Mark Haddon

• Born: September 26, 1962
• Place of Birth: Northampton, England

Biography

Mark Haddon was born on September 26, 1962, in Northampton, a populous area of England’s East Midlands region. Although the author has been reserved about offering information about his early years, he has noted in interviews that in writing fiction for children—the literary genre in which he had his first success—he sensed that he was always writing for the child he once was. He has also said that he read little fiction as a child; instead, he read books about science, particularly chemistry and archeology. His favorite book was Origins of the Universe (1972) by Albert Hinkelbein. He imagined that he would become a paleontologist. In his adolescence, he discovered poetry, another of his adult writing interests.

Haddon attended Uppingham School and received a B.A. in English from Merton College, Oxford, in 1981. In 1984, he received an M.A. from Edinburgh University. He married Sos Eltis, a fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. The couple had two children and settled in Oxford.

In his earlier life, Haddon worked at a variety of jobs, which may have influenced his view of the world as it appears in his fiction, as well as in his works for children. His early part-time job as a caregiver to patients with multiple sclerosis and autism surely helped his understanding of learning-disabled people, such as Christopher in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), and his work as an illustrator and cartoonist must have readied him to produce his illustrated books for children.

Haddon began publishing books for children in the late 1980s; he has noted ironically that he once imagined such writing would be easier than writing for adults. From the start, his children’s books incorporated humor and mystery and often demonstrated a powerful empathy with his characters, qualities which also have been praised in his adult fiction. In 1994, Haddon published four books in the Baby Dinosaurs series. In the mid-1990s, he wrote and illustrated the first of the popular Agent Z series books, which chronicled the adventures of three friends who form a club and find themselves involved in a variety of humorous escapades.

Two of Haddon’s books for young people have been praised for exemplifying his gift for empathy. In The Real Porky Philips (1994), the central character is an overweight boy who finds a way to validate his identity with his school world; the novel was short-listed for the Smarties Prize. In Titch Johnson, Almost World Champion (1993), the central character is able to overcome his self-image as a loser. Another of Haddon’s works for children, The Sea of Tranquility (1996), has roots in his youthful interest in space travel and the first moon landing. Haddon has also written for children’s television.

Despite his success as a children’s author, Haddon has had an ongoing interest in writing adult fiction, an interest which ultimately led to The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. He has told interviewers that his earlier work included not only the seventeen published children’s books but also five unpublished novels, some of which he has called “breathtakingly bad.” One of them, he has jokingly suggested, should be published as a “dreadful warning to young writers who want to be the next James Joyce.”

Publication of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time became a surprising route into adult fiction because in England, at his agent’s arrangement, it was published simultaneously by two publishing houses, one for adult literature and another for children’s literature. The two versions were identical except for their covers; even the “adult” language was maintained in the young people’s version. (Haddon has pointed out that all children know that adults swear, and in the novel, only the adults use swear words.) The novel’s double success was a surprise to Haddon, although he has expressed interest in continuing to write for adults, as well as in pursuing his interest in poetry.

In 2007, Haddon wrote the television movie Coming Down the Mountain about the relationship between two brothers, one of whom has Down syndrome. A Spot of Bother was made into a comedic French language movie and released in France in 2010.

In 2016, Haddon published The Pier Falls, a collection of short stories. Haddon is also the author of a book of poetry, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea (2005).

In 2019, Haddon published his novel The Porpoise about a young girl trapped in a sexually abusive relationship by her father. Just weeks after the book was published, Haddon underwent a heart bypass operation that left him suffering from self-described “brain fog.” A year later, he contracted a lingering COVID-19 infection that made his conditions worse. As a result, he struggled to read and write for much of the next five years. According to a 2024 article he penned for the Guardian newspaper, Haddon said the fog was slowly beginning to lift.

Analysis

Haddon once noted in a newspaper essay that Jane Austen’s novels focus on ordinary people, going about ordinary lives at the end of the eighteenth century. What makes readers admire her work, he claimed, is the sympathy she exhibits for those ordinary young men and women who populate her novels. One might say much the same about Haddon’s first two adult novels, which, like Austen’s, are populated by ordinary people whom Haddon invites the reader to feel for and even to like. Superficially, the characters of these novels are quite different.

