English Heritage: "Eight Ghosts"

Give eight writers an assignment, and you never know what they’ll come up with. 

The English Heritage organization cares for more than 400 properties, buildings, and monuments, ranging from Roman forts and medieval castles to Cold War bunkers. To help raise funds for conservation work, it asked eight English authors to choose their own English Heritage site, spend time there, including after hours, and write a ghost story involving the site.

 

The result is Eight Ghosts: The English Heritage Book of New Ghost Stories. It’s a small gem of book, with some cracking good stories that each pack at punch.

 

For “They Flee From Me That Sometimes Did Me Seek.” Sarah Perry (After Me Comes the Flood, The Essex Serpent) selected Audley End, a house built on the site of an abbey in Essex. She tells a tale of a young woman who joins a team restoring an old tapestry, who soon finds out that the work will figuratively and literally absorb her. In “Mr. Lanyard’s Last Case,” Andrew Michael Hurley (The Loney, Devil’s Day) visited Carlisle Castle, and spins a historical story of an attorney prosecuting the rebels who fought and lost the Battle of Culloden in 1746.

 

In “The Bunker,” Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Pier Falls) selected the York Cold War Bunker, telling the story of a woman caught between present and future. Kenilworth Castle is the setting for Kamila Shamsie’s (Burnt Shadows, Home Fire) “Foreboding,” in which a new guard starts his job and finds what he’s not looking for.

 

Stuart Evers (If This is Home, Ten Stories About Smoking) goes to Dover Castle for his story, “Never Departed More,” about an actress who stays there to soak in the atmosphere and soaks in a bit more than expected. Housesteads Roman Fort is the setting for “The Wall” by Kate Clanchy (Meeting the English, Antigona and Me), in which a mother and father takes her truant teenaged daughter for a day trip – and little is what it seems. 

 

Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?) selected Pendennis Castle for “As Strong as Death,” about in impending wedding haunted by a ghost of woman who disguised herself as a sailor. And Max Porter (Lanny, Grief is the Thing with Feathers) used Eltham Palace to tell his story “Mrs. Charbury at Eltham,” about an elderly woman who returns to the place where her sister disappeared.

 

The volume also includes a short essay by Andrew Martin (The Somme Stations, Soot), which explains how the castles, abbeys, and houses of England inspired the ghost story. Also included is a gazetteer of English Heritage hauntings, a detailed list of all the places said to have ghosts. 

 

Eight Ghosts is both a collection of some really good (and scary) stories and a clever way to raise funds for a worthy cause.

 

Related:

 

My review of The Porpoise by Mark Haddon.

 

My review of The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry.

 

My review of Lanny by Max Porter.

 

Top photograph by Joakim Honkasalo via Unsplash. Used with permission.

“Boom!” by Mark Haddon

In 1992, British author Mark Haddon published a middle grade book with the improbable title of Gridzbi Spudvetch!He says that, with a title like that, only 23 people bought the book (and he claims that number is an exaggeration). 

It went out of print, but he’d occasionally hear from fans who loved it. He’d been writing and publishing other books (like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in 2003) and his publisher would ask him about updating Gridzbi Spudvetch! He reread the book and realized it needed more-than-serious updating, plot hole-filling, and other improvements. He put it off, until he heard from a schoolteacher in Oxford, who read it aloud to her students, who loved it. So, Haddon tackled the rewrite, and Boom! was born in 2009.

The book, still aimed at the middle grades, is now 10 years old, just about the age of its hero, Jim, called Jimbo by the family. The story is fiction, and science fiction, and comedy, and drama, and downright funny. I knew I was captured when I laughed out loud on page three, as Jimbo lets fly from a balcony a “helicopter sandwich” of cheese and strawberry jam that smacks his sister’s greasy boyfriend squarely in the face. What brother hasn’t wanted to do exactly that, or something like it?

Mark Haddon

Jimbo and his best friend Charlie get into all kinds of mischief. When Jimbo’s sister claims she’s heard teachers at school talking about sending Jimbo to a “special school” for discipline, he and Charlie concoct a plan to bug the teachers’ lounge with walkie talkies. Mostly what they hear is boring teacher talk, until only two teachers are left in the room. They begin to speak in a language neither Charlie nor Jimbo has ever heard, saying things like “Gridzbi spudvetch!”

