The matter of home is threaded through all of Deirdre Madden’s novels. Her characters reflect on what home can mean, consider how the security of home can be destroyed and rebuilt, explore symbols of home and belonging.
In Hidden Symptoms (1986), Madden’s first novel, the protagonist Theresa is aware that violence — in the form of her brother Francis’s death in a sectarian attack — has dealt a fundamental blow to her sense of belonging. In One by One in the Darkness (1996), the domestic peace of a kitchen is torn apart by murder; and in Time Present and Time Past (2013), the protagonist Fintan is moved by fear to halt an ordinary family dinner for a moment, to capture the experience of familial togetherness before it vanishes. “Sometimes,” we are told, Fintan “feels he can almost hear time rushing past him; it is like a kind of unholy wind”.
The essays gathered in this exemplary and fascinating collection analyse this and many other themes woven through Deirdre Madden’s work — and the collection’s editor notes that such a study is overdue, drawing attention to the “intricacy and subtlety of [Madden’s] novels and the searching philosophical inquiries that they instigate”, but also to the relative dearth of sustained critical attention her writing has hitherto received.
As Frank McGuinness writes in his powerful preface to this collection, Madden asks us to look at the rents in the fabric of life and to ‘know, as she knows, that some things can never be repaired’
As several of the essays in the collection observe, Madden’s work returns again and again to the impact of trauma on individuals and societies and across generations. It also questions the coherence of our present culture of commemoration, by demonstrating the many ways it falls short of providing a coherent ethics that might bring healing.
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Fintan’s fear of the passage of time, meanwhile, indicates a connection to another theme running through Madden’s writing: that of the ability — sometimes — of memory to remake the past. But not always: Fintan “had wanted to keep the moment, to preserve it, and even by the strangeness of his request make of it something that they might all remember”; for even memory itself can be stiffened by events, unable to develop and heal. As Frank McGuinness writes in his powerful preface to this collection, Madden asks us to look at the rents in the fabric of life and to “know, as she knows, that some things can never be repaired”.
