The Pier Falls by Mark Haddon, book review: Startling, good and gripping short stories

These nine tales are upfront and even baroque in their confrontation with the dark, disastrous side of life

The biggest surprise in this first collection of short stories by the bestselling novelist Mark Haddon is not that he can write compellingly in short form too. The shock of The Pier Falls is in the darkness of subject matter Haddon chooses to bring to centre stage.

While illness, death, sunken marriages and dysfunctional families have lain within his three novels, not least his first and most successful, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, these nine tales are far more upfront, even baroque, in their confrontation with the dark, disastrous side of life.

Each story is variously shot with danger, desperation, sudden violence, and death – so much death. Few have happy endings. Funerals and illnesses abound, lives are unravelled. In short, bad things happen to good, and bad, people.

A man is marked by a childhood memory of seeing life seep out of a deer that his friend shoots dead (“The Gun”), a family reunion is soured by a sudden act of violence (“Wodwo”), a woman commits a crime out of the love (“Bunny”) and more than one parent suffers a sudden, fatal stroke.

Often, an omniscient narrator tells the story in a dispassionate tone that verges on the clinical, though sometimes Haddon jumps inside the head of a child or a suicidal women or a middle-aged man whose life has hit the buffers and in these moments there are bursts of empathy and compassion that move the reader all the more amid this bleak terrain.

Yet for all the lost and struggling souls in these pages, The Pier Falls is a startling good, gripping read, precisely because it forces our imaginative confrontation with the darkness around us.

The first, titular story sets the tone for the rest, imagining with vivid, awful clarity, the collapse of Brighton Pier in 1970 (when the pierhead of West Pier was, in fact, closed over safety concerns). A summer’s day for sea-siders is upended when the structure keels and takes many lives down with it: “The noise stops and there is a moment of silence, as if the sea itself were holding its breath.”

The next moment brings chaos and carnage, in which children are swallowed up by the sea, fathers fall to their deaths and half their heads are torn off by the impact, young brothers languish in hypothermic waters, looking for lost sisters. All the while, the narrator updates us with a minute-by-minute death toll, as if it were a ticker on a rolling news story (“Five minutes. Fifty-eight dead”… “An hour and a half. Sixty-four dead”). This narrative voice also announces the future of the survivors as they struggle, in the present moment, to save their lives. The voice of this all-knowing, God-like narrator emerges again and again, and it is an unsettling tic.

Stories such as “Bunny”, about the mutually-needy friendship between a morbidly obese man and a down-and-out woman, verge on horror, although a supernatural element only enters in one story – “Wodwo”, about the unravelling of one smug, middle-class family after a visit by an armed stranger, but the other-wordly elements here are kept anchored by realism.

The final, quietly tender story, “The Weir”, of a depressed man who saves a woman from drowning (and who subsequently, in her own ways, saves him), keeps to the collection’s elegiac tone but shows us too that more often than not, darkness might not be quite so frightening, or so monstrous, if we chose to confront, and maybe accept, it.

Jonathan Cape, £16.99