From there, the two boys stage a break-in of one of the teacher’s homes and find strange papers and documents that look like they’re in code. One turns out to be coordinates for an ordnance map of a location on the Isle of Skye in Scotland. And then Charlie disappears. A strange policeman tries to capture Jimbo. Two men break into his family’s apartment and are fought off by Jimbo, His sister, and the greasy boyfriend. Jimbo and his sister hop aboard the boyfriend’s motorcycle, and they’re off to Scotland to rescue Charlie. 

It’s all wildly improbable. It’s completely within the imagination of a nine-, ten-, or eleven-year old, defending Earth against scheming extra-terrestrials. And it’s totally fun.

Haddon is the author of several novels and young adult novels, including A Spot of Bother (2007) and The Red House (2013). He blogs under his own name.

I can easily see my fourth-grader grandson reading Boom!, while his second-grade brother listens, enraptured, and the two saying things to each other like “Spleeno ken mondermill.”

Related:

My review of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

My review of The Pier Falls by Mark Haddon.

My review of The Red House by Mark Haddon.

My review of Two Stories by Virginia Woolf and Mark Haddon.

My review of A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon.

My review of The Porpoise by Mark Haddon.

“The Porpoise” by Mark Haddon

In 1393, a contemporary of Geoffrey Chaucer named John Gower published Confessio Amantis, the story of Apollonius of Tyre, and thought to be a translation of an ancient Greek text. It’s the story of a prince who visits Antiochus, king of Antioch. Antiochus has offered the hand of his daughter to anyone who can solve a riddle; fail to solve it and you’re put to death. 

The riddle’s solution is that the king is committing incest with his daughter. Apollonius solves it – and is on the run for his life for most of the rest of his life. He has an extraordinary number of adventures, marries the love of his life, she seemingly dies at sea after giving birth, Apollonius goes almost mad with grief – and that’s only the start. Ultimately, the family is reunited – and virtue rewarded.

In 1576, a writer named Lawrence Twine published The Pattern of Painful Adventures, a prose novel based on Gower’s story. William Shakespeare, possibly with the help of a writer, innkeeper, and possible criminal named George Wilkins, wrote and produced a play based on Twine’s retelling of Gower’s story. Shakespeare named his Pericles, Prince of Tyre. It was staged in 1607 or 1608.

Fast forward to 2019. A small plane crashes in northern France; a well-known movie star in the plane gives birth shortly before she dies. Her distraught husband withdraws from social life and raises his daughter in rural England. He falls in love with her, and it leads to incest. The father poses no riddles for would-be suitors to solve, but a suitor shows up, and the girl falls madly in love. The father assumes the role of King Antiochus, sends his right-hand man off to kill the young man, and the game is on.

You’re entering the world of The Porpoise, the latest novel by British author Mark Haddon. He’s not content to writer a contemporary version of Apollonius/Pericles. The Porpoisegoes well beyond that. Haddon retells the original story of Pericles in tandem with the contemporary interpretation, and along with the account of George Wilkins and William Shakespeare. 

You might say the novel is three stories in one, and it is, but it becomes much more than that. Haddon is offering a meditation on myth, writing, legend, the human condition, the act of literary creation, and more. The result is stunning – a gripping account written in the present tense that tells us how we continue to relive ancient myths and legends today. 

Mark Haddon

Haddon knows how to pull the reader into a story. The gripping account of how and why the small plane crashes leaves the reader almost gasping – similar to his description of the collapse of a seaside entertainment pier in his short story “The Pier Falls.” The account is so gripping that you can’t stop reading. When you come up for air, you find yourself in ancient Tyre, Antioch, and Tarsus, and then in early Jacobean London. Gradually it all begins to make sense.

Best known for his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Haddon is the author of several novels, young adult novels, and story collections, including The Red House and The Pier Falls. He is also an artist. He blogs under his own name.

The Porpoise is many things, but ultimately it is a novel about how we come to read, understand, and live stories, and how our stories come to be retold again and again.

Related:

My review of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

My review of The Pier Falls by Mark Haddon.

My review of The Red House by Mark Haddon.

