BERNARD MacLaverty sits in the bar of the Montrose Hotel, playing for time.

There's a faint sense of a tug-of-war between us, as he makes a good- humoured attempt to subvert the formality of the interview procedure, bantering with the photographer, telling anecdotes and asking a disarming number of questions. Reluctantly, he gets down to business.

Perhaps it was his years of experience as a teacher that made him seem a lot more comfortable the last time I saw him, at the Foyle Film Festival in Deriy. He was explaining to a group of keenly attentive schoolchildren the difference between writing for the page and the screen, and illustrated his talk with excerpts from the films Cal and Lamb, both adapted by him from his award- winning novels of the same titles. His new book, Grace Notes, is his first novel since Cal, although there have been two collections of short stories (The Great Profundo and Walking The Dog) in the 14 years in between.

"The transition from stories to a novel was something that happened without any great moment of definition," he says. "Some of the stories were becoming quite long and two of them were about the same character, a woman, at different points in her life. I gradually began to expand these, bringing them under the general umbrella of music and religion."

The loss of a strong Catholic faith and rediscovery of a sense of mystery and transcendence through music; the profound joy of childbirth; the debilitating burden of depression; regrets for estranged family relationships:

Grace Notes quietly traces the emotional journey of a young Northern Irish woman called Catherine McKenna, who is a composer and music teacher. There is an intensity and attentiveness to the details of everyday life that are characteristic of MacLaverty's work, as well as a reluctance to dramatise or aggrandise.

The novel opens with Catherine's return from Glasgow to her native town, near Belfast, for the funeral of her father whom she has not seen for a few years. Memories of her childhood jostle with her reactions to being back in the small house over a pub, where she grew Lip.

While the political landscape of the North is delineated clearly, with its sectarian allegiances and immutable codes, these form part of the background of the characters' lives rather than their central preoccupation. "It is yet another hurdle facing them," MacLaverty says, with violence from both sides putting blockages in their paths. The awareness of this violence is part of the web of Catherine's creative life, and brings seriousness into it.

The second half of the novel is set in the recent past, flashing back to the period Catherine spent on the island of Islay, off the Scottish coast, where MacLaverty and his family lived for many years. It chronicles her brief, unhappy relationship with the father of her child, her first, difficult, year of motherhood, her partner's decline into violent drunkenness and her decision to leave him which coincided with the reawakening of her ability to write music.

"I really wanted to get the female voice right," MacLaverty says. "Of course I have picked up a lot of it subconsciously. The women of my childhood in Belfast were extraordinarily strong. "My earlier work was full of fathers and sons, but this one is more concerned with the chain of womanhood, from daughter to daughter, and the central life-event of birth, which is in the gift of women. But it's not a simple gift; there's a lot of pain and awfulness around it, and I wanted to get this across.

The gift of musical corn position is the source of Catherine's identity and her inner strength, and, when it fails her, the focus of her despair. Her inability to hear music in her head any longer, after the birth of her baby, is analogous to a chronic writing block, and it is clear that the novel is concerned with the creative process itself, any creative act, regardless of the medium. MacLaverty is reluctant to make a causal link between Catherine's frustrated creativity and her depression, and insists on the reality, prevalence and severity of post natal depression, this spiral of despair that hits her out of the blue".

He is obviously familiar with black periods himself, with Catherine's weary question: "what was the point in going on if every waking was to be this plunge into panic" - and with writing blocks.

"There is a constant difficulty, yes. Looking back at old diaries, I see that the difficulty is part of the process of writing. It is a battle. Once when I was thinking 'what can be worse than a writer who can't write?" I thought about Beethoven, and then came up with a story about a blind painter. In effect, I wrote a story about not being able to write."

Although MacLaverty gave up teaching a number of years ago to devote himself to writing, there are periods when he actually writes very little. A stern notice in his study serves as an admonition:

"Planning is not writing; thinking is nor writing; only writing is writing". He is puritanical about reading, unless he has earned it as a reward. "It's a pleasurable activity that I can't engage in unless I have been writing." When he does permit himself, he enjoys writers such as James Kelman and Alasdair Gray, both from his adopted home of Glasgow, described by Catherine in the novel as "like Belfast without the killing".

AS in many of his short stories, particularly those in A Time To Dance,

MacLaverty's observation of character in Grace Notes is compassionate and sensitive. While his tone remains low-key, his styled sparse and clipped, with a cultivated bareness that mirrors the banality of ordinary life, these familiar qualities have now been injected with a linguistic playfulness, an attempt to render into words and images the experience of listening to music. "I've tried in the instrumentation of the final scene, to create an aural identikit picture of Catherine's music," MacLaverty says.

Sometimes this seems a little strained and sits awkwardly with the more natural interior monologue of Catherine, but when it works there is a buoyant, celebratory energy in the writing, which reflects Catherine's feelings about the numinous qualities of music.

"I can see music as the grace of God ... a way of praying," an elderly composer in Kiev tells her, and we sense that is true for her also. By composing a new Latin Mass, she is trying to revisit the religious tradition of her childhood, but take from it only what she needs. In the composition of her symphony, with which the novel closes, she uses the rhythm of the Lambeg drum, now drained of its cultural and political resonances, to transcend sectarianism momentarily.

"Catherine writes difficult music, full of intensity and wonderful, interesting sounds. But it is not wilfully, obscurely difficult."

Bernard MacLaverty laughs, suddenly realising that he is talking about music that does not exist. Yet, it the pattern of screen adaptation of his novels continues, a composer might soon have the daunting task of translating those words into notes.