The adolescent Christopher Boone, the narrator of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, tells his story with the affectless voice of a person with Asperger’s syndrome. He is incapable of analyzing the emotions of the people around him or of interpreting their motives in his dizzying world, where he always teeters on the edge of sensory overload. The four characters who provide the point of view in A Spot of Bother (2006), on the other hand, spend a great deal of time analyzing themselves and others. All of them, however, are part of a very ordinary world. Christopher is trying to understand who killed the poodle of one of his neighbors, and in the process he comes to learn the secret of his mother’s death and his family’s breakdown. The four members of the middle-class Hall family in A Spot of Bother are grappling with the usual materials of comedy—three love affairs, which look likely to disintegrate, a family wedding, and, the salt in the comic froth, a grand-scale mid-life crisis.

The last decades have increased public understanding of what the medical world calls the autism spectrum, so that Christopher Boone’s particular personality traits in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time may remind readers of what countless magazine articles and television specials have often described. The person with Asperger’s syndrome, a high functioning variety of autism, may have difficulty empathizing with others and with understanding the significance of others’ gestures and facial expressions. Such persons may dislike being touched, may insist on rigid routines for activities and even for foods, and may find loud noises frightening and painful. They may find figurative language and jokes baffling, and they may have their own idiosyncratic passions and monomanias and their own curious means for comforting themselves, such as rocking or hand flapping, when the world frightens them with incursions of noise or other sensory impressions. Haddon’s success lies in creating a voice for Christopher that rings true but still allows the reader to care about him. Part of the novel’s humor rises from Christopher’s misinterpretation of events around him, but because those events are described through Christopher’s eyes, the reader inevitably identifies with him as well. His fear of people he does not know forces him into a complicated mental gymnastic in order to find a railroad station; he is more comfortable making mental maps than asking directions. His solution is funny, but it also establishes his intelligence.

Haddon accomplishes the same effect in portraying George Hall’s mental breakdown in A Spot of Bother. Like Christopher, George imagines that even his most irrational actions are perfectly logical, an effect of stress. Haddon is particularly skilled at creating lifelike descriptions of disintegrating mental states, the state which makes Christopher sit immobilized on a bench in a subway station for six hours or which leads George to attempt do-it-yourself surgery on what he believes to be a tumor on his hip.

It may seem superficial to note that communication is an important theme in Haddon’s work; after all, communication is a key to most human relationships. Some critics faulted A Spot of Bother for offering situation-comedy situations and solutions, last-minute epiphanies that some readers found too pat for comfort. However, even truisms can be meaningful. In The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, most of the novel’s action results from Christopher’s inability to communicate with others, and one of his father’s most appealing qualities is his effort to make his son understand his love for him. Tellingly, father and son’s estrangement arises from his father’s attempt to hide the fact that Christopher’s mother has left them by telling Christopher that his mother has died. Christopher’s terrifying journey from Swindon to London is precipitated by his finding a packet of the letters that his mother has faithfully written to him.

In A Spot of Bother, the whole Hall family is paralyzed by the members’ failure to talk to one another or to look much beyond themselves. George and Jean are in late middle age, and their marriage has faded into wordless routines that have sent each of them in different directions. Jean is involved in a love affair, while George, whose focus is even more inward than hers, concludes that he is dying of cancer. Their grown daughter Katie seems about to make a second bad marriage, though neither of her parents is able to tell her their concerns, particularly because ever since her explosive adolescence, talking with her has been a bit like walking through a minefield. George and Jean have also been unable to talk honestly with their son Jamie, who has told them that he is gay but who has never brought his partner, Tony, to meet them. Now Jamie’s relationship with Tony seems to have ruptured, in part because Jamie has been unable to articulate—or even to admit to himself—the depth of his feelings for Tony. Haddon’s particular gift is his ability to make his readers care about these people, even while he describes the world as it is viewed through their very limited vision. “Only connect” is the motto the English novelist E. M. Forster provided for his characters in Howards End (1910); it would carry equal weight in Haddon’s work.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

