“I wish that this were a happier ending,” writes the dying narrator in one of the stories in this collection, but you could say it about any of them. Mark Haddon has left behind the ingeniously constrained view of his bestselling novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (2003), and these nine pieces show a wide range — from suburban dementia to space travel, Victorian exploration to morbid obesity — wedded to an alarmingly bleak vision.
The title story is set in 1970, bringing back the British seaside in hallucinatory detail: “The upper storeys of the Regency buildings along the front sit above a gaudy rank of coffee houses and fish bars and knick-knack shops with striped awnings.” It’s all here: the dried seahorses in cellophane packets, the “99” ice creams, the hotel sign missing a letter, and the pistachio-green paint on the metal balustrade, eroding and blistering in the sea air.
There is a mackerel sky above, while in the marina “the dolphins turn in their blue prison”. On the pier the hotdog onions are frying and the bumper cars are bashing around with their rubber rims, as — unnoticed by anyone — a rivet in the pier snaps. Five have already gone, and 12 minutes later another one fails. The whole story is a descriptive tour de force, as Haddon collides collective memory with tragedy.
It isn’t just the pier that collapses in this book: almost everything comes to a sticky end, and by the standards of quality fiction there is a high body count. There are some space-station suicides, a loving and considerate murder, and a princess abandoned on an island. There is an inspired imitation of a 19th-century adventure narrative, as a small party of men — acting on information from the survivor of a previous expedition, now in a lunatic asylum — hack into the jungle hoping to find “some clues as to the fate of our predecessors”. Further strong scenarios include a housebound 37-stone man who falls in love, and — in an agile reworking of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight — a middle-class family Christmas that is interrupted by an unknown black man tapping on the window. Not long after being reluctantly let in and given a mince pie, he produces a gun.
Rather than the celebrated Dog, the Haddon book closest to this collection is probably A Spot of Bother (2006), where a man discovers he has a tumour and suddenly realises that in normal life everyone is just “frolicking blindly” in a bright meadow surrounded by a dark forest, “waiting for that grim day on which they were dragged into the dark beyond the trees and individually butchered”. Haddon treats this central message with virtuoso subtlety, counterpointing his characters’ fates with their dreams and ominous intimations (“something gathering in her imagination. Whales cruising in the dark, right now, just round the corner of the world”). More than just mortality, he is interested in those moments when life can fork down very different paths, happily enough for most of us, but more by luck than decision: “If you were lucky you got an education. If you were lucky you weren’t abused by the guy who ran the five-a-side.”
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In the final story, a man rescues a depressed woman from drowning, and Haddon seems to confront the book’s depressive tendencies: we are all going to die, “and the last few minutes will be horrible but that’s OK, it really is… The river will keep on flowing and there will be dandelions in spring.”
More than dandelions, the real redemption in these superbly gripping stories comes from their canny human detail, and the vivid, unsettling clarity they bring to our brief lives.
Read the first chapter on the Sunday Times website
Cape £16.99 pp323
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