The Birds of the Innocent Wood by Deirdre Madden – #NovNov Day 8

Thank you for all the birthday good wishes for yesterday – Colin and I had a lovely time, successfully escaping an escape room with some friends, then seeing fireworks. There are always handy fireworks displays near our birthday, courtesy of Guy Fawkes Night.

Today I was back on my novellas in November challenge, with Deirdre Madden’s second novel, The Birds of the Innocent Wood from 1988, when she was only 28. It starts at quite a pace – rattling through the tragedy of Jane’s childhood, with both parents dying in a house fire and being sent to a convent. We see that she thrives on making others react emotionally to her tale of woe – and it’s something she tries on James, the man she starts dating and whom she will marry.

She had a deep contempt for all those who had known from birth what it was to be loved. She did not believe that they could ever know how strange and wonderful it was to watch another person gradually fall in love with them. She certainly watched James, and watched him with a steady fascination, as a naturalist might watch a butterfly uncrumple itself from a chrysalis, or wiltingly die in a killing jar. She would always make a point of arriving early for their meetings, so that she could conceal herself at a distance and covertly watch him arrive and then pace the street disconsolately, looking at his watch, as he waited for her. Then she would leave her hiding place and approach him, her eye steadily fixed on his, so that she would not miss the moment when he caught sight of her. Because to see that moment was the whole point of the exercise: to see his face change, to see the relief and the tenderness and the love with which the mere sight of her filled him was the highlight of the entire evening. It made her feel dizzy with power.

It did all feel a bit dizzying at the beginning, to whip through so much plot so quickly. I feel like Madden might space it out more, as a more mature writer. But things settle a bit once it’s established that she is in an unsure and discontented marriage to James – living in remote countryside, with the only neighbour being a woman oddly like Jane, with whom she has an instant and lasting antipathy.

And then chapters begin to alternate – half is Jane’s young married life, and the other half are adult twin sisters Sarah and Catherine. They are Jane’s daughters – we learn early that Jane has died, though don’t know how. Madden does well at delineating the twin sisters – what they have in common and what they don’t. And something they do have in common is a hidden secret.

This is the first of my Novellas in November project that I think would have been better if I hadn’t read it one day. Perhaps because it covers so much time, perhaps because her writing is gentle and subtle, The Birds of the Innocent Wood is really a novella to linger over. I wish I’d spent a bit more time in the eerily described landscape, inhabiting these awkward, haunted lives.

I really love Madden’s Molly Fox’s Birthday. This earlier novella is evidently not as mature – the writing is very good, but doesn’t have the same piercing precision. She does manage to weave images of birds well through the novella, deliberately but not disruptively. On its own, The Birds of the Innocent Wood is very good – it’s only because I have read her later work that I see the ingredients are there for the extraordinary novelist she will become.

Nothing is Black by Deirdre Madden

I absolutely loved Molly Fox’s Birthday a year or so ago, and so over Christmas I thought I’d treat myself to one of the other Deirdre Madden novels that I’d since been stockpiling. I went on Twitter for advice, but nobody seemed to have read the ones I had – so I picked the shortest one: Nothing is Black from 1994.

Claire lives in a remote coastal area of County Donegal. I have to admit that, until now, I hadn’t realised that Ireland had a north coast – but turns out that Northern Ireland is really only the north-east of the island. You probably all knew that. She lives in a stark and sparsely populated area, living an almost perversely minimalist lifestyle – only the barest, most functional furniture; few local friends; few efforts to stay connected with her past. She’s an artist, and practices each morning by making a quick watercolour sketch of the ever-changing landscape outside the window of her ugly, practical house.

Rather reluctantly, she lets her cousin Nuala come to stay. She lives in Dublin, but it might as well be a thousand miles away. This is the idea of Nuala’s husband. Neither of them are particularly enthusiastic about the idea – which Nuala combats with talking, and Claire with silence.

They drove out along the coast road. Claire would have admitted that the place where she had chosen to live was bleak, but she thought that it had its own magnificence too. It certainly didn’t have the lushness and prettiness people often expected to find in the countryside. To appreciate this area properly required a certain way of seeing things. Because of the wind coming in off the Atlantic, it was never static. Claire liked that about it, and she liked the colours, not bright, but often vivid, with the contrasts of the low, soft plants against stone.

This isn’t an ‘Enchanted April’ type of novel, where unlikely companions become firm friends. But Madden expertly takes us through the paths and wounds that have led to these two women’s unhappy circumstances. Nuala has started shoplifting. Claire has deliberately isolated herself. But these are only the outer signs of much deeper matters – and, even in a very short novel, Madden finds space to gently develop them.

Do you ever get that ‘difficult second novel’ feeling with an author you love, even if isn’t actually their second novel? This was Madden’s fourth, and actually written fourteen years before Molly Fox’s Birthday – but I suppose I was no longer surprised that she was such a wonderfully perceptive writer. Which is to say, Nothing is Black is beautifully, poetically, sensitively written – but at this point I’d have been surprised if it weren’t.

