![]() Yet Catherine's memories are described in absorbing detail (''the sound of her mother's hand husking around in the tea caddy - a hollow scuffling - had stayed with her''), transforming what could feel ponderous into something lyrical and hypnotic. Nothing much happens on the surface of this elegiac novel, which is imbued with a continual theme of estrangement. On Islay, a remote island off the coast of Scotland, she becomes enmeshed in a troubled love affair made murkier still by alcoholism and depression, finding solace only in the music she composes - fragments of a larger, overtly spiritual orchestral work. ![]() ![]() At issue are the loyalties of Catherine McKenna, who as a young composer finds a clarity of voice that is otherwise missing in her stifling roles as daughter, girlfriend and mother. ![]() These evocations of the drums are a framing device for the main narrative of Bernard MacLaverty's new novel, but, as in his previous one, ''Cal,'' the region's political troubles serve mostly as a metaphor for the intense familial struggles that beset his characters. But his daughter finds herself ''thrilled by the sound'' - and later composes a symphony that emphasizes their thunderous cacophony. ''On the Twelfth they thump them so hard and so long they bleed their wrists,'' a Roman Catholic father mutters bitterly of the enormous drums beaten during the Protestant marching season in Northern Ireland. ![]()
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