“My Old School,” one of eight stories in Mark Haddon’s grim new collection, recalls – at first – some of the novels Roald Dahl conjured from his time at Repton. It’s no secret that the British boarding school experience was often bleak and full of abuse; recent memoirs by Earl Spencer and Alex Renton provide bitter testimony. In Dahl’s 1953 story “Galloping Foxley,” a commuter sees a fellow passenger on the train and is convinced that this was the boy who brutally beat him at school. The twist is that the man, confronted by the narrator, says he has gone to another institution; the reader must decide which is true.
Haddon’s story seems to be along the same lines, opening with a glib recollection: “After all these years, I can still remember the first time I saw him.” It’s 1976 at a small British boarding school, and the narrator recalls the arrival of Graham Meyer, another unfortunate 12-year-old doomed – like our storyteller – to be the victim of incessant, sanctioned brutality from teachers and students. Haddon’s writing is stark and claustrophobic: “I wasn’t suicidal, but I remember feeling trapped in a life I couldn’t bear, with no way out.” This is an immensely gripping, bluntly uncomfortable story about loyalty, or the lack of it; an exploration of how the consequences of our actions can reverberate for decades. It’s much less clear-cut than Dahl’s work, and more complex.
The titular “dogs and monsters” are in all of us. The realism of “My Old School” is an outlier; most of the stories rework classic myths and legends – as Haddon did to brilliant effect in his 2019 Goldsmiths Prize-nominated novel “The Porpoise” – or evoke unsettling science fiction.
“The Quiet Limit of the World,” for example, is based on the story of Tithonus, with whom the Dawn fell in love. She asked her father Zeus to grant him eternal life, but also forgot to ask him for eternal youth. Haddon elegantly illustrates the result as Tithonus moves through the millennia, risking his wife and family but watching them—and their children and grandchildren—die, leaving him in loneliness. He witnesses the world’s progress, from the printing press to the airplane, but none of it affects him: “His previous inability to be touched by what is happening around him seems like a loan he took out in ignorance, and which must now be repaid immediately and in full.” The vivacious young woman who visits him every morning has no idea what she has done.
Also effective is The Wilderness, based on HG Wells’ 1896 novel The Island of Dr. Moreau. Here, a young woman, Tegan, is on a bicycle ride through the wilderness when she takes a spectacular fall and is rescued by a stranger who takes her to a mysterious facility surrounded by barbed wire. Wells’ Moreau used vivisection to mix humans and animals for his sinister purposes; Haddon’s telling is a nod to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna – pioneer developers of the Nobel Prize-winning CRISPR gene-editing technology. The ending is disappointing; it’s almost as if Haddon was building to something longer and just stopped.
DOGZ is built around ideas rather than plot. It begins with Actaeon, torn apart by his dogs when he sees Aphrodite bathing, and ends with Laika, the dog sent into space by the Soviets and roasted alive. It’s Haddon’s full-throated embodiment of canine sensibility that makes the whole thing surprisingly moving.
Least satisfying is the first part, “The Mother’s Story,” which roughly brings the legend of the Minotaur into the present day and looks at it from the point of view of the monster’s mother. A good idea, but the piece itself is oddly cold and unsatisfying. The reader feels neither her terror nor her love; there is something almost superficial about Haddon’s writing style. One longs for what is surely the finest example of the genre, Angela Carter’s great 1979 story “The Bloody Chamber.” But that is a high bar indeed. Overall, “Dogs and Monsters” is an eclectic collection of stories; even when they are the least consistent, they understand that both mortals and immortals are rarely ruled by their better natures.
Dogs and Monsters by Mark Haddon is published by Chatto & Windus for £20. To order your copy, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
