FICTION/ Molly Fox's BirthdayBy Deirdre Madden Faber, 221pp. £12.99
A classic novel structure is to begin with a quiet description and develop increasing intensity towards a climactic end. Deirdre Madden's work tends to move in the opposite direction. Like Ian McEwan, she often starts with an event which does have an element of the extraordinary to it, and works to a conclusion which is a triumph of the ordinary. In this way she is the least sensationalist of writers; the revelation that emerges is often unportentous. And yet there is no doubting that what she writes about is important, in human terms: for example the revelations of Cate/Kate in One By One in the Darknessin the end amount to no more than a readiness to resume her life. Molly Fox says what we have to do with life is to live it.
The new book begins with a dream (a device previously used with great success by Madden). It is narrated by an intriguingly disconcerting storyteller, a playwright with writer's block. Her attitude to the hero, the brilliant actor Molly Fox, is a cunningly portrayed mixture of a veneration that she emphasises and an envy of which she is oblivious. It is significant that her first - maybe only - successful play, Summer With Lucy(we never learn the narrator's name though we are in her presence on every page), was inspired by resentment at a passing slight from the teenage daughter of an employer. The narrator craves friendship and keeps claiming it; but it is always questionable whether that is quite the mainspring of her relationships. Molly Fox's birthday is the summer solstice, the 21st of June. It is a day that Molly Fox herself - in marked contrast to the solipsistic narrator - doesn't want noted, any more than her age (which may be 38 or 40: we don't know who to disbelieve). This evasion is not the product of vanity, but of an actorly self-abnegation, the heroic quality here.
But self-abnegation is not unconditionally good. The issue is reality and the possibility (or desirability) of escape from it. The other central character in the book, as successful in his profession as Molly Fox is in hers, is the art historian and television pundit, Andrew. He has escaped into art from his Northern Irish Protestant background, burying his social definition (including his brother Billy's loyalism) with his accent, after "he took himself off to England, to begin a PhD on Mantegna, at Cambridge". The result is he becomes nobody, for all the fondness with which he is regarded. "Poor Andrew!" is twice the response of women that he is in love with. In a striking series of reversals, people who seem disadvantaged here (like Molly Fox's troubled brother Fergus, or Andrew's terrorist brother) are at least partially recuperated, while the apparent successes lose personal definition, like the Cheshire cat.
Behind it all is the theatrical question memorably raised in Seamus Heaney's poem The Real Names: are actors, and television presenters, more themselves when they are in their roles, or in their own lives?
By the end of this book, the playwright-narrator has so much lost confidence in her ability to write a play - to create an action that will capture this reality (the word keeps recurring here) - that she says "Maybe I'll do something completely different, something I've never done before. Maybe I'll write a novel".
There are two highly productive images here for the evaluation of reality. The first is voice, a traditional index of credibility (it is significant that loss of accent in Andrew meant loss of personality). There is a wider social context of integrity here, delicately as Madden handles it: the difficulty of the Irish social structure in fitting into the modern, cosmopolitan world without falling prey to affectation and snobbery (both terms are explicitly raised). Apart from Molly Fox, the only unconditionally positive figure is a third significant brother, the narrator's eldest brother, Tom, who is a Catholic priest. In a way, he is a third disadvantaged brother whose presentation transcends the stereotype.
The second crucial image is the fact that the narrator is living in Molly Fox's house, so she is constantly measured against her. Aisling in Madden's Remembering Light and Stonehas a dream of trying to escape from her own skin; the narrator here lives in someone else's house, and by the end she wants to escape her definition as playwright. She insists throughout that she is very successful in that profession; we increasingly come to suspect that she is not. Only one of her plays - Summer With Lucy- is ever named. Her current thought for a play - about a man carrying a hare that she comes across by chance - sounds unpromising. Towards the end, she says she is "fed up" (a significantly inelegant phrase in such a style-conscious writer as Madden) "with opening the door to people who were crestfallen to find me on the other side of it".
So by the end it is clear that this is not, after all, a deluded Nabokovian narrator, who undermines herself by lack of awareness of her own motivation. She knows what she is like; she is just disappointed to be herself. And what the reader is left marvelling at, finally, is a novelist who is at once so shrewd and knowing an observer of human frailty, and yet maintains so kindly an understanding of it.
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Bernard O'Donoghue's Selected Poems were published by Faber this year
Deirdre Madden will be reading, with the writer Yiyun Li, at 1.10pm next Saturday (Aug 9) in St Canice's Cathedral, Kilkenny, during the Kilkenny Arts Festival. www.kilkennyarts.ie