She had started writing "little bits and pieces" when she was in her teens and soon realised that she wanted to devote her life to writing. She read English at Trinity College Dublin, and instantly felt at home. There was "great encouragement to work very hard, and to get to university", which she did. "Often," she says with a smile, "one tends to be quite gloomy when you're young." But there is, says Madden, another, much simpler reason for the melancholy. One thing that does strike me if I think about my own work is how the Troubles are almost always in it in some way, at some level." They are most visible in Hidden Symptoms, but there's a sense of them in the background of nearly all her books, even though most aren't set in the north. "It was a very depressing time," she says, "but I think Northern Ireland, even in terms of climate, is a tough place anyway. I think it had a very big impact on pretty much everyone I know who lived through it." So is that it? Or is there also something bigger to do with Irish rural life? I'm thinking, I tell her, of John McGahern, whose sad, luminous work is about as beautiful as melancholy gets. "The Troubles broke out when I was a child," she says when I ask where the melancholy comes from, "so that really coloured it very much. In her teens, she discovered Edna O'Brien and Elizabeth Bowen, whom Richard Ford has said he thinks of when he reads Madden. She had one sister and a "very quiet" childhood, spent reading: Enid Blyton, E Nesbit, comics, anything, she says, "I could get my hands on". Her father was a sand merchant and her mother was a teacher who gave up work as soon as she got married. "We're all very fond of each other." Born in 1960 into a Northern Irish Catholic family, she grew up in Toomebridge, a small village "right beside the north shore of Lough Neagh" in County Antrim. It's the kind of fiction that might make you think its author had a traumatic childhood, but Madden apparently didn't. "The year has barely begun, but she knows that it is foolish to expect that it will bring any hope," is a thought that gives a flavour of fiction that's rich in poetic meditation, but which it would, to paraphrase PG Wodehouse on the Scots, be hard to confuse with a ray of sunshine. In Hidden Symptoms, Theresa is recovering from the brutal murder of her twin brother in The Birds of the Innocent Wood, Jane grows up in the shadow of her parents' sudden death in a fire. The prose might be a joy to read but there really wasn't all that much joy in her characters' lives. In Madden's early work, the compassion went along with a deep sense of melancholy. Nor, it's clear to anyone reading her work, does her creator. She "never judged a character", says the narrator, whose name we never learn. And it's there in all the novels that follow: in her fourth Nothing is Black, for example, the central character talks about a painting she has bought from a friend, "a touchstone from which she would draw strength, and realize the need for compassion" in Molly Fox's Birthday, which was shortlisted for the Orange prize in 2009 (the second time Madden was shortlisted for the prize) the narrator realises that compassion was "one important part of the mystery" of her friend Molly Fox's brilliance as an actor. It's there in her first novel, Hidden Symptoms, which came out in 1986, and in her second, The Birds of the Innocent Wood, which won the Somerset Maugham award in 1989, and in her third novel, Remembering Light and Stone.
She is a character who embodies one of the central qualities of Madden's work: a profound and wide-ranging compassion. When I first meet Madden, I am immediately reminded of one of the characters in her latest novel, Time Present and Time Past: Colette is "inordinately kind, and this kindness, suffusing her face, makes her look more attractive than many a cold beauty half her age". They were all referring to the Irish novelist Deirdre Madden. "T he constant genius of Irish letters," according to Sebastian Barry, a "first-rate novelist" for Richard Ford, and "one of the most original and disturbing writers since Jean Rhys", wrote Linda Grant.