The Irish Novel 1960 - 2010

2002: Deirdre Madden, Authenticity

2002 Deirdre Madden, Authenticity A native of Toomebridge, County Antrim, Madden (b. 1960) is one of the few women novelists to emerge from Northern Ireland during the Troubles. A number of her novels draw on that traumatic period – Hidden Symptoms (1986) and One by One in the Darkness (1996). But her output also deals with family secrets, in The Birds of the Innocent Wood (1988), and a young woman’s quest in modern Europe is the subject of Remembering Light and Stone (1992). The creative life is the central interest of both Nothing is Black (1994) and Molly Fox’s Birthday (2008). Memorable for their women characters, these novels’ deceptively modest style conveys much emotional subtlety. To write a novel that upholds a belief in art as a repository of faith, hope and charity is an ambitious and courageous undertaking, but that is what Authenticity ultimately amounts to. Deirdre Madden’s portrait of the artist Roderic Kennedy is not just a depiction of that painter’s processes and accomplishments. In addition, it conveys a rich appreciation – and even a defence – of the value of art as a human activity. At a period when there has been much public debate on the role of the arts, the importance of the arts to cultural and communal well-being, and the contribution of the arts in the creation of a sense of national identity – by being recruited as an acceptable face of the nation for international consumption – the interest and focus of Authenticity may seem particularly timely. But the novel takes an explicitly contrary, individualistic tack. For Roderic Kennedy and his fellow artist and lover Julia Fitzpatrick, what matters is the need, not the network; the making, not the product; the spirit that moves, not the market that marks up (though, in that last regard, they are not so pure as to be indifferent to being able to earn their living through their talent). First and foremost, they recognise the need to be answerable to themselves. The rest is not their business. This sense that what they are within is the important thing is confirmed by their different backgrounds. Roderic, son of a general practitioner in the bland and comfortable south County Dublin suburbs, grows up amidst the not unfamiliar tensions of the nuclear family and siblings. In contrast, Julia is an only child, reared in rural County Wicklow by her widower father, Dan, a mechanic. (Her mother was killed in a road accident when she was six.) These circumstances 2002: DEIRDRE MADDEN, AUTHENTICITY 151 obviously mark the pair in distinctive ways. Roderic rebels. Julia, in various ways, remains close to home. The differences of their personal histories, however, while ineradicable, also seem complementary. City is counterpointed by country, single-parent family by nuclear family, only child by brother and sisters, white-collar father by blue-collar father – and, as we get to know them better, the sense that they make a match is also developed along such lines as age, sex, artistic interests and attitudes to others. Their backgrounds and circumstances have left their mark, but they do not have the final say in who Roderic and Julia are. Each in his and her own way exemplifies the capacity not only to make and remake themselves but to represent the commitment of such an undertaking in expressive form. The artist can be seen as a noteworthy instance of the self-made person – an image, expressed in work completed , of risk, integrity and open-handedness. Their own gifts donate a gift to the world at large. Strangers meeting and finding something in one another is one way of describing the private and personal exchange between viewer and picture. And Deirdre Madden may have chosen painting as her artists’ mode of expression because it is in this medium that the exchange is typically direct. In Authenticity, the exchange frequently takes place in a museum or similar venue, a private transaction gracing a public space, enhancing and adding value to both. But exchanges in general also recur throughout the novel – the unexpected encounter, the moment of attraction, the invisible current of contact, the unconscious gesture, the colloquy of friends. It would be futile to intend or expect such interludes to be definitive. Rather, they are forms of openness, engagement and unpredictability, and as such they exhibit a liberating novelty and sense of renewal. Art preserves a consciousness of these transient transactions, authenticating them. And the value of that expressive enterprise may be considered when regarding...