Mark Haddon’s 2019 novel The Porpoise draws upon the story of Pericles as told by Shakespeare, in which a prince who reveals a terrible truth about a powerful king is forced to flee for safety and in so doing is catapulted into half a lifetime of nomadic adventuring. The Porpoise is a marvellous novel, in which Haddon’s pleasure in formal complexity is more than evenly matched by his skill as a storyteller. The eight stories in this new collection are similarly compelling. Though written across a number of years and gathered from a variety of venues, they possess nonetheless a sense of common purpose, shared themes and recurring imagery, not least the dogs and monsters of the title. Diverse in setting, they share with The Porpoise a delight in the enduring power of myth and the infinite variety of ways in which myths can be retold.
The Mother’s Story is exactly that – a recasting of a familiar story from a different angle. In Haddon’s version of the myth of the Minotaur, we find ourselves not in Crete but in southern England, some centuries after the storied events supposedly took place. The climate is damp and stormy; servants fleeing the palace ask directions to Norwich; the bull-child’s mother is gifted a volume of Montaigne’s essays. A brilliant engineer is tasked with building a maze in which a monster is to be incarcerated, though who the real monster is in this story is a matter for debate. The engineer, hardened by experience, is willing to participate in a fiction, so long as he is permitted to escape with his life. His flighty son – beautiful, idealistic, doomed – wants no part in the deception. “The story will spread far and wide,” he protests to the mother, “and people will be terrified and they will love being terrified and your husband will be in possession of a weapon that has cost him no more than two holes in the ground.”