First published: 2003

Type of work: Novel

When fifteen-year-old Christopher discovers that his mother is alive in London, he sets off on a journey to find her, despite the many ways in which he is limited by Asperger’s syndrome.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time established Mark Haddon as a writer of adult fiction. It won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize, TheGuardian Children’s Fiction Prize, and the Booktrust award for teenage fiction. The book was adapted for the stage by Simon Stephens and won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Play for its Broadway run. The novel’s main appeal is the character of its narrator, fifteen-year-old Christopher Boone, whose counselor in his special-needs school has suggested that he write a book, and so he does. Although the words “autism” and “Asperger’s syndrome” are never mentioned in the novel, it soon becomes clear that Christopher has a high functioning form of autism. Because of the particular way his brain is wired, fiction is unappealing to him; he cannot tell lies or understand most made-up stories. As he tells his narrative, the list of his quirks grows ever larger. He cannot eat things colored yellow or brown. He cannot be touched. Seeing three red cars in a row on the way to school means that it will be a good day.

Christopher, however, is a very bright child. In mathematics, his abilities are far beyond his age. He is intensely observant of the world around him, even though its human inhabitants are mostly a mystery to him. He loves puzzles and is very good at them, so it is no surprise that he likes the Sherlock Holmes mysteries of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Holmes’s dispassionate analysis of clues is especially appealing to him. Thus he has decided to write a mystery to address his counselor’s assignment.

From the opening pages, Christopher’s special gifts, as well as his special limitations, are apparent. He numbers his chapters using only prime numbers (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and so forth). He always knows the precise time, and he notices that one of his teachers wears brown shoes with approximately sixty small circular holes in them. When Christopher finds a dead poodle, he is sad; he likes dogs, whose moods are much less puzzling than human moods, and he resolves to discover its killer.

Christopher’s discovery of the dog leads to a skirmish with the dog’s owner, who calls the police. When the policeman asks too many questions too fast, Christopher employs his usual method of coping with overload—he lies down and begins groaning. When the policeman tries to force him to get up, he becomes frantic and hits the man because of his intolerance for being touched. When his father comes to get him out of jail, the two fan out their fingers and touch their hands together; this gesture, created by his father, means “I love you” and substitutes for the hug that Christopher cannot bear. Throughout the novel, Christopher’s father seems to be a man who is doing his best in a nearly impossible circumstance, raising his difficult son alone. However, here his father testily tells Christopher to give up the idea of investigating the poodle’s death.

Christopher does not stop the investigation, however. It is the subject of his book, and he begins interviewing some of the more approachable neighbors, but timidly, because he is fearful of strangers. When his father learns of the book, he throws it away, with the inevitable result that Christopher searches until he finds it in his father’s closet, along with a packet of letters his mother has written him every week since his father told him she died of a heart attack. Now he learns that she is alive, living in London with the husband of the neighbor who owned the dog. She confesses that she thinks Christopher is better off with his father, who has more patience than she did; nevertheless, she loves Christopher and is puzzled that he has never written her.

The letters occupy the exact center of the novel and form a turning point for what happens to Christopher, for when his father discovers him reading the letters, he tries to explain his terrible lie, talks about his liaison with the dog-owning neighbor after his wife’s departure, and finally confesses that he himself killed the dog in a bout of anger. Christopher is left with only one possible conclusion: His father is a dangerous man who may also try to kill him.

That conclusion leads Christopher to start his bold trip to London. He surmounts all the obstacles, although sometimes he does so awkwardly, hiding in a luggage compartment for most of the train trip, sitting terrified in the subway station for six hours, and risking his life among the subway rails to rescue his pet rat Toby. When at last he arrives at his mother’s apartment, he is met with the awkward fact that her partner is not at all glad to share the flat with someone whose needs are as complicated as Christopher’s. In the end, his mother moves back to Swindon with Christopher, although she does not return to his father. In the novel’s last chapters, it is clear that his father is willing to make a herculean effort to regain Christopher’s trust. He takes the first step by buying him a dog, to Christopher’s pleasure. Christopher passes his A-level mathematics exam with an “A,” adding to the novel’s hopeful conclusion.

