.08.2017. |
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References
Kevin Rockett, et al., eds, Cinema & Ireland (1988), cites Cal, filmed by Pat O’Connor in 1984 with with John Lynch as Cal and Helen Mirren, John Kavanagh, Donal McCann et al. in other roles. [Note that Blackstaff Press catalogue for 1983 states that Cal is to be fimed by David Puttham, director of Chariots of Fire, for C4 TV in 1984].
Walter ReadeTheatre Program (1994) lists Lamb, dir. Colin Gregg (1985), 110 mins.; bleakly Dickensian reform school in N. Ireland, headmaster (Ian Bannen) uses cruelty and terror to keep boys in line; when a kid (Hugh O’Connor) nobody wants arrives one of the priests (Liam Neeson) kidnaps him away from the school, an act of compassion leading the two into terrible complexities, public and private; Neeson’s performance called faultless, &c. Also Cal ((1984), 102 mins. [as above].
British Libraryholds [1] Title Walking the dog and other stories Penguin c.1995; [2] Walking the dog and other stories Bernard MacLaverty. c.1994; [3] Walking the dog and other stories 1994; [4] The best of Bernard Mac Laverty short stories. c.1990 Heinemann [5] The Mac Laverty collection. 1991 Longman; [6] Cal [trans. into German by] Niklaus Stingl. Berlin Aufbau 1987; [7] Lamb. Longman 1991; [8] Cal, Bernard MacLaverty unit written by Linda Flynn and Sally West. 1989 [9] The great Profundo and other stories. 1989; [10] Andrew McAndrew. London: Walker 1988, Children’s short stories; [11] Cal. 1988; [12] The Great Profundo and other stories. 1987; [13] The great Profundo and other stories 1987; [14] Cal 1983; [15] A man in search of a pet written and illustrated by Bernard MacLaverty. Blackstaff 1978; [16] Secrets, and other stories. Blackstaff 1977; [17] Bernard MacLaverty. c.1982 Glasgow National Book League Writers in Brief, No. 20; [18] Cal 1983; [19] A time to dance and other stories. 1982 [20]; Lamb 1980; [21] A time to dance and other stories. 1985, c.1982; [22] Cal 1984, c.1983; [23] Lamb 1981, c.1980; [24] Bk 4, Storyline Scotland [ser.]. Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd 1985; also Cal [Videorecording] directed by Pat O’Connor videocassette/1993 [UUC Lib.]
Hibernia Books (Cat. 19) lists ‘A present For Christmas’, in Short Stories by Modern Irish Authors (Caldo[?] n.d.).
Blackstaff Catalogue (1994): Secrets and Other Stories (Befl: Blackstaff 1977) [0 85640 101 3]; rep. (Blackstaff 1983) [0 85640 195 1]; A Man in Search of A Pet (Belfast: Blackstaff 1978) [085640 116 1]; A Time to Dance and Other Stories (London: J. Cape; Belfast: Blackstaff 1982) [0 8564 265 6]; Lamb (Belfast: Blackstaff 1980) [0 85640 215 X]; Cal (Belfast: Blackstaff 1983; Heinemann Educ. 1988; Penguin 1994) [0 85640 281 8; 014 010810 6]; The Great Profundo and Other Stories (Belfast: Blackstaff 1987) [08564 0 389 X]; Walking the Dog and Other Stories (Belfast: Blackstaff 1994) [0 85640 534 5]; Walking &c. (London: J. Cape [0 224 03681 5]; Storyline Scotland (London: Edinburgh Oliver & Boyd 1987) [0 05003 5 65 7] [Dewey 428.6].
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Notes
Cal (1983): The title character is living in predominantly loyalist area with is father Shamie; he is unable to face work at an abbatoir. He becomes involved in an IRA murder, driving the car for Crilly and Skeffington and afterwards feels branded by it. Cal begins to trail Marcella, a librarian, the widow of the victim but cannot bring himself to confess his crime to her. She makes love with him out of loneliness and he fails as a lover yet still yearns to write to her explaining everything ‘as it was.’ (p.54). The IRA man Skeffington justifies sectarian killings and the novel invests attention in the theory of necessary suffering, citing Archbishop Romero and Pearse, while Marcella shows Cal the Grunewald crucifix during their love-making. In these ways the novel, as a whole, underscores the theory of patriotism as sacrifice. In order to save her library from attack, he turns informer. (See also under Quotations, supra.)
Grace Notes: Giraldus Cambrensis wrote, ‘They glide so subtly from one mode to another, and the grace notes so freely sport with such abandon and bewitching charm around the steady tone of the heavier sound, that the perfection of their art seems to lie in their concealing it [...]’ (History and Topography, John O’Meara trans, 1982, pp.102-03; quoted in Andrew Carpenter, ‘Changing Views of Irish Musical and Literary Culture’, Michael Kenneally, ed., Irish Literature and Culture, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1992, p.9-10 [and see Giraldus, q.v.])
‘Walking the Dog’ is the title of a zany piece of music by Gershwin for a film with Fred Astaire, and here the title of a story about paramilitaries randomly picking out Catholic victims for sectarian killing.
Critic’s choice: Bernard MacLaverty recommends Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven (Penguin 1994) as ‘wonderfully argued’ explanation of ‘the origins of the sufferings inflicted by the Church in this area. I have a fantasy of leaving a copy beside the Bible in every hotel room in Ireland’. (Tribune Magazine, Sunday 11 Dec. 1994).
Edinburgh Fest.: MacLaverty read at Edinburgh Festival (Sept. 1998), with Jennifer Johnston, Joan Lingard, Owen Dudley Edwards, Victoria Glendinning, Ardal O’Hanlon, and others; Hayden Murphy reports in Irish Times, 12 Sept. 1998.
Lambeg drumswere played by a cross-community group at a reception organised for Bill Clinton in Washington, and later in Monte Carlo at the Reunion of the Ireland Fund of Monaco (7th Oct. 2000).
Kes who: Capt. Robert Nairac, the “Ultra” assassinated by the IRA, kept a falcon in his rooms at college; one of his birds was even used in the film, Kes. “You might say that he was identifying with the falcons, that he was involved in that kind of objectification of the natural world”, says [Eoin] McNamee.’ (Interview with Roisin Ingle, The Irish Times, 9 April 2004.)
Arundati Roy: Grace Notes was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in the year it was won by Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things (1997);
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