Douglas Maddon

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Douglas Maddon (1970-) is the pen name of Northern Irish author and teacher David McDowell.

He was born in Belfast in 1970 went to Belfast Royal Academy and Merton College, Oxford, whilst contributing to one of his main loves, politics. A believer in unionism, he was active on the left wing of the Ulster Unionist Party, promoting unfashionable liberal causes such as an end to the Orange connection, friendship with the Irish Republic and engagement with the European Union. A prolific political journalist, he wrote for the Unionist house magazine Ulster Review and Russian daily Izvestia. He was praised in Jonathan Stevenson's 'We Wrecked The Place: contemplating an end to the Northern Irish Troubles' for his 'guts, inventiveness and panache' but he left active politics in the late 1990s. His main career was teaching the subject, along with history.

The English Department's Whores, his first novel, was acclaimed as a successor to the Tom Sharpe novels. It is certainly in the tradition of the darkly comic English farce, featuring a teacher who, on being made redundant, corrupts her former colleagues into setting up a brothel which is later used to blackmail a prominent politician. This was generally seen as a thinly-veiled satire of life in the West Sussex town of Horsham, which appears as Hengistley, and in particular Collyer's College, which is parodied as Mercier's. His second novel, Arson About, is squarely in the 'ladlit' tradition pioneered by Nick Hornby and given a Northern Irish twist by Colin Bateman. Its plot revolves around a group of Belfast men who go on the run to France, believing that they are going to be blamed for a bombing in Dublin. This became cult reading among Northern Ireland football fans after a rave review by Malachi O'Doherty in the Belfast Telegraph.

Maddon's strength lies in his pungent dialogue and acid descriptions; he is weaker on plots and his female characters are often flimsy. Recurrent themes in his work are the inherent cruelty of human relationships, the flawed and often foolish aspects of people, especially those with power, and the difficulty of hope. Alcoholism is portrayed with considerable detail, especially in the second novel, and virtually all his characters smoke. Self-destructive behaviour and its consequences lies at the heart of Maddon's work, suggesting a residual Calvinism (he was brought up in a Presbyterian manse). It is possible to see the novels, although one was described by O'Doherty as 'one of the bawdiest and most lecherous pieces of writing I have ever read', as having a certain moral core; Maddon rails against unkindness, bigotry and violence, and there is always the possibility of redemption for at least some of the characters.

His characters, although often witty and clever, are ultimately victims inhabiting a Hobbesean landscape of moral emptiness. Interestingly, he appears reluctant to attribute the same depth of depravity to his (rare) female characters as he does to the laddish, corrupt male ones. A feature of both novels is the feisty and intelligent girl student (Alice and Beth in Whores, Kirsty in Arson), often the only character with any moral sense, and it is quite possible that these figures represent an idealized archetype of the young women with whom Maddon worked in real life. Core male characters are wise-cracking, fun-loving and morally ambiguous, if essentially decent. They are generally considered to be based on the coterie of hard-drinking friends with whom Maddon associated in his schooldays, at university and in his political double life. Another recurrent character is the crotchety, sexually repressed schoolmaster (William in 'Whores' and Fergus in 'Arson' are virtually interchangeable) and it is generally believed that these figures are self-lacerating caricatures of the author himself.

Their manifestly self-destructive, depressive behaviour and attitudes were mirrored in Maddon's own life; he has not written anything following being diagnosed with the illness following the publication of Arson in 2001. He has thus far failed to live up to the early promise which many identified in the two novels.

The books remain available as print-on-demand titles, having sold out their relatively short print runs some time ago.

Maddon/McDowell is currently teaching History, Government and Politics at Fettes College, where he appears to be writing again^[1].