A Spot of Bother

First published: 2006

Type of work: Novel

George Hall is thrust into a deep depression when he concludes that he has cancer; meanwhile, his wife, daughter, and son all face crises of their own.

The domestic comedy of A Spot of Bother is presented from four viewpoints. It begins as George Hall, a retired playground equipment manufacturer, decides that an odd spot on his hip is cancerous. In “his” chapters, he grapples with growing terror at the thought that he is about to die. Despite his doctor’s reassurance, he sinks ever deeper into angst, finally attempting to remove the spot himself. A hospital stay and a prescription for Valium give him some respite, but soon his despair reemerges, leaving him nearly incapacitated.

His wife, Jean, is little help. Over the years, their marriage has staled, and she is involved in a love affair with David, one of George’s former coworkers. At the time of George’s crisis, she is upset that their daughter, Katie, is about to marry Ray, a man the family has called “unsuitable.” Her concern for Katie and her interest in David leave her little time for George’s eccentric behavior, and anyway, George is unable to tell her about his fears, especially after he observes her and David making love in their bed.

Katie herself is unsure of her motives for marrying Ray. He seems much better than her first husband, and he is unfailingly kind to her little boy, Jacob. Moreover, he has a nice house and plenty of money. What he lacks is Katie’s intellectual achievement, and she fears that she is about to marry for security, not love.

Her brother Jamie, a successful real estate agent, also has love problems. He and his boyfriend Tony have just split, and Jamie must come to terms with his guilt in spoiling their relationship, as well as with his concern for his sister’s welfare. He dreads the upcoming wedding, knowing that his parents are hypersensitive to what others may think of his homosexuality. His unwillingness to invite Tony to the wedding was the precipitating factor in their breakup.

The novel’s many short chapters circle through these characters’ concerns and the various crises that arise from the on-again, off-again wedding and George’s erratic behavior; at one point, he crouches behind a chair and moos softly. Because this is a comedy, the errors multiply on the day of the wedding, but each character arrives at last at an understanding of the importance of true love. Everyone realizes what a sterling fellow Ray is; Jamie manages to patch things up with Tony; Jean knows that she belongs with George, who in turn realizes that the spot on his hip is just what the doctor diagnosed—eczema. Among all these rather neat epiphanies, all the characters come to understand that human attachments are more significant than what others may think about them. None of them says “Only connect,” but they all know it.

Summary

Mark Haddon’s work is essentially comic. His skill is in creating voices for his comic characters, in making their breakdowns both funny and moving, and reminding his readers that human connections make life bearable. His ability to create characters who are both funny and empathetic appeals to both young and old readers.

Bibliography

“A Family with Failings.” The Bookseller, May 12, 2006, 32.

Haddon, Mark. “The Curious Incident of the Author Who Couldn’t Read or Write: Mark Haddon on Long Covid and Overcoming Five Years of Brain Fog." Guardian, 16 Aug. 2024, www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/aug/16/the-curious-incident-of-the-author-who-couldnt-read-or-write-mark-haddon-on-long-covid-and-overcoming-five-years-of-brain-fog. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

“Mind the Gap: Mark Haddon Brings Sense to the Crossover Debate.” The Bookseller 124, no. 5 (April 16, 2004): 20.

Muller, Vivienne. “Constituting Christopher: Disability Theory and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” Explorations into Children’s Literature 16, no. 12 (December, 2006): 118-126.

Webber, Imogen Lloyd. "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time Sets Broadway Closing Date."Broadway Buzz, 22 Mar. 2016, www.broadway.com/buzz/182916/tony-winning-the-curious-incident-of-the-dog-in-the-night-time-sets-broadway-closing-date/. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.

Wroe, Nicholas. "Finding the Vital Spark." The Guardian, 23 Sept. 2005 www.theguardian.com/books/2005/sep/24/poetry.booksforchildrenandteenagers. Accessed 26 Sept. 2024.