Rescue and Resurrection Narratives: Reexamining Bernard MacLaverty's Career through Blank Pages and Other Stories

Abstract

Rescue and Resurrection Narratives:Reexamining Bernard MacLaverty's Career through Blank Pages and Other Stories Richard Rankin Russell (bio) belfast-born bernard maclaverty (b. 1942) has long been a master of both the short story and the novel. Many of his short stories from his first five volumes were gathered in Collected Stories, published in 2013. Grace Notes, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1997, should have won that award. It is a nearly perfect novel of two halves, the first (but chronologically second half) exploring the postpartum depression of protagonist Catherine McKenna, a composer who has returned to Northern Ireland from Scotland for her father's funeral. Estranged from her parents, Catherine begins resurrecting her relationship with her mother on this trip, revealing to her mother toward the end that she now has a child. That portion of the novel ends with the tentative hope that Catherine is rising out of her depression, while the second (but chronologically earlier) part of the novel concludes with the triumphant performance of her symphony Vernicle. MacLaverty writes a simple and resonant last sentence—"She rose"—which in retrospect we realize applies also to Catherine's rise out of her depression in the novel's first half, when she becomes fascinated with the Rose of Jericho flower that blooms after long periods of stagnation.1 That resurrection motif remains on full display in Blank Pages (2022), which contains resonant stories of life and death. MacLaverty told me and my graduate seminar students at Baylor University in a telephone conversation on April 12, 2023, that the collection is meant to be "hammock-shaped," with a resurrection story at the beginning ("A Love Picture: Belfast 1940") and at the end ("Blackthorns: County Derry 1942") and a double death story ("The End of Days: Vienna 1918") in the middle. Framing this collection with the upward "bend" of [End Page 25] those two resurrection stories gives it an overall hopeful message, but typically for MacLaverty, there is plenty of darkness even in those stories, in the title story, and in others. Also characteristic of his work, there are many instances of humor, little and large. This is MacLaverty's sixth volume of stories, to go along with his five terrific novels, and he, like his master Anton Chekhov, is a consummate practitioner of the genre. His pacing, characterization, and idiom work superbly in tandem with each other to give us indelible glimpses of the human condition, including the frailties of his geriatric characters, which, understandably as MacLaverty himself has aged, populate his pages more and more. Besides Chekhov, James Joyce remains another master. MacLaverty noted to us that he thinks of these twelve stories as a "wee exhibition"—like paintings in a gallery—and cited Joyce's Dubliners, which he called a "wonderful set of stories." Joycean homages abound. For instance, "The End of Days: Vienna 1918" features a gorgeous passage where the artist Egon Schiele imagines the soot from his burned drawings of his wife right after her death covering the whole city of Vienna: "Black snow falling on the Danube. Soot becoming clogged in the golden foliage of the Secession Building. Darkening the Opera house. The cafes and hotels. The back streets and brothels."2 Here, snow is "general" over Vienna, not Ireland, as in the conclusion of "The Dead." And in "Blank Pages," the inspiration-seeking author tries to recall the onomatopoeic sound that Leopold Bloom's cat made in Ulysses (191, 197). Like Joyce, MacLaverty brilliantly makes extraordinary moments happen in front of our eyes out of seemingly ordinary words and situations. Consider too the Joycean revelation of the opening story, "A Love Picture: Belfast, 1940," in which Gracie believes her son has been killed by a Nazi torpedo that sank his ship. After her niece's friend tells Gracie she believes she saw Gracie's son in a newsreel at the local cinema that depicted survivors being landed at Galway, Gracie gets the local cinema manager, Johnny, to open the place for her that evening so she can watch the newsreel for herself. Near the end of this moving story, Gracie watches the newsreel intently and finally sees the miracle she has...