The British writer Mark Haddon is best known for his 2003 novel “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” in which a neurodivergent teenage boy solves a murder mystery and wins the reader’s heart. Haddon is equally accomplished at creating gripping narratives and sympathetic characters in his shorter fiction. The stories in this splendid new collection are inspired by an eclectic variety of sources, including a novel by H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf’s first published story and, as with some of Haddon’s previous work, Greek mythology.
The narrator of the aptly titled “The Mother’s Story,” a retelling of the myth of the Minotaur, is an unstoppable maternal force. Fabricated rumors claim that her newborn son, Paul, is a monstrosity, the result of her coupling with a bull, and her icy royal husband has the child imprisoned in an almost impenetrable underground dungeon, where he’s said to eat other prisoners alive. Years later, she manages to visit him daily — offering consolation through songs and food and declarations of her love — and eventually to free him. Though she admits Paul “did not look like other boys,” she tenders only a few scant descriptions and insists, with thrilling certainty, that he is one.
“The Quiet Limit of the World” updates the myth of Tithonus, in which the goddess Eos asks Zeus to grant her mortal lover eternal life, forgetting to add the bonus of eternal youth. With the passage of time, Tithonus suffers the vicissitudes of endless aging — the continuous loss of loved ones and even his own identity, the ongoing erosion of his own body — while bearing witness to the horrific events of modern civilization, from the bubonic plague to the bombing of Hiroshima. He has even lost his desire to live, making a strong case for mortality.
The book’s many animal references — to dogs, mostly, but also to foxes, apes, deer — demonstrate Haddon’s respect for the natural world. The narrator of “The Mother’s Story” teaches her caged son to sing, and what comes out is “not unlike the noise I imagine a dog might make if it were musical.” The story “D.O.G.Z.” eloquently revives canines from literature and history: Snoopy; Laika; Jip from “David Copperfield,” dying along with his beloved mistress, Dora. “Here is the fox terrier Nipper listening patiently with a cocked head to a windup Edison-Bell phonograph,” Haddon writes. “And there is Flush” — the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel — “lying at the feet of Miss Barrett in the cushioned cave they share on Wimpole Street.”
“My Old School” is a searing and suspenseful account of adolescent boys trying to fit in, or rather not stand out, at a sadistic boarding school run by Fairfax, the housemaster who inflicts humiliation and corporal punishment regularly, even arbitrarily. (After wrongly beating a child he’s mistaken for someone else, Fairfax says, “You’ve got six on credit, then.”) The cruelty trickles down to the students: As one tormented boy puts it, in a marked understatement, “Just, you know, some of the boys can be really unkind.” As an adult, another classmate recalls feeling “the sensation of being trapped inside a life I couldn’t bear and there being no way out.”
Amid such unsparing darkness, Haddon scatters lighter moments, too. A spoiled princess asserts that “being marveled at was part of her job,” and an aging woman who’s drinking whiskey and smoking a cigarette after her daughter’s wedding thinks: “Mother of the Bride. It sounded like the title of a horror film.”
The work of a consummate storyteller, the brilliantly conceived “Dogs and Monsters” illuminates a variety of species, both real and mythical, including our own.
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