My review of Two Stories by Virginia Woolf and Mark Haddon.

My review of A Spot of Bother by Mark Haddon.

“A Spot of Bother” by Mark Haddon

A wedding should be a joyful event. Katie Hall, a divorced woman with a young son, is marrying Ray. The Hall family had its doubts about Ray. He comes from, er, the working class (and had this novel been written 10 years later, Ray would have voted for Brexit). Truth be told, Katie has her doubts about Ray. 

For all its doubts about Ray, the rest of the Hall family has its own set of problems. Jamie, Katie’s brother, has just broken up with his boyfriend. George, the father, discovers a lesion on his hip and decides he is dying from cancer; George will go round the bend and over the top repeatedly throughout the story. Jean, the mother, is having an affair with a former work colleague of George’s. George will discover his wife’s infidelity and, in a rather British reaction, say nothing about it while his behavior becomes even more bizarre.

Mark Haddon

British novelist Mark Haddon tells the story of the Hall family in the novel A Spot of Bother, first published in 2006. The story is poignant, funny and almost comic in parts. Haddon starts with a group of characters that are difficult to like and ends with people you actually care about. The one exception is the rather unsuitable Ray, who maintains a kind of solid strength and character throughout the story (aside from throwing a rubbish bin or two when he’s angry). It’s interesting that the one character the others find rather suspect is the most likeable and sympathetic – and the one who holds the Hall family together when it looks to fracture.

Best known for his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Haddon is the author of several novels, young adult novels, and story collections, including The Red House and The Pier Falls. He is also an artist. He blogs under his own name.

A Spot of Bother tells the story of how a group of people grow and change over a very short few weeks as they grope toward understanding themselves and each other.

Related:

My review of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

My review of The Pier Falls by Mark Haddon.

My review of The Red House by Mark Haddon.

My review of Two Stories by Virginia Woolf and Mark Haddon.

"Two Stories by Virginia Woolf and Mark Haddon"

In 1917, Virginia and Leonard Woolf began Hogarth Press, which over the years published Virginia Woolf’s stories and novelsas well as works by Katherine Mansfield and T.S. Eliot. Eventually, Hogarth Press was acquired by the publishing firm of Chatto &Windus, where it continues today. Its success in the Woolf years had as much to with Leonard’s painstaking bookkeeping and business management as it did with Virginia’s eye for literary quality. 

Virginia Woolf

To commemorate the 100^thanniversary, Hogarth Press published Two Stories by Virginia Woolf and Mark Haddon– homage to the first publication by Hogarth in 1917 being two short stories, one by Virginia and one by Leonard. To look both backward and forward, the new Two Storiesincludes “The Mark on the Wall” by Virginia Woolf and “St. Bride’s Bay” by contemporary British writer and artist Mark Haddon (best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time).

Mark Haddon

Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall” is a kind of stream-of-consciousness narrative that begins with an observation of a mark on the wall and moves into a host of ponderings, including the meaning of life, before returning to the discovery of what the mark actually is. Haddon’s “St. Bride’s Bay” concerns a mother who has just left her daughter’s wedding reception (a second marriage) who pauses to watch the lights of a ship on the bay and then considers her own life, including a youthful fling. The two stories are both ultimately about one’s mortality.

Two Stories by Virginia Woolf and Mark Haddon is a fitting tribute to both Hogarth Press and the writers themselves.

Related:

My review of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

My review of The Pier Falls by Mark Haddon.

My review of The Red House by Mark Haddon.

“The Red House” by Mark Haddon

On the surface, it appears to be two families coming together for a week’s vacation. Richard, a doctor, brings his wife Louisa and her teenaged daughter Melissa. Richard’s sister, Angela, brings her husband Dominic and their three children, Alex, Daisy, and Benjy. They’re coming together not long after the death of Richard and Angela’s mother. The two families don’t know each other very well, and that’s the primary reason for the joint vacation.

The baggage they bring with them is more than just suitcases.

Richard is facing a possible malpractice charge. Melissa and her school friends did some nasty bullying. Angela has never gotten over a miscarriage, and the daughter she lost would be turning 18 this week. Dominc, who seems to be more unemployed than employed, is having an affair. Alex seems the normal older teenaged boy with one thought on his mind, at least most of the time. Daisy has found religious faith, which makes her the odd duck out in both families. And even 8-year-old Benjy has fears of being orphaned.

