Mark Haddon’s 2019 novel The Porpoise draws upon the story of Pericles as told by Shakespeare, in which a prince who reveals a terrible truth about a powerful king is forced to flee for safety and in so doing is catapulted into half a lifetime of nomadic adventuring. The Porpoise is a marvellous novel, in which Haddon’s pleasure in formal complexity is more than evenly matched by his skill as a storyteller. The eight stories in this new collection are similarly compelling. Though written across a number of years and gathered from a variety of venues, they possess nonetheless a sense of common purpose, shared themes and recurring imagery, not least the dogs and monsters of the title. Diverse in setting, they share with The Porpoise a delight in the enduring power of myth and the infinite variety of ways in which myths can be retold.
The Mother’s Story is exactly that – a recasting of a familiar story from a different angle. In Haddon’s version of the myth of the Minotaur, we find ourselves not in Crete but in southern England, some centuries after the storied events supposedly took place. The climate is damp and stormy; servants fleeing the palace ask directions to Norwich; the bull-child’s mother is gifted a volume of Montaigne’s essays. A brilliant engineer is tasked with building a maze in which a monster is to be incarcerated, though who the real monster is in this story is a matter for debate. The engineer, hardened by experience, is willing to participate in a fiction, so long as he is permitted to escape with his life. His flighty son – beautiful, idealistic, doomed – wants no part in the deception. “The story will spread far and wide,” he protests to the mother, “and people will be terrified and they will love being terrified and your husband will be in possession of a weapon that has cost him no more than two holes in the ground.”
The story plays out in unexpected ways, and it is this upending of traditional outcomes that is the point. Myths are characterised by their longevity, their staying power, but they can also be toxic, a convenient way of brushing unpleasantness under the carpet. “What suffering might these fabulous events conceal?” The mother urges us to question not only her own story but stories in general. “Where am I being encouraged not to look?”
D.O.G.Z. also draws directly on Greek myth, in this case the story of Actaeon the hunter, who suffers an ignominious and painful end after being caught spying on the goddess Diana as she bathes naked in a forest pool. The beauty of Haddon’s interpretation is in its sense of place: the glorious evocation of heat, the scents of dung and dry grass, the camaraderie between men who are close in age and who love to be outdoors. In particular, it is the love Actaeon feels for his dogs that gives this story its pathos. In asking us to consider further how stories reach through time, Haddon zooms outwards from the original myth to encompass the present, and the enduring power of the relationship between dogs and humans.
How we receive and respond to a story is often secretly governed by who is telling it. My Old School is told by a man in middle age looking back at his schooldays, a period of his life so indivisible from suffering that he has done his best to bury it entirely. He compares being at boarding school with being in prison, “a prickly tangle of pecking orders and unwritten rules and invisible lines that must not be crossed”. Unwilling to risk becoming vulnerable, he avoids forming friendships, only to be caught off guard by a pupil named Meyer, who opens up to him about his parents’ divorce.
There is no shortage of stories about school bullying – My Old School put me immediately in mind of Roald Dahl’s 1953 mini-masterpiece Galloping Foxley. What makes Haddon’s noteworthy is the confusion it generates in the mind of the reader: who exactly the bully is here, and how the truth of an event can be thrown into question by being perceived from a different angle. It is a story about betrayal in which no one is exempt from criticism and the passing of time itself can be used as a weapon.
The Wilderness contains echoes of HG Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau – mentioned by Haddon himself in the acknowledgments – but is equally reminiscent of Stephen King’s 1999 novel The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, in which a young girl named Trisha “steps off the path” while on a family hike. But one of the most interesting features of Haddon’s stories is the way they frequently make an abrupt turn into darker territory. In the case of The Wilderness, what starts out as a simple tale of survival against the odds becomes something far more complex and sinister.
Equally sinister is The Bunker, which Haddon wrote for an anthology of ghost stories inspired by National Trust properties. The York cold war bunker, in active service as late as the 1990s and designed as a station for the monitoring of radioactive fallout in the event of a nuclear strike, is itself the ghost at the heart of Haddon’s story, in which people living in an alternative 1960s find themselves prey to disturbing visions of a world in the chaotic aftermath of a third world war. Nadine’s only hope is the “exorcist”, who claims she can guide her out of her madness and back to reality. The tale is chillingly inconclusive, and all the more effective for what remains unexplained.
Some of the stories are more meandering. The Temptation of St Anthony and The Quiet Limit of the World are elegiac meditations on human mortality and the passing of time; St Brides Bay is a contemporary homage to Virginia Woolf’s first published story The Mark on the Wall and an equally effective demonstration of stream-of-consciousness narrative. What raises them all is the quality of Haddon’s writing, always rock solid and frequently luminous, as in the final image of the spacedog Laika in D.O.G.Z., “transformed into nothing more than the tiniest change in the colour of the rain falling on a single mountainside”, or of the ancient Kristof in The Quiet Limit of the World, “his ears and nose too big for his face so that he seems like a very small giant from a very old story”.
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“There is nothing more terrifying than the monster that squats behind the door you dare not open,” Haddon reminds us in The Mother’s Story. Each of these stories opens a door upon an unexpected landscape, a dangerous situation, a character who may be simultaneously “monster, and miracle”. All are complex, surprising, evocative and richly entertaining.