Mark Haddon’s first foray into short fiction, a collection of nine stories, is a vibrant and compelling exploration of contrasts. Haddon masterfully juxtaposes intimacy with estrangement, the exotic with the domestic, innocence with malice, and the meticulous detail of the specific with the broad sweep of the general. These oppositions not only drive each individual story but also create a powerful dialogue across the entire collection. His characters often grapple with the desire to escape isolation, while simultaneously harboring a deep, hidden commitment to it. Similarly, his landscapes teem with the echoes of human activity, yet remain fundamentally indifferent to our fates. The titular story, “The Pier Falls,” hints at another pervasive theme: the disintegration of structures that once symbolized imperial strength, opulence, and stability, ultimately revealing their complete uselessness.
“The Pier Falls” vividly captures a single seaside afternoon in 1970. The resort town appears untouched by the radical social shifts of the 1960s and the impending transformations of the Thatcher era. While devoid of overt historical or political commentary, Haddon’s prose resonates with the underlying tensions and distinct characteristics of England’s recent past. As people stroll and enjoy pineapple fritters against a backdrop of peeling paint, a catastrophic failure occurs when “a rivet fails.” The narrative meticulously chronicles the disaster’s inexorable unspooling, minute by agonizing minute, death by death. Haddon excels at portraying the dual nature of catastrophe: its blinding speed and its agonizingly slow-motion perception, its cinematic familiarity to us, and its utter aberration from the norm.
Spectators on the shore watch in bewildered fear, mixed with a peculiar frisson of excitement. On the pier itself, an elderly woman, having succumbed to a fatal heart attack, appears merely to have dozed off. The narrative employs similes to convey the unfolding events, as if plain facts were insufficient. The crippled pier emits a sound like “a redwood being felled.” A woman shakes her unconscious husband “as if he has overslept and is late for work.” A hypothermic teenager repeatedly submerges, until “there is so little left of his mind that he lets it go as easily as if it were a book falling from his sleeping hand.” Even amidst spectacular destruction, death can be remarkably mundane.
While the characters in “The Pier Falls” remain somewhat elusive, other stories offer deeper glimpses. In “Bunny,” a morbidly obese young man finds companionship in his meticulously crafted models of the Afrika Korps and his view of a neighbor’s motorhome. Love appears to bloom when Leah, one of several adult children who find themselves returning to unsatisfying parental homes, arrives laden with junk food and ready meals. This story’s ambivalent exploration of appetite and satiety, culminating in a deeply ambiguous conclusion, makes for a profoundly unsettling read. It also connects to two other narratives, “The Gun” and “Breathe,” where the post-industrial English suburbs brush against a more rural past. In “The Gun,” two boys venture from their housing estate into the woods, their adventure marked by the stark contrast of “The bubbling runs of a blackbird’s call. An empty pack of pork scratchings trodden into cracked and powdery earth.” Their ill-conceived escapade ends tragically with the butchering of a deer on the top floor of a council tower block. In “Breathe,” a woman fleeing a failed relationship returns from the United States, her journey marked by the familiar sounds of “The train clatters north from Euston. The deep chime of the familiar. Chained dogs in scrapyards, level crossings, countryside like a postcard, all her history lessons written on the landscape, Maundy money and ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses.’”
“Breathe,” a poignant examination of mother-daughter relationships and the dangerous equation of femininity with nurturing, gives way to a wonderfully imaginative Victorian tale of derring-do that highlights masculinity. Other stories transport us far from the everyday, venturing into space or to an island strongly resembling Naxos, where Ariadne was abandoned by Theseus. These narratives delve deeply into the peculiar nature of solitude and the unpredictable depths of inner resilience.
However, it is in the collection’s centerpiece, “Wodwo,” a story spanning over sixty pages and justifying every one of them, that these themes coalesce most brilliantly. What begins as a quasi-Christmas story—middle-class siblings and their families gathering at their recently retired parents’ country home for good wine, smoked salmon quiche, and competitive bickering—unfolds into a loose reimagining of Gawain and the Green Knight. The core of the medieval tale lies in the concept of repaying a debt of violence and testing courtly ideals against something fundamentally wild. Haddon’s contemporary adaptation accentuates issues of masculinity, parental expectations, filial inadequacy, and contemporary society’s preoccupation with class and race. His “Green Knight” is a black man with a shotgun and an accent that defies assumptions, belonging neither to Trinidad nor Hackney. “Wodwo” stands as one of the most exceptional new short stories published in years; it is a piece so powerful that, if it were my publication, I would issue it as a special edition for families at Christmas, offering a comforting counterpoint to their own domestic challenges.
“Wodwo,” like many of the collection’s stories, masterfully disrupts narrative chronology by offering glimpses into characters’ future fates. This technique preemptively undercuts the reader’s engagement with the present moment, injecting a chilling premonition of what is to come. Perhaps the most striking example of this device appears in “The Gun,” a passage that functions almost as a capsule review for this remarkably compelling collection: “Halfway through the meeting a cow will fall through the roof and it won’t be anywhere near as funny as it sounds.”
