| David McDowell | |
|---|---|
| Born | 17 April 1970 Belfast, Northern Ireland |
| Pen name | Douglas Maddon |
| Occupation | Writer, Journalist, Teacher |
| Nationality | British |
| Period | 2001 - present |
| Genres | Fiction |
Douglas Maddon (born 17 April 1970 in Belfast, Northern Ireland) is the nom de plume of Northern Irish author and teacher David McDowell. He is best known for the novel The English Department's Whores published in 2001.
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Douglas Maddon was born into a unionist family. His father was a Presbyterian minister and home was the manse. He was educated at Belfast Royal Academy and Merton College, Oxford. He is a staunch believer in Northern Ireland’s status as part of the United Kingdom and 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. As a 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’ for his ‘guts, inventiveness and panache’.[1]
Maddon left Northern Irish political life in the late 1990s for a career as a teacher and writer. The English Department's Whores,[2] 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 in England, which appears as Hengistley, and in particular Collyer's College, which is parodied as Mercier's.
He followed this up with an anticipated second novel, Arson About. The theme this time returned Maddon to his Irish roots with a plot 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 review by Malachi O'Doherty in the Belfast Telegraph. Whereas his first novel was in the Tom Sharpe tradition, this was more of a 'ladlit' work, borrowing heavily from Nick Hornby and, in particular, from his fellow Ulsterman Colin Bateman.
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 relationships, the flawed and often foolish aspects of human beings, 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. Core male characters are wise-cracking, fun-loving and morally ambiguous, if essentially decent. Maddon rails against unkindness, bigotry and violence, and there is always the possibility of redemption for at least some of the characters. An admirer of Jonathan Swift, Maddon writes into the gutter with genuine anger in order, as he sees it, to hold up a mirror to the stupidity around him.
Maddon has recently returned to teaching History, Government and Politics at Fettes College, where he wrote a satirical play about Old Fettesian Tony Blair.[3] • He is still writing.