Mark Haddon recently called them “beige”: the stories he has had enough of and never wants to read again. They are the mediocre progeny of “Chekhov, Joyce, Mansfield and Carver”, “modest, melancholic stories, not arcs with beginnings, middles and ends, so much as moments and turning points, stories often about things not happening and people being absent, not really stories at all according to the everyday meaning of the word . . .”
You know the stories he means, pieces in the mode of what might be called received realism, set in a generic present day and written in inhibited, risk-averse prose, containing little to no external action, and usually ending – or not – with some minor calibration of the main character’s mindset, or with some oblique, and by implication significant, gesture.
No surprise then to find Haddon's debut collection contains a suite of ambitiously scaled and event-packed tales, self-consciously eclectic both in setting and subject matter and for the most part trading in life-or-death stakes and often featuring multiple death tolls. The first, titular story is less a story than the kind of concussive opening set piece Ian McEwan or Don DeLillo might admire. Imagining the fictional collapse of Brighton Pier on the "23rd July, 1970", The Pier Falls unfolds in a chillingly objective style.
Though rife with vivid details ("a balustrade whose pistachio-green paint has blistered and popped in a hundred years of salt air") and adroit simile ("There is a faint tremor underfoot as if a suitcase or stepladder has been dropped somewhere nearby."), Haddon does not assign these observations to a central character. While the story contains dozens of victims, there is no main character, save perhaps for the collapsing pier itself as it becomes catastrophically animate, "a threshing machine of spars and beams". Instead, the narrative moves with the callous serenity of a movie camera or recording drone over this vista of destruction, zooming in to capture moments of intimate vulnerability, – "a woman is shaking the body of her unconscious husband as if he has overslept and is late for work" – before pulling back to disclose rescue boats "idle just beyond the moraine of bodies and debris, unable either to help or turn away". The Pier Falls is risky writing precisely because it dispenses with so many of the resonance generators fiction usually trades in: identifiable characters in whom the reader can become invested, meaningful narrative progression, resolution and so on.
Manipulation of perspective
The tension and momentum of the story are created purely through the manipulation of perspective, not character, and by the accretive power of Haddon’s figurative language and unflinching descriptive prose, the cruel rightness of the details and sensations he elects to evoke.
The Pier Falls
is a bracing, remorselessly lucid depiction of a sudden and expansive moment of chaos.
The other stories in the collection do give us characters to root for, but Haddon, a novelist best known for the lit-hit The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-Time is gratifyingly leery of the crutch of interiority. He prefers to define character by action, and duly plunges his protagonists into a variety of extreme circumstances.
In The Island, a princess wakes up on a barren island, abandoned by the lover for whom she betrayed her family. In Bunny, the titular character has been rendered terminally housebound by his own extravagant corpulence. In The Woodpecker and the Wolf, the crew of a damaged expeditionary ship stranded on Mars can only sit and wait for help to arrive as their life-support system runs inexorably down. In The Boys Who Left Home to Learn Fear, a rescue mission deep in the Amazon jungle goes fatally awry.
As can be deduced from these premises, Haddon frequently looks beyond the conventions and idiom of "literary realism" toward genre and myth to give structure and texturing to his stories. The Island is a version of the myth of Ariadne, left by Theseus on the island of Naxos. Wodwo is a contemporary retelling of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The Woodpecker and the Wolf is sci-fi with more mythic overtones.
Blending "high" and "low" genres, or putting a modernising spin on an ancient text, is, of course, far from a new tactic, but Haddon does it well. He eschews pastiche, playing each premise straight. In Wodwo, the updated Green Knight is a "tall black man in a black woolly hat, sporting a big salt-and-pepper beard and wearing a long black overcoat over camouflage trousers and big black boots". He intrudes upon the Christmas Eve celebrations of the oleaginously middle-class Cooper family, produces a shotgun and challenges them to "a game", then untroubledly walks away from a point-blank blast to the chest inflicted by Gavin, the Coopers' showiest, shallowest son, with the promise that next year "it will be my turn".
Wodwo is the longest story and one of the best, starting out as a slightly too sneering comedy of manners, turning abruptly, violently supernatural, before becoming something unclassifiably elegaic and eerie as we follow Gavin's drink- and drugs-fuelled descent to a state of vagrant, living erasure.
There are also stories that hew much closer to the template of literary realism, but these too brim with uncanny moments and the menace of incipient, if not overt, violence: in The Gun, two boys find an older brother's semi-automatic pistol; in Breathe, a woman estranged from her family returns to England from the States and moves in with her ailing mother, but her every intervention only seems to exacerbate further the older woman's deterioration.
Dismemberment of a woman
Motifs carry over from story to story – diazepam, elderly parents suffering strokes – and imagery and language echoes too. The mythically inflected
The Island
ends with the brutal, ritualistic dismemberment of a woman – “they are on top of her, the men and women, biting, tearing, ripping her skin . . . pulling free the greasy tubes and bags of her innards . . .” – just as the realist
The Gun
culminates with the graphic butchering of a shot deer in a high-rise flat.
At the end of The Woodpecker and the Wolf, the surviving astronaut, Clare, back on earth and in receipt of an unlikely happy ending, suffers an intimation that "there is something wrong with all of this but she cannot put her finger on what it might be". In Breathe, the protagonist, Carol, dreams that her father is alive again, beckoning her to join him in the heart of a huge pyre: "There is something not right about him being here but she doesn't know what."
The Pier Falls opens the collection with bodies falling into water. The Weir caps the collection with another body descending into water.
These reverberations, mirrorings and echoes are carefully inserted, and are typical of the attentiveness and thought with which Haddon has layered and constructed these stories. The supernatural elements of the more fantastical stories permeate the atmospheres of the ostensibly realist pieces, inculcating in the reader the equally disquieting and enthralling suspicion that absolutely anything might happen next, and anything frequently does.
Haddon concluded his Guardian piece by asserting that "if you are writing a short story and it is not more entertaining than the stories in that morning's newspaper or that evening's TV news, then you need to throw it away and start again".
I'm not sure "entertaining" is the most edifying descriptor for the news, but Haddon certainly fulfils his own remit. Each of these stories grip. Like the news at its queasiest, most shocking or grimly inevitable, you frequently want to look away but are compelled to keep reading. Colin Barrett is the author of the story collection Young Skins
