ABSTRACT
In the stories and novels of Bernard Mac Laverty,1 the city-most often Belfast, but occasionally other urban centers such as London-is a powerful presence, as integral to his works as his characters, and at times even more important in being the single strongest motivator of Mac Laverty’s protagonists and plots. From the direct simplicity of “Father and Son,” or the even earlier “St. Paul Could Hit the Nail on the Head,” to his most highly developed writing like the acclaimed Cal, the city, with its violence and alienation, shapes Mac Laverty’s fictive vision, transforming it into what to many is “an eloquent plea for tolerance, good faith, and compassion-the virtues of an old-fashioned liberal,”2
and to others “a primal gloom from which some sort of bright oblivion seems the only escape.”3