Throughout, Claire’s painterly mindset influences the narrative. Just as the playwright in Molly Fox’s Birthday was always thinking of words and staging, even if this only came through to the surface of the narrative in the subtlest ways, so colour and form threads through everything in Nothing is Black. It’s done so cleverly and naturally – it matches the world and characters that Madden has created, and their preoccupations and concerns. Unusually for me, I think this could have been longer. I suppose, because she has created fully realised people and is showing us their existence, rather than a particular set of plot points they go through, there is no end to the interesting things she can tell us about them.

Molly Fox’s Birthday by Deirdre Madden

I’ll be honest, I could happily have gone my whole life without visiting Bradford. With apologies to anybody who lives there, it’s not exactly on a ‘must see’ tourist list of the UK. But it did have the nearest football team to our holiday cottage when my brother and I recently stayed in Yorkshire, and apparently going and seeing twenty-two men try to get a sphere from one place to another place is a vital part of a holiday. Naturally I wouldn’t dream of going to a football match, so that left me with a couple of hours to kill in Bradford.

I did pop into the beautiful (but not especially well-stocked) Waterstones, but most of my time was spent with a book in Caffe Nero – specifically the novel Molly Fox’s Birthday (2008) by Deirdre Madden. It was published in 2008, I bought it in 2009 – and finally, after ten years sitting on my shelves, I read it! And it’s a great argument against those people who suggest you should get rid of books that have been on your shelves unread for years – because it’s one of the best novels I’ve read this year.

The action of the ‘present day’ is pretty sparse. The narrator – unnamed, I only now realise – has borrowed the Dublin home of her friend Molly Fox, and spends the day reminiscing and trying to get on with her new play. For she is a successful playwright, who came to fame after turning an awkward moment as a housekeeper into a narrative about class and friendship. Only her most recent play has not been such a success, and she is starting to doubt herself. Molly Fox, on the other hand, is recognised as one of the foremost stage actors of her generation. Their mutual friend Andrew, an art historian who is doing well on television, completes something of a love triangle, albeit one that has settled into some sort of quiet inaction. And he turns up at the house during the day – which is, of course, Molly Fox’s birthday. Though she doesn’t like to celebrate it.

About the most eventful thing that happens in the present day is the narrator breaking a drug, but the whole novel shifts back and forth in time through memory and reflection. We see Andrew and the narrator meeting as undergraduates at Trinity College, Dublin – and her shock when the Andrew she meets again in England has reinvented himself, changing accent and appearance to distance himself from his upbringing. We see Molly and the narrator first meeting, when Molly acts in a play the narrator has written – and the narrator proceeds to fall in love with the other person in the play. Touches of their friendship over the year build together into a natural, organic sense of their relationship – without saying too much, there is an enormous depth here. We sense the narrator’s love of Molly, mingled with jealousy, uncertainty, protectiveness. The attempts at objectivity that can only be subjective.

When the public fails to recognise her in her daily life it is not just because they see her face only infrequently on the cinema or television screen. It is because she has a knack of not allowing herself to be recognised when she doesn’t want to be. I have no idea how she does this, I find it difficult even to describe. It is a kind of geisha containment, a shutteredness, a withdrawal and negation. It is as if she is capable of sensing when people are on the point of knowing who she is and she sends them a subliminal denial. I know what you’re thinking but you’re wrong. It isn’t me. I’m somebody else. Don’t even bother to ask. And they almost never do. What gives her away every time is her voice. So often have I seen her most banal utterances, requests for drinks or directions, have a remarkable effect on people. ‘A woman with such a voice is born perhaps once in a hundred years,’ one critic remarked. ‘If heaven really exists,’ wrote another ‘as a place of sublime perfection, then surely everyone in it speaks like Molly Fox.’

What I most enjoyed, I think, is the way Madden writes about the theatre – how the plays develop from the perspective of the writer, but also the atmosphere of backstage life, and how the creative process of writing and the public process of reception can clash. I do wonder whether many playwrights are permitted as much intrusion and control as the narrator gets, and it is slightly coincidental that almost every important figure in the narrator’s life becomes publicly notable, but we can forgive those things.

And Madden’s extraordinary strength is captivating the reader through writing about people and their shifting feelings about one another. The writerly voice is careful never to judge anyone, even when the narrator does – if that makes sense. There are no heroes and villains, but fully-formed and complex people. What’s particularly impressive is that this extends to Molly Fox – because she is an enigma even to her friend, and we see her in such fragments. Through the eyes of the narrator, through Andrew’s eyes to an extent, and from the perspective of the avid fan who turns up at the door, disappointed to meet the narrator instead of her hero – though thank goodness she did, as she came bearing a peacock feather, which Molly Fox has a deep-set superstition about.

Moments connected with the Northern Irish Troubles are perhaps tonally a little out of place, shattering the everyday surface of the rest of the novel and its eternal questions of friendship, love, loyalty, faith – but this is undoubtedly a beautiful, extraordinary novel. Any writing that conveys beauty and keeps you hooked, all without knowing quite what makes it so good, is writing worth hunting out. I’ve since bought another Madden novel, and I’m excited to find out more.

Have you read any Madden novels? What would you recommend?