Jackie McGlone

BERNARD MACLAVERTY is recalling his mother explaining to him when he was a child at home in Belfast how to tell whether a wee bird was dead. He cups his hand, gently weighing a featherweight, invisible body. This, he reveals, is how he knows when he begins a new work whether he is writing a short story or a novel.

“It’s the weight of it,” says the silvery-haired 74-year-old in his soft, compelling brogue. The dead bird was always light – so he is aware instinctively that he is embarking on one or other literary form. He weighs the words. It is typical of one of the greatest living Irish writers that he should choose to turn the fall of a sparrow, say, into a tender metaphor.

It’s also a reminder of a scene in his magnificent, much-anticipated new novel, Midwinter Break, when Stella, on the long weekend in Amsterdam, which gives the book its title, with her husband Gerry, climbs high above the city, watching birds fly over the rooftops. She thinks of Bede’s description of life as a sparrow flying through a banqueting hall from darkness to darkness: “The fire, the food, the finite... And the older you get the quicker it gets.”

Gerry, a retired architect, remembers being at a topping-out ceremony on another rooftop, however, watching another flock of birds and another skyline – the Belfast Hills on July 21, 1972 – when the Provisional IRA exploded more than 20 bombs, killing nine people and injuring 130.

“Bloody Friday as it became known,” sighs Belfast-born MacLaverty, who was also on a rooftop that day watching birds fly around, then staring down at the black smoke rising above the city laid out before him and his colleagues, afraid, like Gerry, to return to ground level. There is a deeply personal sadness to MacLaverty’s memories of that Friday but he asks me not to write about it.

Glasgow-based since moving to Scotland with his family in 1975 to teach and then become a full-time writer, he chooses instead to write about sectarian atrocities in a more meaningful, more powerful way in fiction. The cruelty and trauma of Bloody Friday have indelibly scarred Stella and Gerry’s lives, although we discover only how profoundly late in the novel as the couple, both in their seventies, look back on a long marriage, their courtship and schooldays, as well as the Troubles.

Acts of violence and murderous bigotry have continued to bleed into much of MacLaverty’s work, although he insists he has never set out to write politically. Nonetheless, he admits: “You are right, Northern Ireland and its troubles are always with me. At least they’ve stopped the killings. The hatred hasn’t gone away. Both sides still hate each other with an intensity. If they can hate but control themselves and not slay each other, then that’s cause for quiet optimism.” But he does have Gerry, who drinks far too much whiskey, say, “Isn’t it strange that Ireland’s biggest export is a lesson in how to enjoy yourself. That and the car bomb.”

Midwinter Break is the award-winning, Booker Prize-nominated MacLaverty’s first novel for 16 years. He has been writing for 40 years and has produced five collections of Chekhovian short stories. From his brilliant first novel, Lamb (1980) to the slaughter of Cal (1983) – both books were memorably filmed, the latter starring Helen Mirren and John Lynch – to a decade of writing short stories, MacLaverty returned with his superb novel, Grace Notes (1997), which won the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award and was Booker shortlisted.

His last novel, The Anatomy School (2001), in which his protagonist, Martin Brennan, a Catholic grammar schoolboy, grows up in 1960s Belfast then works as a laboratory technician in a university department during the Troubles in the 1970s, mirrors MacLaverty’s own life. Martin becomes a photographer who will “see things as they are.” Which, of course, MacLaverty does, too, with his fiction, screenplays and film direction – he won a BAFTA from BBC Scotland for Bye-Child, his adaptation of a poem by his friend Seamus Heaney.

In 2006 he published another collection of stories, Matters of Life & Death, but it’s been a long wait for another novel. Was it worth it? Colm Toibin believes Midwinter Break is “a novel of great ambition by an artist at the height of his powers,” while Anne Enwright notes: “MacLaverty is a sweetly astute writer, a master of fine detail... Midwinter Break shows us how ordinary and immense love can be.”

Reviewers have been similarly admiring, ranging from “quietly brilliant” to comparisons with Seamus Heaney, who “recorded Ulster’s tribal butchery in great poetry. MacLaverty does so in great fiction.”

So, 16 years! What kept you, I ask MacLaverty as we drink tea in a sunny, comfortable, book-and-CD-lined room in the spacious flat in Glasgow’s west end, where he and his wife, Madeline, to whom he has been married for half a century, raised their two sons and two daughters.

