Author Feature

We are delighted that Deirdre Madden, whose prescribed text, One by One in the Darkness was introduced in last Autumn's TESS has written for our author feature in this edition.

Home was a huge sky: it was flat fields of poor land fringed with hawthorn and alder. It was birds in flight; it was columns of midges like smoke in a summer dusk. It was grey water; it was a mad wind; it was a solid stone house where the silence was uncanny.

Cate was going home.

Cate Quinn is a successful journalist who lives in London. In the opening chapter of One by One in the Darkness she is going back to spend a week with her family in her native Northern Ireland: her mother Emily, her sisters Helen, a solicitor in Belfast, and Sally who is a primary teacher in the school the sisters themselves attended as children. The novel tells the story of that week, shortly before the start of the IRA cease-fire in 1994. Interwoven with this is the story of the sisters' childhood and adolescence from the 1960s through to the 1970s, which charts and records the outbreak and evolution of The Troubles in the north.

Often it's difficult to remember years later what the initial idea for a book was - such thoughts tend to get lost and confused in the process of actually writing. But I do believe that in writing One by One in the Darkness I was making a far more conscious decision to deal with particular subjects than is usually the case. Of the six books I have published, it is the closest by far to my own background and lived experience. I wanted to describe the countryside around Lough Neagh where I grew up, a place not of spectacular beauty but of immense psychic power. It is the landscape that is for me always the benchmark of reality. There were things in my childhood - Halloween, the love of aunts and uncles and my granny, a strange little holy well - which I wanted to record and celebrate.

I also wanted to write about The Troubles. Like the women in the book, I was a child in 1969 and I remember vividly that time and the years that followed. While aspects of that situation, such as the bomb scares, the endless checkpoints on the roads and the terrible news night after night on television became familiar they always remained abnormal and disturbing. And still normal life continued - school, exams, holidays, church, friendships and so on. I hope the book gives some sense of what it was like to live through that. So while it is a novel about a particular political conflict, it is also a book about ordinary life, about families, about parents and children, about how sisters relate to each other as the years pass.

I have lived away from Northern Ireland for a long time now and have to admit that when I go back the strangeness of it as a society strikes me more and more, and that too was something I wanted to express.

She drove through pinched villages where the edges of the footpaths were painted red, white and blue, where there were Orange Lodges and locked churches; through more prosperous towns with their memorials from the Great War and their baskets of lobelia and fuchsia hanging from brackets from the street lamps, with their Tidy Town awards on burnished plaques and their proper shopfronts … Now and then she would see a Mission tent, or a temporary road sign indicating the way to a 'Scripture Summer Camp.'

At the heart of the book is a great loss - the murder of Charlie, the father of the family, by loyalist paramilitaries. Writing about this was an enormously delicate and sensitive issue. While I never had the misfortune to lose anyone in my immediate family to the violence, I did know people who had suffered this terrible blow. Also, I did know what it was to be bereaved and the pain of that made me wonder how people managed to cope when the death of someone they loved was sudden, brutal and unnatural. Even to try to imagine what that must be like was very hard and it made me aware of how people are forced to carry this great burden through their life. I very much hope that this aspect of the book does justice to the subject.

When the sisters are small, Tony, the brother of their friend Willy is blown up while planting a bomb. Once Tony had killed a fox. He gave the skin to his brother who brought it into school to show to everybody; and that was what Helen remembered now, the rank smell of the red pelt and Willy stroking the fur with his hands and saying 'There's nobody in the country as brave as our Tony.' When Helen closed her eyes she saw the desolate field where foxes lived, and where Tony died; a field bound by dense hedges of hawthorn and sloe. She and Kate had heard the bomb explode.

I greatly regret that this novel remains topical. While it is a truism that there are many adults who cannot remember a time before The Troubles, it is sobering to think that someone who is now twenty was only about twelve in 1994, when it looked as if there would be peace at last. There is a new generation who have grown up knowing only this new uneasy calm which is far from what we lived through in the seventies and eighties, but is also still far from genuine peace. A considerable degree of violence remains, and an extraordinary amount of bigotry. I very much hope that the novel will speak to the students of today and that it will give them a deeper understanding of what has been happening in their own country in the past thirty-five years.