The opening title story of Mark Haddon's new collection, The Pier Falls, adopts a deliberate air of reportage or verisimilitude, almost to the point that your reviewer was tempted to check Google to learn if in fact a pier actually collapsed on the given date, July 23, 1970. One discovers that two spans of Cleveden pier did in fact collapse in October 1970, though, thankfully, without loss of life.
Maybe this event is what inspired Haddon to take it further. In any case, 64 lives are lost in 90 minutes in Haddon’s gripping tale as the catastrophe is recalled in strict chronological detail, beginning with rivets giving way. The story is told with forensic precision in short, telegramatic sentences, as the pier effectively slices into two sections and all hell breaks loose.
Haddon vividly conjures the general panic, the unreal atmosphere, the desperation of people searching for loved ones, the helicopters ferrying the survivors to safety. He hones in on the varying personality quirks, the survival of the fittest and the not so fit.
A man opts to swim frantically to shore rather than be rescued by in the helicopter as he has a dreadful fear of flying. A young boy refuses to come out of the water because, as it later transpires, he believes his sister is still in the water and he does not want to desert her. There is a sense of dark horror about the dispassionate description of this boy of thirteen who ‘floats in a dark recess between two fallen girders. He refuses to come out and will not respond to their calls.’
Haddon is also a poet - and indeed illustrator - and his deft imagery can make you pause and marvel a little. In The Pier Falls, he describes an aquarium in which `the dolphins turn in their blue prison.’ In the story The Island, a jellyfish is `a ball of light in a white bag with a charred rim’ which `pulses in the slow wind of the current.’
They are long stories in the main and the 31-page The Island - not even the longest - is arguably too long. The poem employs elements of Greek myth as an unnamed Ariadne-like figure is abandoned on a remote island by a Theseus -like personage. The young princess endures terrible privations as she tries to stay alive. Haddon evokes the not-quite-deserted island atmosphere with a sense of visceral terror and wild beauty, a blend of Lord of the Flies, Castaway and Robinson Crusoe, if you will.
In The Weir, a recently-separated husband jumps into a weir to rescue a deranged young woman, whom he takes home with the woman's best interests at heart. But he begins to regret helping her into warm clothes and acceding to her request that she not be brought to hospital. 'He's disappointed to realise that he doesn't like her very much.' However, that sentiment changes and Haddon tracks the change with great insight.
The stories are not all good and Haddon can be too showy with verbal pyro-technique. If you are in the business, as Haddon is, of zooming around your imagination and testing its limits, you might teeter into sensory overload and melodrama, as in the story, Breathe, in which a young woman revisits a dysfunctional mother. It just feels too gratuitously unpleasant, like a bad horror movie, and it ends in a rather ho-hum nightmare sequence, dirty realism gone mad. Hats off, nevertheless, to Mark Haddon for thinking outside the box as he projected these stories and set to work.
Paddy Kehoe
