That and the car bomb”), but remains loyal to its whiskey. Gerry is bitterly scornful about the country of his birth (“Isn’t it strange that Ireland’s biggest export is a lesson in how to enjoy yourself. Gerry and Stella escaped Northern Ireland decades ago by moving, like MacLaverty, to Scotland, but over the course of the novel their memories circle back to a life-changing act of violence there. Midwinter Break reads as both a summation of his themes and a remarkable late flowering.
In 40 years of short stories and four previous novels, MacLaverty has written often about the distance between couples: about men floored by alcohol, and women examining their faith about religious prejudice in Northern Ireland, the violence of the Troubles and the stranglehold of the Catholic church. That can’t be it, can it? There’s 10 or 20 years left over, as it were” – Gerry is pouring all his mental resources into surreptitious schemes to top up the “traveller’s friend” he bought in Duty Free.Ĭlimbing above Amsterdam, ‘Stella gains a whole new cosmic perspective’. While Stella is wondering what to do with her life – “The family is raised – the work’s done.
It demonstrates, too, how alcohol can blot out every other concern. This unflinching attention to the textural detail of minute-by-minute existence slowly builds into a profound exploration of the biggest themes in both public and private life: faith, politics and fanaticism love and loneliness joint compromise and individual purpose. With acute, understated tenderness, he charts the medical palaver and hyper-awareness of the body’s fragility that come with age: the noisily popping blister packs of pills the “blood-red winter trees” Gerry sees as he stares into his own bleary eyes the toilet seat slightly lower than at home, meaning he “panicked in the last few millimetres of his descent”.
It is extraordinary how his blunt, declarative sentences translate the fiddly minutiae of life – the pleated paper from a bar of hotel soap, the cellophane packaging round a pair of pyjamas – into utterly gripping prose. MacLaverty takes us from the perspective of one to the other with great efficiency and delicacy as they wait for a taxi to the airport, pass round the Werther’s Originals in the departure lounge, arrange their Amsterdam hotel room into a temporary home.
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