Guardian Review
It is 2006, and the Celtic Tiger is at its height. The Buckleys are originally from County Armagh, but the childhood bonds between Fintan, now a legal adviser in his late 40s in Dublin, his sister Martina and their father's family on the farm have been broken. Fintan holds his mother responsible for this, although it slowly becomes clear that, again, it is the Troubles that have penetrated the family and altered it. Throughout the novel, Madden explores the question of how far the idea of family intimacy corresponds to the facts. The chief trauma of Martina's life is unknown to any other member of the family. Neither Fintan nor Martina know that their mother can hardly bring herself to walk past the National Maternity hospital because of the memories it brings back. They see her as a kind of monster, feelingless, blithely unaware. This beguiling novel is a clear-eyed, even forensic study of a family crammed with secrets to the point of sickness, reflecting a wider society that bolts down consumer goods in order to purge itself of the past. It is 2006, and the Celtic Tiger is at its height. The Buckleys are originally from County Armagh, but the childhood bonds between Fintan, now a legal adviser in his late 40s in Dublin, his sister Martina and their father's family on the farm have been broken. #+ |9780224099103 |9781448189755 |9780099590361 |9780224099028 ~ Bleeding Edge begins in spring 2001 during the lull between the bursting of the dotcom bubble and 9/11, and features Maxine Tarnow, a maverick fraud investigator who has had her licence revoked for bending the rules one time too many - she jokes that she is the "Bad Accountant". At first glance it seems like Pynchon lite. There is little or no physics, there are few of the tangential flights of fancy or, say, repeated child-rape scenarios that make his bigger books hard work. But, in the postmodern way, Bleeding Edge combines apparently unserious, even puerile means with deadly serious ends. It is nearly 500 densely packed pages long, and carries a clear message about the US's current direction: about the "emerging technopolitical order" after the "hole" that "opened up in American history" after 9/11 and about the "global pyramid racket" of "late capitalism". But this postmodern novel, like many others, also often degenerates into a crude cartoon, and it looks particularly grievous when Pynchon tries to hack a path back through all that irony and pastiche to sincerity. - Theo Tait Bleeding Edge begins in spring 2001 during the lull between the bursting of the dotcom bubble and 9/11, and features Maxine Tarnow, a maverick fraud investigator who has had her licence revoked for bending the rules one time too many - she jokes that she is the "Bad Accountant". At first glance it seems like Pynchon lite. - Theo Tait.
New York Review of Books Review
WE SPEND OUR LIVES tumbling through time, carried along as it eddies and pools, buckles and loops, stutters and flies. As T.S. Eliot put it in the opening lines of "Burnt Norton," "Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future,/And time future contained in time past." We like to think that time is ours to waste, but it is we who pass through time, wasting only ourselves. An elegant, insightful meditation on the shifting forces of time and memory, "Time Present and Time Past," Deirdre Madden's latest novel, centers on 47-year-old Fintan Buckley, a Dublin legal adviser and happily married father of three. Thoughtful and innocent, "faithful as Lassie," Fintan has been feeling uneasy. The year is 2006, and the booming Irish economy is about to deflate, but that's not the source of Fintan's free-floating guilt and anxiety. Watching a clock's second hand sweep round and round, he can feel "time racing on, racing like a palpitating heart, so that he feels his life will be over before he has had a chance to live it, certainly before he has had a chance to understand it. Sometimes he feels he can almost hear time rushing past him; it is like a kind of unholy wind." Gobsmacked by hints of the future and echoes of the past, Fintan begins to experience strange lapses of consciousness. Words and objects suddenly drift free of meaning: A slice of carrot cake morphs into an unspeakably bizarre orange-flecked mound topped by "a hard, dark wrinkled thing that looks like the pickled brain of an elf" (that is to say, a walnut). Distant memories of childhood visits to his family in Northern Ireland during the Troubles rise up unbidden as he finds himself sliding helplessly between what was and what is. "The past," as Faulkner wrote, "is never dead. It's not even past." Madden's cool prose style is quietly confident and sure-handed as she explores the inner lives of Fintan's prickly mother, Joan; his kind wife, Colette; his troubled sister, Martina; and other members of his family. On the surface, this is an astutely observed domestic novel, but underneath deeper themes cut to the heart of what it means to be alive. "When did the world become colored?" Fintan's young daughter, Lucy, asked him once, as they were looking through some old black-and-white family photographs. Examining a book of early color snapshots from the 1900s with his teenage son, Niall, Fintan is struck by "how alarmingly familiar all these things look, exactly like eggs and biscuits, fish and flowers which he might come across on any day of his life." Can a photograph - or a novel, for that matter - bring the past nearer? Can it stop time? Seated at the dinner table one evening with his wife and children around him, Fintan suddenly asks everyone to freeze. "Bemused, they look at each other, but do as requested. For a short time they sit in silence, like worshiping Quakers waiting for the Spirit to move through the room. The kitchen clock ticks. Fintan looks at them all earnestly. Then he simply says, 'Thank you,' and stands up." Madden's thoughtful, beautifully written novel is a reminder that we'd do best to acknowledge the fact that everything is always changing, and to savor what we can of those passing moments Eliot called the "still point of the turning world." SARAH FERGUSON'S essays and criticism have appeared in The Guardian, Elle and New York magazine.