The Pier Falls by Mark Haddon review – a stunning debut short story collection

Disaster strikes on a seaside afternoon, a woman runs from a relationship gone wrong and a debt of violence is repaid at Christmas

The nine stories in Mark Haddon’s debut collection are exuberant, lusty exercises in juxtaposition: intimacy and estrangement, exoticism and domesticity, innocuousness and malevolence, the cataloguing of minute detail and the expansiveness of the zoomed-out lens. Such contrasts not only power each piece but also act as a form of call and response across them. Haddon’s protagonists attempt to escape isolation while remaining intensely, covertly committed to it; his landscapes bustle and resonate with the impact of human affairs but, naturally, remain almost entirely indifferent to them. And the title story suggests another of the book’s recurring concerns: the collapse of a structure representative of imperial solidity, grandeur, leisure, prosperity. Viewed another way, it suggests complete uselessness.

“The Pier Falls” freeze-frames a seaside afternoon in 1970, in a resort town apparently untouched by the seismic social shifts of the 60s and with the equally transformative events of the Thatcher era still to come (there is nothing overtly historico-political about this, and yet Haddon’s prose is redolent with the tensions and particularities of England’s recent history). As promenaders eat pineapple fritters against the backdrop of paint-peeling balustrades, “a rivet fails”, and a catastrophe begins. Its inexorable unspooling – minute by minute, death by death – is recounted in a way that captures the lightning speed and agonising slow motion of disaster, the way in which it is simultaneously filmically recognisable to us and utterly aberrant.

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