He responds with a hearty laugh. “What kept me was living. There have been various bits of writing and various bits of life. It is the stage of my life when grandchildren come along. Midwinter Break is dedicated to all of them. Our four have produced eight between them – we’re all in the same postcode. So visits go on all the time and if you have a babysitter as good as Madeline, she is much employed. Yesterday, we had the youngest, the wee two-and-a-half-year-old boy, and it was a total pleasure. So there’s that over the last 15 years – and I did write a book of short stories, Matters of Life & Death. I also put together Collected Stories and wrote an introduction to that.”

Was he tempted to rewrite early work? No, he replies, quoting the great Sean O’Faolain who when putting together his life’s work, was asked the same question. “He said, no, because it was the work of a younger man in his twenties. The things I changed or corrected were mistakes. There’s a grammatical thing in the first story that I still don’t get right – they were conjugating verbs or ... Well, I still don’t know whether you conjugate verbs or nouns. Somebody pointed it out, saying, ‘That’s wrong!’ So I went back and changed it. There were other clumsinesses, internal rhymes that lost emphasis, awkwardnesses, those sorts of things but I didn’t rewrite and it is lovely to have all the stories in one collection.

“But there have been other projects: a libretto for Scottish Opera, a stint as a classical music DJ for Radio Scotland, the movie script for Robin Jenkins’s The Cone Gatherers [which had to be abandoned after five years when the producer died]. I haven’t been lounging about!”

Despite that metaphorical cupping of the hand to take the measure of his fictions, however, I tell him that I believe the seeds of Midwinter Break (he and Madeline took a midwinter break in Amsterdam in 2001 and he shows me diary notes he kept that he knew might become a fiction) were sown in a story, At the Beach, in his 1994 collection, Walking the Dog. To my delight, he agrees.

In that story, a woman on holiday in Majorca with her alcoholic husband goes for a walk alone during siesta. In the sunshine outside a church, time telescopes and she recalls memories of school, her first kiss and other events in her life. “All these memories whoosh past her but all the time she stays constant as the same person,” he says. “The story begins with the husband then slides into the woman’s point of view and I felt it was successful when it was inside the woman’s head.

“When I finished it, I thought,‘Well, I’m on female railway tracks here.’ I remember thinking I must write something from a female point of view. That led to Grace Notes. Then I thought it might be interesting to examine both the male and female point of view so The Anatomy School was an attempt to do that. I have done this again in Midwinter Break and I hope it works. But to quote another writer, E M Forster, he said everybody writes the same book over and over again. Perhaps that’s what I do.”

Few male writers, with the possible exception of another Irish novelist, Brian Moore, have so successfully explored the female psyche. How does MacLaverty do this with such sensitivity? He has been married to Madeline for decades, he has daughters and he and his late, younger brother grew up in a houseful of women – “women of great strength!” His father, a commercial artist, whom he holds in the highest esteem, died when MacLaverty was 12. He recalls listening to the soft voices of his mother, grandmother and a kindness of aunts and great-aunts, forever weaving narratives like so many skeins of wool fashioned from words.

It was most pleasurable, he once told me, when he was convalescing from a serious illness at the age of eight or nine. There was nothing like lying downstairs, blanketed on the sofa, in front of a flickering coal fire, listening to the rise and fall of the old ones’ voices in the fuzzy warmth, drifting in and out of sleep.

“Mention of Brian Moore, a writer I admire tremendously, reminds me that his brother was my doctor,” he says. “The Moores and I went to the same school – I was about ten or 15 years after Brian. His brother Seamus was a GP in Belfast, a very good doctor. When I became seriously ill with some kind of weird rheumatic fever of the bowel, he doctored and nursed me through that. People said that I was going to die, so I’m eternally grateful to the Moore family for being saved by them and then influenced – well, maybe not influenced, but I always feel with a Brian Moore [novel] at the end of the first page, I am in safe hands.

“I hope readers feel comfortable with my work. Only this morning I was reading Frank O’Connor on the short story, which he says is allied to loneliness, then he said every story needs development, drama and exposition. Every story has those three things. I hope that’s the case with Midwinter Break, I felt that looking at a relationship that has gone on for a long time and for it to be tested would be an interesting experience. Also the idea of exile intrigues me. Madeline and I left Northern Ireland in 1975. As do Stella and Gerry in Midwinter Break.

“I wanted to put together that notion of exile with the current awful situation of people fleeing from wars. And I wanted to write about love and life and death and religion.”

Will we have to wait another 16 years for the next novel? He laughs loudly. “Wait and see!” he exclaims, carefully weighing his words.

Midwinter Break, by Bernard MacLaverty (Jonathan Cape, ÂŁ14.99). Bernard MacLaverty will be at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on Wednesday August 16.