The human characters in Mark Haddon’s second collection of short stories often find themselves out of joint with time and with their surroundings: thrust into a world altered by a sudden slippage. The Wilderness, which the book’s afterword tells us was inspired by HG Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, sees a young woman sailing over the handlebars of her bicycle and into the jaws of a ravine, where she lies, expecting death, for several days. Rescued by a passerby, her problems are only just beginning: she wakes in a mysterious compound, where she eventually discovers rows of caged animals and, ultimately, caged women. It is not unreasonable to imagine that she might soon be joining them.
Evidently, it’s an unsettling premise, but Haddon’s interest lies not in its most outlandish elements – the possibility of gene-editing programmes that may strip away what makes us recognisably human – but in the unsteadiness and disruption already lodged in our minds, ready to make us mistrust what appears to be in front of us. It’s there too in The Temptation of St Anthony, which retells the trials that tormented Anthony the Great during his withdrawal from the world, most notably in the form of the shapeshifting devil, at one moment appearing as his sister to berate him for abandoning her, at another as legions of disciples ready to flatter his ego. It takes a stray dog to bring him back down to earth.
