Uninterested in truth

It would be doing an injustice to Mark Haddon to accuse him of tapping into the current trend for reimagining Greek and Roman myths from female perspectives (Circe, Clytemnestra, Ariadne, Briseis, Helen of Troy). His riffs on the loves of goddesses and mortals imply wider themes, not least that of storytelling itself. As interested in sudden transformations as Ovid, whose account of Actaeon he builds on in his latest collection of stories, Dogs and Monsters, Haddon follows his imagination from the human into the animal realm and beyond, into the divine.

“The Mother’s Story” transforms Pasiphae, the mother of the Minotaur, from a sexual pervert into the maligned wife of a tyrannical (pre-Reformation) English monarch. The king cannot countenance a disabled child, and its mother listens with horror to the solution proposed by “the engineer” (the court’s Daedalus figure). The contraption that supposedly helped her to conjoin with a bull, together with the sexual frenzy that supposedly urged her on, is wholly confected, but the scurrilous tale will be believed, even by those who have seen and heard the poor child imprisoned in the “labyrinth” (a simple cell). As the engineer breezily assures her: “People are seldom interested in the truth. It’s so much easier to believe in the macabre, the preposterous”. And who doesn’t love gossip about a privileged female? While her daughter (Ariadne) curries favour with the king, the queen and her friend the pastry cook attempt to bring some comfort to the infant, denied toys, stimulation and human interaction.

Arrested development of another kind is at the heart of “The Quiet Limit of the World” (a phrase from Tennyson), which evokes contemporary tech bros with eerily shiny skin and taut physiques, who aim with pills, exercise and their own Daedalus boffins to extend life indefinitely. The racked and desiccated form of Tithonus lies helpless in a nursing home, having been condemned to eternal life by his lover, the goddess of the dawn, who forgot to ask her father for the eternal youth to accompany it.

For the myth of Actaeon, retold as “D.O.G.Z”, Haddon provides a glimpse into the afterlife of the hunter’s hounds. What does it mean to have eaten the flesh of one who has been in contact with the divine? Leaping off from Ovid, he imagines the sudden heaviness of the stag’s head on the man’s body, and the way the antlers entangle him in surrounding boughs. His dogs have lived on and procreated after their grisly feast, their genes descending to such famous canines as the Hound of the Baskervilles, Nipper, the HMV mascot, and the Russian stray Laika, catapulted to the heavens just as similar unfortunates in myth become constellations.

“The Wilderness” picks up from H. G. Wells’s novel The Island of Dr Moreau, pushing further the idea of the human-animal hybrid and updating Wells’s science to involve gene editing. A Zeus-like scientist, John Magnusson, uses an imprisoned woman as a helpless subject, sending a virus “through her brain chopping out carefully chosen genetic sequences” and replacing them with equivalents from a dog. “Is it not extraordinary?” he informs the female explorer unfortunate enough to fall into his clutches.

Commissioned pieces often sit uncomfortably in otherwise coherently themed collections. “The Bunker”, written for English Heritage and inspired by the York Cold War Bunker, features a post-apocalyptic world, including more dogs (dead ones this time) and, once again, the total indifference of deities. “I would pray for God to go with you”, says an official to the woman who can slip between the present and the future, “but my faith in the old chap has been somewhat undermined of late”. The tale has its merits, but the airlocks, pressure gauges, warning lights and seals are perhaps best appreciated by those who have already visited the site.

The unsettling “My Old School” would seem like the outlier, dealing with bullying at a boys’ boarding school. But it too concerns the way truth is rubbed away over time and fashioned into a myth convenient for the teller. Whether supernatural, realistic, SF or mythological, Mark Haddon’s supple and emotionally involving tales turn on the observation of Pasiphae: that monsters don’t exist. After all, if it exists, then it’s not a monster.

Suzi Feay is the former literary editor of the Independent on Sunday and hosts a YouTube channel of author interviews, Suzi’s Book Bag

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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