There’s the Grandmaster in his collection Walking the Dog, described – in a curiously Irish way – as ‘leaning down confidently, pointing out the sins, advising for the future’. Lines from his short stories fizzle in the memory years after we read them. Normally it’s just a cop-out, borrowing the sonorous qualities of one art-form to make up for the artistic failings of another.īernard Mac Laverty’s strength has always been his linguistic focus on minutiae, his depiction of the parochial through luminescent language. Films – the Helfgott biopic or Jane Campion’s truly abysmal The Piano – acquire gravitas by replacing all shades of grey with the stern black and white of the keys. Clichéd images of the musician as mute genius or emotional pygmy crop up everywhere, and bad scripts are bailed out by sonorous soundtracks. Now, though, with sledgehammer subtlety and schmaltz, music, the piano in particular, tends to be invoked for all the synaesthetic reverberations it can offer. The musical metaphors of Romanticism are steeped in linguistic paralysis: as in Shelley, where music ‘vibrates in the memory’ only when ‘soft voices die’. Spoken language follows in music’s wake, verbalisation a poor second best. The speechless quality of music is much envied and imitated.
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