Other critics had already explored the political implications of Catherine’s music, so I researched events in Northern Ireland while MacLaverty was writing the novel. Working on a commissioned essay about Grace Notes in 2013, I resolved to look more closely at its politics. Though Catherine does not recover her faith, I wrote, she decides that the ends of art and religion are really the same: “communication, communion, between people.” When I reviewed Grace Notes shortly after its 1997 publication, I paid most attention to its themes of female creativity and the relationship between religion and art, and to protagonist Catherine McKenna’s challenges as a lapsed Catholic from Northern Ireland and as a woman in one of the most male-dominated branches of the arts. But appearances can be deceiving, as I discovered through researching and writing about Bernard MacLaverty’s novel Grace Notes, which features in a chapter of my book Getting to Good Friday: Literature and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland. A novel about a female composer struggling with depression after the birth of her child does not, on the face of it, seem to have much to do with war or peace in Northern Ireland.

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