MARY-ROSE MACCOLL The True Story of Maddie Bright. Reviewed by Kim Kelly
The True Story of Maddie Bright captures the challenges of the writing life with wit and romance.
Intriguing from the opening scenes, which play out in the grim between-wars London of 1921 and a possum-ridden Brisbane house 60 years on, Mary-Rose MacColl’s sixth and latest novel is a sparkling historical fiction about fame, friendship, the power of stories, the purpose and craft of telling them, and the getting of wisdom.
Most powerfully, it’s the tale of two women writers: Maddie Bright and Victoria Byrd. We meet Maddie across three distinct phases of her life: in 1920 as a naïve serving girl-cum-secretary on the Australian royal tour of Edward, Prince of Wales; as a Princess-Diana-obsessed recluse in 1981; and as an older writer reaching out with her last great truth in 1997, the year Diana was killed in that infamous car accident in Paris. Victoria Byrd is a journalist covering Diana’s death, grappling with the vacuity of the tabloid press and a boyfriend who is unsupportive at best, when she’s sent to interview the enigmatic, mega-selling MA Bright on the other side of the world.
The way the lives of these women entwine is as beautiful as it as masterful. To describe it further would give too much reading pleasure away, but suffice to say, the portraits MacColl paints of the particular difficulties women writers face are poignant and real.
MacColl’s ability to draw her characters with honesty as well as sympathy is a delight throughout. Her weaving of historical detail always enriches the narrative, too, with political and social mores of the times expressed cleverly and incidentally so that the reader feels immersed in each of the periods.
But it’s the prose itself that is the stand-out for this reader. Almost every page delivers some crisply witty line.
Here, on an actor’s vanity:
‘I want to impress everybody,’ Quite-the-yummy said, rubbing his thumb across the tops of his fingernails, as if he’d just had a manicure and was admiring the work.
On a young man confessing his lax reading habits: ‘I don’t read much,’ to which Maddie archly replies, ‘Well, you might as well not bother living then …’
On the excitement of the royal train at Central Station, 1920:
The pigeons above us cooed more warmly and fluttered more meaningfully than they might above any other train. The steam and smoke were more like a gentle mist of morning. The smells – coaldust and more universal dust – were more pleasant.
On a self-important seamstress: ‘She was a person for whom the entire field of italics was invented.’
On the practice of writing: ‘Well, service is honest work … Writing, so often, is not.’ And: ‘… writers who used semicolons were indecisive and those who used colons were show-offs.’ Of a publisher: ‘He was young, with a pretentiousness that might grow old with him and become far less endearing.’ Of news media: ‘… increasingly, truth’s not the job.’
Among the many cheeky literary jokes and flourishes that pepper the text, it’s a nice touch that the publishing house in the novel is called Barlow Inglis, a nod to the author’s real-life publisher and agent.
But the lines aren’t all for laughs. Of being motherless, MacColl writes: ‘It was like being a bird growing up without wings.’ On tenderness: ‘My heart was as soft as the down feathers on the crow outside my window …’ On forgiveness:
We can harden our hearts and miss the life that’s ours, or we can soften and forgive and find something tender and real in the middle of ourselves.
And the quote that is perhaps the beating heart of the whole story:
Who needs money when children are without their mother? And who needs the news when someone has shared their truth with you?
The cards for Maddie and Victoria fall believably, and the triple-stranded narrative is very well managed, even if the plot is at times a little fanciful, particularly the central premise of Maddie’s secret author status, and some elements of the ending. At times the lines of romantic love in the story seemed a little too lightly drawn, too, especially around the question of why Victoria was so taken by a man so unworthy of her; of course this happens in life all the time, but perhaps here it needed a little further depth to make the self-sabotage seem more credible and bring this aspect of the tale a little further above the trope of men behaving badly and exploiting the naivety of the women who fall for them.
Above all, it’s heartening to know that writing like this – original, entertaining, soul-nourishing and Australian – is still being published in a market that has generally seemed to discourage it. Accomplished and sincere, The True Story of Maddie Bright is good old-fashioned storytelling, each word delivered with love, clear-eyed intelligence and not a little mischief.
At one point Maddie muses:
People like stories about overcoming adversity, and they even like tragedies. I’m not sure what they think about trickery.
Doubtless, many readers will love the tricks in this one.
Mary-Rose MacColl The True Story of Maddie Bright Allen & Unwin 2019 PB 504pp $29.99
Kim Kelly is the author of eight novels, including the acclaimed Wild Chicory and The Blue Mile. Her latest novel, Sunshine, was published in March 2019. Find out more about Kim at: kimkellyauthor.com
You can buy The True Story of Maddie Bright from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
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