AS she lies in bed recalling scenes from her childhood, Helen, one of the characters in Deirdre Madden's fifth novel, One by One in the Darkness (Faber, £14.99 in UK), realises she "could see herself as though she were looking down on her own bed, where she was curled up, drowsing, waiting for sleep, and feeling safe, so safe and happy, not knowing that when she was a woman, it would break her heart to remember this".
The power of memory dominates this novel. All the characters bare trapped at varying levels by their own set of images, incidents, lost opportunities and lives which have become quiet ordeals. Three grown sisters are brought together at the family home where their widowed mother still lives with the youngest girl. The action takes place over a week, and the narrative revolves around an informal, sudden and utterly unconvincing family reunion, caused by the return home of the sister who works in London.
Something terrifying or shameful, possibly both, has brought Cate formerly Kate the sophisticate with "wonderful clothes", back to rural Northern Ireland. Although Madden intends it as a mystery, it is obvious exactly what is going on. In many ways this plot device is a weakness, and while it helps establish the awkward intimacy of people who are close to each other yet distant, and tells us something about them and their narrow view of life, it makes for clumsy writing. Madden has specialised in uncertainty to such an extent that it has now become a weakness. She is always a careful writer, but her prose is becoming increasingly laboured and flat.
No character in a Madden novel has ever experienced true intimacy. This appears set to continue. Cate wants to explain something to her sister, but, and this is typical of a Madden character, she "didn't know how to go about it without revealing more than she wished". This most introspective of novelists seems at ease only when working the first person voice, as in Remembering Light and Stone (1992).
It is significant that in that novel, Aisling, the narrator, admits to herself "I'm not a person who has much talent for happiness." In Nothing Is Black (1994), Nuala concedes "I'm unhappy because I don't know how to live." The characters in the new novel also exist rather than live as for happiness, it's a word they can probably only spell.
Unhappiness and a lack of personal fulfillment are Madden's artistic mantra. One By One in the Darkness, a weaker variation of her previous novel, is not easy to read not that any of her books have proved comfortable. But what was a preoccupation is now becoming a stylistic and thematic limitation.
Demanding of her reader, and herself she is an introspective, intense writer far more concerned with the interior world of her characters than with conventional narrative. Although daily rituals and routines have always featured in her work, her characters appear incapable of conversation The dialogue in this novel, aside from early flashes of local dialect from Uncle Peter, falls on the ear lifelessly.
Nothing Is Black takes place in Donegal, well removed from the largely Italian setting of Remembering Light and Stone, this new book returns Madden to the tragic recent history of Northern Ireland of an earlier novel, Hidden Symptoms (1988). Yet that book, with its underlying traditional themes such as sexual and religious guilt and the examination of mother/ daughter relations, possesses a depth curiously absent from her new work. This time her observations of the Northern conflict are predictable, almost exhausted.
Like a sympathetic if weary listener, Madden moves from one character's thoughts to those of another equally preoccupied, equally dissatisfied individual in a circle of silent suffering. The characters are interchangeable at best, two dimensional at worst. When asked if she regrets having chosen to stay on at her old school as a teacher, Sally, the youngest, sister. "It was all right, until Daddy died ... Now, I want out again. If it wasn't for Mammy, I'd leave tomorrow. I can't stand being in Northern Ireland, all that guff about it being a great wee place, and the people being so friendly, I feel ashamed for having gone along with all that other people being killed the way Daddy was, and one of the ones saying, there is more to Northern Ireland than shooting and bombing."
Elsewhere, Helen, the profoundly unhappy solicitor who early on in the novel realises "that out of her whole family, she, the only bone whose life was supposedly dedicated to the administration of justice, was the only one who didn't believe in it as a spiritual fact", goes to visit the house her mother stayed at during her year as a teacher before she married she wonders, looking at a grim view of "rows and rows" of chimney pots and damp roofs, how her mother had lived there, "when she thought of the fields, the wide sky and the light at home".
From novel to novel, Madden's characters continue cautiously circling each other. While the sisters in this book all enjoyed a happy childhood, their adult lives are grimly unfulfilled. It is as if life stopped at childhood what follows is merely an endurance test of daily routine peppered by flashback memories.
There are moments throughout One by One in the Darkness when Madden succeeds in capturing a sense of real pain. Writing about the ordinary and about small lives is never easy. Anita Brookner chronicles the mundane in narratives of quiet, intuitive brilliance Deirdre Madden is as concerned as Brookner with the relentlessness of monotone lives more endured than experienced, yet she lacks the English writer's immaculate deftness of touch, which is beyond her narrow range. Madden's failure in this disappointing, powerfully intelligent, disciplined novel lies in too repressive a control rather than its lack.
