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?