The bestselling writer Mark Haddon tells Horatia Harrod that no character is too strange to be familiar. Plus: an exclusive extract from his new novel, The Red House
‘If you’re trying to be a successful writer, and you go into a second-hand bookshop,” says Mark Haddon, eyeing me dubiously, “it’s the graveyard of people whose books haven’t been wanted.” Haddon’s third and latest novel, The Red House, is set in Hay-on-Wye, the capital of second-hand bookshops. So I have arranged to meet him in a second-hand bookshop, where I learn that Haddon gravitates towards poetry, drama, fiction, neuroscience and philosophy – and, more saliently, that he hates second-hand bookshops. Five minutes later we have decamped to a café across the road, and our brief, enervating visit is forgotten.
I can’t help but be surprised by Haddon’s wariness. After all, his 2003 debut, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, sold two million copies. It was the bestselling novel by a British writer of that decade and has become, as Haddon himself puts it, “a vaguely global institution”. (This summer the playwright Simon Stephens will bring it to the stage at the National Theatre.) But Haddon’s feelings about the book are ambivalent. “The books I’d always loved were hated by some people,” he says. “I was a little bit afraid of lowest common denominatorism. I think good books have to make a few people angry.”Fortuitously enough, cafés are important in Haddon’s writing life. He wrote parts of The Red House in the basement of a café in north Oxford, where he lives with his wife and their two sons. “We’re a very happy family, which is rather poor fuel for a novel,” he says. The café was a place to observe and listen.
Other activities you might loosely term “research” include watching television and reading magazines and newspapers. Haddon has a particular penchant for real-life stories – “‘I threw myself under a tube train’,” he suggests, “or, ‘My father had a sex change’.” “I haven’t done a transgendered character yet,” he says thoughtfully, sipping a cup of green tea, “but I quite fancy that as a subject.”
I ask him whether he has an affinity with unusual people, outsiders. The Curious Incident was narrated by a meticulous teenage savant; the follow-up, A Spot of Bother, featured a hysterical hypochondriac and, even more daringly, a dull gay man. But no, he looks aghast: “You’re making me sound like Lady Di.”
Full piece and extract at The Telegraph
Full piece and extract at The Telegraph