All of this baggage begins to swirl together as the two families go about doing the things you do on vacation – taking hikes, visiting local sites of interest, and just relaxing. They are renting (Richard’s paying, of course) for a house in the country near the English-Welsh border. The house never becomes more than it is, but it is important as the place the families keep coming back to and the place that anchors The Red House by Mark Haddon, published in 2012.

Best known for his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Haddon is the author of several novels, young adult novels, and story collections, including A Spot of Bother (2007) and The Pier Falls. He is also an artist. He blogs under his own name.

Mark Haddon

Haddon is a master at characterization. Each of the characters gradually becomes real and recognizable. Each has a back story that will gradually be revealed, to themselves, the other characters, and the reader. Real and recognizable doesn’t automatically translate to sympathetic; but they do translate to understandable. It’s difficult, for example, to be sympathetic to a character determined to be nasty to everyone around her, even as she stumbles toward the discovery of kindness. But Haddon holds that character in tension; the reader feels it and wonders how the tension will be resolved.

The author remains true to his story; there is no great revelation or singular crisis moment that brings everything to resolution. But that’s how most families are, moving toward individual resolutions or individuals putting off what doesn’t have to be done today. Things becoming known and understood doesn’t mean things becoming resolved. 

Related:

My review of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

My review of The Pier Fallsby Mark Haddon.

Top photograph by Filip Gielda via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"The Pier Falls" by Mark Haddon

In 2015, we were on vacation in London and had a list of plays we wanted to see. For me, topping the list was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, based on the novel by Mark Haddon. Alas, we both came down with severe colds and had to some serious damage to our planned itinerary. We missed the play. I had to make-do with reading the book, and I was blown away by how good it was. We were able to see the play in 2017 at the St. Louis Repertory Theatre, and it was marvelous.

I had rather high expectations when I started reading Haddon’s The Pier Falls, a collection of nine short stories. The first and title story took less than 20 minutes to read. It blew right through my expectations.

The story is an account of a pier collapse at a seaside resort city like Brighton. It’s told in the present tense, almost minute-by-minute, giving it the sense of watching a documentary film unfold in horrifying detail. It’s mesmerizing.

Could the remaining stories be as good? The answer was yes. They’re different, very different, but the stories are excellent.

“The Island” seems like a story from Greek mythology. A princess helps a soon-to-be-sacrificed man escape and sees her brother killed. She finds herself abandoned on an island, focused solely on survival. “Bunny” tells the story of a 500+-pound man, whose life has become increasingly circumscribed he meets Leah. Their meeting and developing relationship becomes a story of mutual dependence – up to a point.

In “Wodwo,” an upper-middle-class family is preparing for its annual Christmas dinner, when they’re interrupted by a knock on the terrace door. It’s a black man, looking homeless, and he asks to be invited in. Once inside, he enjoys a hot drink and then lays a shotgun on the table. A gun also plays a role in “The Gun,” the story of two boys who find a handgun and know they have to try it. The reader thinks he knows where this story is going, and he is dead wrong.

“The Woodpecker and the Wolf” concerns a group of astronauts stranded on a planet like Mars. A relief ship is on its way, but it is not likely to make in time to save their lives. In “Breathe,” a woman walks away from a career upset and the end of a romantic relationship to go home to England, and finds her mother living like a homeless squatter.

Mark Haddon

In “The Boys Who Left Home to Learn Fear,” a group of British explorers are trying to find a lost expedition, only to find themselves lost and the situation dire. In the final story, “The Weir,” a man saves a woman from drowning herself, but the question is which one of them was really drowning.

Haddon is the author of several novels and young adult novels, including A Spot of Bother (2007) and The Red House (2013). He is also an artist. He blogs under his own name.

The stories of The Pier Falls are gripping, sometimes shocking, and always fascinating. What they share in common is what happens in people’s lives when the unexpected or disastrous occurs. The cover blurbs include words like “gripping,” “compelling,” “superb,” and “brilliant,” but as good as they are they don’t do these stories justice.

Related:

My review of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

Top photo by Sean Pierce via Unsplash. Used with permission.