I met Bernard MacLaverty when he was the guest of honour at a literary festival in Kikinda, Serbia, in the spring of 2011. I found him kindly and genial, without a trace of literary hauteur. Most writers, in my experience, are decent sorts; though martinets and snobs exist, generally the qualities of the person inform the qualities of the writing. Reading MacLaverty, you are in the company of a decent human who is giving of the best of himself. I have been moved by all of his novels and many of his short stories, even as I’ve taken aesthetic pleasure in his shrewd, limpid style. “His prose is invisible,” wrote one critic for The Observer, “free of tricks, as though it was your own thoughts.” ‘My Dear Palestrina’ is the story of Danny, a musically gifted boy from a working-class family who is sent to have piano lessons with Miss Schwartz, a Jewish Polish refugee living in 1950s Ulster. Miss Schwartz is one culturally peripheral character in this society; a socialist blacksmith whom Danny befriends is another. The outsider outlooks of these misfits – one living for music, the other for social justice – begin to set Danny on a path to alienation from his home culture and its assumptions. He is drawn to Miss Schwartz and her sensibility, her valiant yet failing efforts to keep despair and, later, disease from annihilating her. At the same time, the religious and political tensions that will shortly to the Troubles are bubbling under the surface. Can music and art protect us from the pain of exile, or shield us from our self-destructive urges? This is a sad and painful coming-of-age story that packs a novel’s worth of material and themes into thirty pages. MacLaverty himself adapted it for a 1980 television play – such are the riches it contains.
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4, 1980. First published in A Time to Dance by Bernard MacLaverty, Jonathan Cape, London, 1982
A Personal Anthology 