There is an incisive exchange about history and collective memory in Bernard MacLaverty's Cal, a novel (and, later, film) set during the Troubles complete with Orange Lodge parades, deadly ambushes and the firebombing of Catholic homes. Over his career, MacLaverty has written several novels and short stories portraying in often excruciating detail the emotional toll of living through such violence, with Cal being, arguably, the most poignant. When discussing the novel, critics often point to similarities between the dilemma of its main characters and that of Shakespeare's “star-crossed” lovers Romeo and Juliet, as its protagonist Cal McCrystal (McCluskey in later printings), an unemployed, working-class Catholic, falls in love with Marcella Morton, the young widow of a Protestant policeman in whose murder Cal was complicit. In this “love across the barricades” story, as in Shakespeare's play, a sense of tragic foreboding is occasionally relieved by glimmers of possibility—for example, when Cal finds fulfilling work on the Morton family farm and makes a new home there to be near Marcella. His days of living on the dole may be over, and his new job hints at a better future. Unlike the protagonists of Romeo and Juliet whose fates are tied to family lineages and histories they cannot alter, Cal seems convinced that he possesses the agency to escape his connection to sectarian violence. Sadly, in the novel's closing scene, his arrest and imminent punishment destroy any possibility of a future with Marcella. But the question remains unanswered, to recall Haines's observation in James Joyce's Ulysses, of how “history is to blame” for Cal's fate. Perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps historical memory and the at times nefarious uses to which history is put are the culprits (Figure 6).

Unlike Cal, MacLaverty's later novel Grace Notes (1997) develops tensions between memory and aspiration that lead to a happier, even refulgent conclusion. The novel begins with a fledgling composer, Catherine McKenna, returning to Northern Ireland from Scotland to attend her father's funeral. At the cemetery where he is interred, she passes the grave of a boy she once knew who “gave his life for Ireland,” as an inscription beneath his name on his headstone clarifies. Reading the epitaph, Catherine wonders what musical composition might best represent the militant nationalism for which her former classmate sacrificed his life.