MARK HADDON

Every so often, it happens that David really does beat Goliath. Last week Mark Haddon completed his rise from being an obscure children’s writer to winning the Whitbread Book of the Year prize for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. The novel, about a teenager with Asperger’s syndrome who is as brilliant at maths as he is clueless at understanding other people is at once a detective story, a literary triumph and a commercial success that has grown by word of mouth to beat David Beckham’s autobiography, Harry Potter and the Atkins Diet. When it first came out in May last year, it gained rapturous reviews, but little fame until John Carey, last year’s Booker Chairman, lamented his fellow-judges’ refusal in these pages to put it onto the short-list. Then, its sales just mushroomed. People are passionate about its wit, its brilliance and its humane insight into the milder forms of autism. News of Haddon’s win was greeted with universal joy and approval, and it currently has an exceptional 163 reader’s reviews on amazon.com.

“Actually, it’s just got to no.1, ” says Haddon, diffidently. He is tired after all the Whitbread celebrations - the kitchen of his Oxford house is heaving with congratulatory bouquets – but more so from a roller-coaster ride of emotion following the birth of his second son nine weeks ago. His wife Sos, an English lecturer at Brasenose, was knocked over on her bicycle when she was six months pregnant. When the news about having been long-listed for the Booker Prize came in he was more preoccupied with having found her in the road in a pool of blood and learning whether she and their unborn child would live. Fortunately, they did, and Zach was born nine weeks ago. Despite a frustrated literary ambition that “almost sent me barking mad” four years ago, winning the Whitbread has been incidental to his family’s health and happiness.

It could not have happened to a nicer man, for unlike his creation Christopher Boone, Mark Haddon has a rare blend of intelligence, sensitivity to others and modesty. He creases himself into guileless rumples of anxiety in order to answer each question, and seems, with a hoop in one ear and a gentle defencelessness of manner, ten years younger than 41. Haddon’s publisher, David Fickling, says he “fell in love with him as soon as we met. I loved the book, but when I met him I thought, Here is a mind I want to hear more from. There’s no self-deception going on, no illusions.”

Christopher Boone’s seemingly flat, unemotional voice, comparable to a genius Adrian Mole, is the more remarkable for emerging out of such a creator. Haddon is not himself autistic, nor has he based his narrator on anyone, though as he says, “everyone now knows a family with a member diagnosed as having Asperger’s, and I worked with disabled people for some years after Oxford. What I started with was the image of a dog with a gardening fork in it. Then I got Christopher’s toneless voice. It was obvious from the start I had to make him a real human being, not medically correct.”

Haddon himself grew up “a depressed, anxious child” in Northampton, the son of an architect, and spent five profoundly unpleasant years at Uppington public school (Stephen Fry’s alma mater). He loved Lord of the Rings, but couldn’t go back to children’s books after reading Camus at 12. Like Christopher, he was good at maths, and almost read maths and philosophy instead of English at Oxford– but adds, firmly, that he was not himself a maths genius, though his love of the subject is intrinsic to the novel’s weird appeal. Each chapter is given a prime number (one that can only be divided by 1, or itself) and Haddon’s hero, unable to lie or interpret human feelings, does complicated equations to calm himself when distressed. He sees the world without filters, a disability which makes him both irresistible and vulnerable to, say, the fabric design on a Tube seat.

“We want to think we’re different from disabled people in order to protect our normality, but Christopher’s plight is universal because we all love order, pattern, ritual. It gives comfort, but we don’t notice unless someone breaks the rules.”

Maths still temporarily obsesses him. “Its upper reaches do give you a sense of the numinous and spiritual equal to any religious feeling. It’s like good writing, it gives you the sensation of getting to the edge of the known universe.”

Uniquely, his novel was published simultaneously as both adult and children’s fiction. Making the cross-over from being a children’s to an adult’s author was, he says, “like going across Death Valley in a Bacofoil suit.;” the discouragement was immense, and he changed agent in the process. Like Philip Pullman, whom he greatly admires, he believes that “bright children have always read adult books, it’s only in the last 50 years there’s been that distinction. What you do find, though, in children’s fiction is a little invisible ring of safety. I wanted to get rid of that, to say to the reader, This is the real world, bad things might happen.”

Yet his novel does have an ending that Hollywood will love, I say. (Steve Klovitz, scriptwriter for the Harry Potter films, is to direct the film.) He looks quizzical.
“How readers react to Christopher’s last words, “I can do anything”, depends on them. Is it self-deceit? Is he going to become a university maths professor, or is he going to spend the rest of his life in social care?”

Haddon himself isn’t saying. He wrote five unpublished and, he says, unpublishable novels before The Curious Incident, and his 18-year apprenticeship includes scripting two BAFTA-winning BBC adaptations (one of Fungus the Bogeyman) and spending two years writing 700 words for a picture book, The Sea of Tranquillity. “The fewer the words, the harder it is to write,” he says dryly.

His career began as an illustrator and cartoonist, and examples of his work adorn the small, childishly colourful house he lives in an orderly chaos of plastic toys, notes to worm the cat and now, a steady stream of media interest. Curiously, this Renaissance man knows almost no other novelists, living in the run-down “People’s Republic of East Oxford”, rather than its plush northern suburb. Even if his novel reaps him the promised £500,000 of Hollywood money, Haddon has no ambitions to move area, beyond needing a room of his own to work in. His next novel, about a man in the grip of a nervous breakdown, is not for children, though it has the same mix of darkness and humour.

“Coming out as a writer is rather like being gay,” he says. “It’s such an outrageous vocation to choose. It’s not just emotionally risky, it depends on your ability to entertain 20,000 strangers. I never thought a novel about a boy with Asperger’s living in Swindon would sell. At the heart of all my favourite novels is that quality of empathy – EM Forster’s “only connect.” Ultimately, no-one is that different from anyone else.”

The Sunday Times February 2004