Book Review

By Derryll White

Haddon, Mark (2016). The Pier Falls and Other Stories.

“… every thought of him is a knife turning in the wound love made.”

Unlike many readers, I am a short story junky. I admire the brilliance a writer can unleash in this form – fast, concise, electric. When a number of stories by the same author are pulled together in a themed way, as in this collection, it is an exciting challenge to discover the pathways that connect.

The first story, ‘The Pier Falls,’ is very direct with an unnamed narrator that gives the whole tragedy a certain unreality – moments of terror and terrible loss mirrored by moments of bravery and caring. Haddon has the wonderful ability to create small phrases, images that still the reader for a moment, force a pause of contemplation – “the pocked coin of the moon.”

By the conclusion of the second story, ‘The Island,’ the reader has a sense that one of the inter-connected pathways might be loss. The language is bleak, but beautiful. The images and thoughts are contemplative, sad and yet somehow freeing. Death is inevitable but what do we learn along the way?

“He could no longer get an erection, let alone masturbate so there was no relief from these images and every fantasy left a small bruise on his heart.”

That is the kind of feeling we get for Bunny, the obese character in the third story. Haddon has a way of writing that both softens and hardens feelings, evoking both sympathy and loathing in the reader with a simple short phrase. He recognizes that without concerted effort we will all die alone.

All of us have a number of shortcomings we can fall prey to – envy, lethargy, ambition, indulgence – and Mark Haddon explores many of them here. And pervading all is a sense of how alone we can become, any of us, if we don’t pay attention to our shortcomings, work hard and embrace others. It is not a kind world for the ignorant and the author’s insights provide some tangible pathways to survival. Just think how quickly and easily you can lose all you have – money, family, self-worth – and what you might do to prevent such losses. Be kind. Love others? Haddon doesn’t provide solutions but he sure got me to ask the questions. I loved this book.

****

Excerpts from the novel:

WOMAN’S WORLD – How alike they are, she and her mother, these blank sheets on which men have written their stories, the white paper under the words, making all their achievements possible and contributing nothing to the meaning.

THE RECKONING – The room is warm and clean and uncluttered, a cube of three white walls, a white ceiling and a window which constitutes most of the fourth wall, through which he can see a line of trees and a featureless, off-white sky beyond. He wonders briefly if this is the laboratory to which you are returned after the experiment of your life has been allowed to run its full course.

CHANGE – Today will be different, not simply shocking but one of those moments when time itself seems to fork and fracture and you look back and realise that if things had happened only slightly differently you would be leading one of those other ghost lives speeding away into the dark.

DISTANCE – She books into the Premier Inn and eats a sub-standard lasagne. Her body is still on Eastern Standard Time so she sits in her tiny room and tries to read the Sarah Waters she bought at the airport but finds herself thinking instead about her father’s last days, that short steep slope from diagnosis to death.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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