Madden has woven a literary tapestry of sorts by exploring the memories and reflections of three sisters and their mother in Northern Ireland as they face a development in one of their lives and think back over their past. None of the sisters have married, yet they have chosen very different paths in adulthood; one a magazine editor, one a lawyer whose firm often defends IRA terrorists, and one a stay-home-and-care-for-Mother teacher. We see how their personalities developed to make them who they are in the 1990's. As they remember their early life, it becomes clear that their father was a victim of the violence during the Troubles, as as result of a case of mistaken identity. Naturally this was a defining moment, not only for them and their mother, but for other members of the family as well. The novel's pattern is intricate, yet all the threads come together without a tangle at the end. Usually with a set-up like this, I would favor one character over the others, or strongly dislike and disagree with one of them. That didn't happen here. I felt sympathy for each woman, and understood how their varied life choices arose from the same set of circumstances. My reservations about the structure are two-fold. First, I occasionally got lost in time, and was a bit muddled as to whose memories I was sharing. There is very little action in real time, so it takes concentration to keep track of the who and when. The author used a nifty trick with one of the characters, who changed the spelling of her first name when she left home. That leads me to my second quibble; although recognizing the difference between "Kate" and "Cate" made it easy to keep track of her, it also made me too aware of the presence of the author, a feeling that sometimes carried over into other sections of the novel. So although the overall effect is of a well-crafted work, at times I was a little distracted by the technique involved. I think I'd benefit by re-reading the book, but I don't think it warrants that much more of my time.
Review written in September 2017 ( )

In this 1996 novel, Deirdre Madden writes movingly about three sisters in their thirties who grew up in rural Northern Ireland as the late 1960s Troubles flared. The novel is premised on the middle sister's visit home to share important news. Beautiful, glamorous Kate (or, as she has preferred to call herself "Cate"--to shave off some of the "Irishness", much to her family's chagrin) fled the misery of her homeland to work for a London fashion magazine. Since tragedy struck the family a couple of years ago, however, her life has lacked its former lustre. The eldest Quinn daughter, Helen, is a successful Belfast lawyer, some of whose professional work involves defending young men charged with terrorism. Studious and driven in girlhood and now perceived by her family as austere, Helen was the closest of the girls to their kind and principled father. She was also the one laid lowest by his death. Sally, the youngest sister, always a frail girl growing up, has over the years become her mother's right hand, demonstrating remarkable emotional strength. She has followed in her mother and maternal grandfather's footsteps and teaches at the local primary school. It has not been easy, and in recent years she has felt compelled to escape.

This short fourteen-chapter novel is structured in an interesting manner. Odd chapters are named for the days of the week that Kate visits with her family; they focus on the present. Even chapters focus on the past: the girls' lovely outings with their father and lively paternal grandmother; the strained visits with their embittered black-clad maternal grandmother; their uncles--one, a sensitive, troubled alcoholic and the other, a jolly but worrisomely committed Republican. As the novel progresses, The Troubles increasingly encroach on the lives of the Quinn family. The older brother of a schoolmate is killed. Protestant tradesmen who used to do business with the family no longer do. The British soldiers arrive, and even pay a visit to the Quinn home--to scout out the outbuildings of the farm and inquire about dogs. Civil rights demonstrations dominate the news. Checkpoints become a fact of life.

Elegiac in tone, much of the novel focuses on the death of Charlie Quinn, the sisters' father. Madden presents a particularly moving scene that Helen remembers from childhood when she heard her father moving about downstairs and left her bed to speak to him. But the book is also forward-looking: Kate's news must be absorbed and adjusted to.

One by One in the Darkness is a beautiful novel, which, in spite of its brevity, manages to say a great deal about life in Northern Ireland in the latter part of the twentieth century. Recommended. ( )

I found this to be quite an interesting read, telling me more about The Troubles in Northern Ireland than I knew. However I was surprised that I didn't find the story more emotionally engaging. It seemed to me that Madden's style of story telling was to avoid the detail of conflict and emotion and I was left wondering why that was so and how this approach might or might not contribute to the power of the story ( )

In my ongoing exploration of the novels of Deirdre Madden, this one, her fifth, is a warmly satisfying visitation with the Quinns, a Northern Ireland Catholic family, until tragedy intervenes. Three sisters - Helen, the lawyer; Cate the magazine editor; Sally the schoolteacher - are suffused with the love of their parents and relatives. As The Troubles begin, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, friends, clergy: all must difficult decisions that will determine their fates. As the ceasefire approaches, so does an event that will ease their sorrow. Strongly affecting. ( )

The story is set during one week shortly before the IRA ceasefire in 1994. Three sisters, Helen, Sally and Kate relate and recollect their childhood during the 1960s and 1970s at the height of the troubles in Northern Ireland. The catalyst for these recollections is the return of the eldest sister Kate, (who now refers to herself as Cate), who abruptly leaves London where she works as a successful journalist for a glossy magazine as an event has forced her to re-evaluate her life.
The book’s chapters alternate between the return of Cate to Ireland and the three sister’s recollections of their childhood. Cate’s life changing event is not that difficult to guess and strangely it is revealed rather early on the book so breaking any sense of tension regarding that particular plotline.
The sister’s childhood is almost idyllic. Their parents own a farm an hour’s drive from Derry. This distance from the cities and towns of Northern Ireland keeps the horrors of the troubles at arm’s length as it also must have felt to those on mainland Britain. The girl’s only connection to the Irish troubles was during their visits to towns like Antrim where they would witness preparations for the Orange Walk; Union Jacks hung out of windows, Orange arches with symbols of a compass, a set square and ladder painted brightly on them.

“And yet for all this they knew that their lives, so complete in themselves were off centre in relation to the society beyond those fields and houses”

However, this insular life soon changed when the British troops moved into Northern Ireland in 1969. With British Army checkpoints around their county and the subsequent visits to the sister’s farm by soldiers the troubles in its many nefarious guises had intruded into the sister’s childhood.
With the atrocity that was Bloody Sunday in 1972 the troubles also came to mainland Britain with the bombing of the Aldershot Headquarters by the IRA. I mention these events as I believe that the sister’s farm may be alluding to the British mainland during the same period of time of the 1960s and 1970s.
I found the story interesting but not fascinating. Each of the sister’s characters was used as clichéd ciphers for Ireland. The eldest sister Kate loves Ireland but needs to leave its sectarian bigotry and religious intractability and becomes a success which she wouldn’t have found if she had stayed in Ireland. The middle sister, Helen becomes a lawyer and defends terrorists even though a horrific experience has befallen her family. The third sister, Sally becomes a primary school teacher like her mother. She hates and loves Ireland in equal measure but stays due to her loyalty to her mother.
The dialogue is rather lumpen and incongruous. There were times when the dialogue did not ring true especially that spoken by the sisters.
Helen’s gay friend David is a superfluous character and seems only to have been shoe-horned into the story to possibly prove how open minded Helen is.
Of all the fictional books that have been written about the troubles, Cal by Bernard Maclaverty or Gerry Seymour’s Journeyman Tailor to name but a few, One by One in the Darkness in my opinion would find it difficult to a part of the any list of the top twenty books on the subject of Northern Ireland and its conflict. ( )