Book review: English novelist Mark Haddon has said he likes to write “about difference … being an outsider … seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way”.
He’s done it in numerous ways. Christopher, of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), is an autistic 15-year-old maths prodigy. In The Red House (2012), we get ghostly watcher and “little monster” Karen. The Porpoise (2019) offers Shakespeare’s Pericles as part narrator. Surprising and revealing indeed.
The outsider viewpoint becomes even more overt in Haddon’s new collection of eight, often substantial, stories viewing human/sub-human/superhuman conditions through multiple lenses.
Myths, traditional or newly minted, are often the starting point. There’s much metamorphosis and transformation. Actaeon becomes a stag and is graphically torn apart by his hunting hounds, before Haddon takes off to speculate what those dogs’ descendants might become (the Hound of the Baskervilles or the His Master’s Voice terrier listening to a phonograph. Uh-huh).
St Anthony sees his sister warp into a hairy, snarling ape. Eos, goddess of dawn, falls for dishy mortal Tithonus, begs Zeus to grant the lad eternal life, but forgets – you guessed it – to add eternal youth as well, so the youth crumbles over millennia to a skeletal, suppurating, foetal shape, tended by a divine being in sneakers and a red hoodie. Inventive stuff.
The Mother’s Story transfers the Minotaur of Greek legend to a semi-medieval setting where politics and patriarchy mean the sacrifice of a deformed baby and much manipulation of misinformation. Yes, how current. Most of the story’s men come off badly, as they do elsewhere. St Anthony is a self-centred obsessive; Theseus is shallow and casual; Actaeon and Tithonus are basically puppets.
These more overt rewritings do go on. They clutch you with their originality and force for the first half, then start to weaken and wander. More successful are the shorter, contemporary visions and transformations. In The Bunker, Nadine buys her milk and newspaper, hops on the No 23 bus, and joltingly, shockingly, plummets into a world of screaming, fleeing people and a nuclear Armageddon. My Old School unflinchingly recalls boyhood torment and torture. St Brides Bay is all gentle changes, closing the book with a stoic shrug.
Specific terrors alternate with the half-glimpsed and therefore more frightful. The world is slippery and treacherous: “Above her in the gloom, the plaster cornices turned monstrous.” Life is “a fight between dogs … the only innocents are at the bottom of the pile”.
Unsettling stuff, with child abuse, suicide, savagery towards animals, physical and psychic death, yet lit with glints of redemption, devotion, forms of battered survival. And Haddon writes with almost concussive force; events and sentences punch at you. They can be blackly witty: Carol’s first fag in 25 years is “formaldehyde, ammonia, cyanide, arsenic … it tasted fabulous”. Then just a few lines on, comes quite wondrous lyricism as she starts her second smoke: “the surprise of her lit hands in the dark, like a tiny Caravaggio”.
Disturbing reading? Absolutely. Also singular, startling, fired with moments of tenderness and beauty. As I say, the guy can go on, but they’re eight journeys worth joining.
Dogs and Monsters, by Mark Haddon (Chatto & Windus, $38), is out now.
