Mark Haddon: “Death is the engine that sits at the centre of all fiction”

How did your new book, Dogs and Monsters come to be? It recalls your most famous novel, The Curious Incident of Dog in the Night-time. Was that intentional?

There are dogs and then there are monstrous human beings. I like how the stories flip the meaning of that phrase around. I had a heart bypass five years ago now, which kind of put the spanner in the works. The stories have been pulled together and then edited piecemeal though I’ve picked old stories. Some of these ideas were sitting around in my notes book for a very, very long time like 20 to 30 years. As for the recall, it is going to happen all the time, isn’t it? I am extremely thankful that the book is still being read and it’s gotten an independent life after 21 years. Every other title someone writes about including a joke about a curious incident, we laugh in the family. When I die on my gravestone, it will say, ‘The Curious Incident of the Writer who should have got a second opinion’.

There is a lot of action packed into Dogs and Monsters – characters get lost in jungles, are trapped in a maze, and buildings are burnt down. It is unlike contemporary literary fiction, which you called “boring” in an interview. How do you navigate these boundaries?

Some years ago, I had tried to write many short stories, but I wasn’t succeeding. I had fallen into the trap of thinking they had to be orthodox, like Raymond Carver, and Anton Chekhov. They had to be quite minimal, melancholic, and little snapshots of bigger stories. About that time, I read two things that completely changed my mind. One was the title story of a collection called Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower. It’s a darkly funny story about two Vikings, and before they settle down or retire, they have to go on one more trip raping and pillaging in Northern England. It starts out funny as a sort of jokey thing, and it becomes rapidly darker, and serious and moving and when you get to the end of it you feel like you’ve been on a saga. But it’s 21 pages long; it’s not huge. And that made me think you can write a short story and you don’t have to play this game of the short story as a more subtle art form for the solo instrument. I much prefer the Victorian idea that a short story is just like a big story but shorter. The other piece of writing influenced me and still influences me is Werner by Jo Ann Beard. I’ve always kept that story and this piece of creative non-fiction at the forefront of my mind. If you are not as entertaining as the most entertaining story in that morning’s newspaper then you should try harder.

Don’t you think retelling myths is a harder task, since the entertaining bits have been juiced out of them?

I suppose I’d argue with the word “retelling”. I did this first with my novel, Porpoise, where I was asked to do a prose version of a Shakespeare play. Why would you touch something that was very good anyway? What changed my mind later on was well, two ideas: one, if you took one of Shakespeare’s worst plays and you have a fight with it, you throw out the bits you don’t like, you change the bits you want. So, it’s more like a conversation. And, in fact, paradoxically, it is more like what Shakespeare would have been doing.

The other thing that always fascinates me is power. Who has the power? Who is suffering? I never mentioned this in the novel at all but behind the Porpoise, I was fascinated with the framing story in One Thousand and One Nights. In the original, Scheherazade saves her life by telling a story but she is still trapped and raped every night. But that’s never mentioned in the childlike retellings. Look at the stories that aren’t being told and ask why you are being distracted and what from.

You were recommended for the OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire) this year. Why did you turn it down?

Did you read The New Statesman article I wrote? There are four reasons: one, I dislike an uncritical acceptance of the British empire. Also, I didn’t want to accept from the previous government, because they were inept, pernicious and self-serving. The third was accepting it from the royal family and I’m a staunch Republican. I dislike the idea that some people, by virtue of their birth, are considered superior. I think that’s an unpleasant and destructive idea to be woven into the fabric of a society but perhaps the most important argument was that as soon as you start accepting gifts of any kind from the establishment, it undermines your intellectual and moral independence.

There have been a lot of people who’ve turned down the honours for a long time in the UK, but quietly. I think it is quite useful to make a noise about it so that it involves other people to do the same if they’re wavering. In the current cyber landscape though, there’s so much noise already for the wrong reasons that it’s almost cacophonic.

About the online chatter around Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Some critiqued it for being inauthentic. What is your response?

If someone approaches me, I always have a conversation about it, and it always ends amicably. There was an image out there that I decided to write an autistic character, and then I decided to pull together lots of traits, which people say are stereotypical. What happened was completely the opposite. I found this voice and wanted a character, and I put in my teenage obsession with maths and physics. I was trying to create an interesting, believable, colourful, empathetic character, and I didn’t really think about labels that he would have put on himself.

The other aspect is that as soon as a label develops and people identify it, they want to emphasize how broad that label is. Of course, they’re not going to be like Christopher if they identify as someone with Autistic Spectrum Disorder. He’s just one example among many. But on the other hand, I used to get loads of letters from people who are saying that the novel is about ‘me’. Sometimes if I hear people saying, this book is wrong and stereotyped, I just want to get these two groups of people and leave them to argue it out between themselves.

As you grow older and the body battles its health issues, has your perspective on writing or creating art changed?

No, it just makes it harder to do. The thing that changed my feeling about death was the heart bypass. I stopped worrying about dying after that. When you come quite close, I found that it wasn’t as horrible as I might have thought in advance. I don’t feel troubled by the finitude of life anymore, but, when it comes to writing, death is still such a fantastic subject, such a driver of stories. Because how can it not be? I think in some ways, death, the finitude of life, is the engine that sits at the centre of all fiction.

Since you are an illustrator too. Were you tempted to illustrate parts of Dogs and Monsters?

I think that exists, in and of itself as a text. Since then, I’ve written a memoir which does have illustrations through it, which I hadn’t done for a long time. I’ve always wanted to write a graphic novel of some kind, but a graphic novel is a huge undertaking, so that may never happen, but I’m certainly still writing, thinking, and writing illustrated books. And the next book of mine will, I think, be an illustrated book.

Kanika Sharma is an independent journalist.