Biography
Agent Z series of books. The
Mark Haddon was born in Northampton in 1962.
He graduated from Oxford University in 1981,
returning later to study for an M.Sc. in English
Literature at Edinburgh University.
undertook a variety of jobs, including work with
children and adults with mental and
disabilities.  He also worked as an illustrator for
magazines and a cartoonist for New Statesman, The
Spectator, Private Eye, the Sunday
Telegraph and The Guardian (for which he co-wrote
a cartoon strip).
His first book for children, Gilbert's
Gobstopper, appeared in 1987 and was followed by
many other books and picture books for children,
many of which he also illustrated. These include the
'Agent Z' series  and the 'Baby Dinosaurs' series.
From 1996 he also worked on television projects,
and created and wrote several episodes
for Microsoap, winning two BAFTAs and a Royal
Television Society Award for this work.
In 2003 his novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog
in the Night-Time, was published and has been
hugely successful.  It is the first book to have been
published simultaneously in two imprints - one for
children and one for adults. It has won a string of
prestigious awards, including the 2003 Whitbread
Book of the Year. His second novel, A Spot of Bother,
was published in 2006 and shortlisted for the 2006
Costa Novel Award.
His first book of poetry, The Talking Horse and the
Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea,  was published
in 2005. His latest books include the
novels Boom! (2009), The Red House  (2012), The
Pier Falls (2016) and The Porpoise (2019).
Mark Haddon teaches creative writing for the Arvon
Foundation and Oxford University.
Critical perspective
Long before The Curious Incident of the Dog in the
Night-time (2003) gave him bestseller status, Mark
Haddon - author, poet, cartoonist and abstract
painter - wrote the 
stories, which are for young teens, are full of the
joys of daydreaming. Ben, the narrator, allows his
hallucinogenic imagination to transport him beyond
the dreary boundaries of the suburban street where
he lives. With his friends Barney and Jenks he forms
The Crane Grove Gang, which is dedicated to
terrorising people through carefully planned
He then
practical jokes. As Agent Z, the identity they adopt,
they leave stickers at the scene of each of their
physical
crimes, as a mark of their triumphs. The books play
on the human need to transcend the limits of reality.
In one way or another, much of Haddon’s work is
about our saving grace as a species: our capacity to
wonder and invent. It is also about the way we seek
consolation and meaning in that capacity,
particularly when the curtain has been pulled back to
reveal that God is none other than the Wizard of Oz.
The publication of The Curious Incident of the Dog
in the Night-time (2003) brought Haddon critical
applause, commercial benefit, and awards. It’s not
hard to see why. It stands with D.B.C.
Pierre’s Vernon God Little and Lionel Shriver’s We
Need To Talk About Kevin as one of the most
memorable novels of the early 2000s. It is narrated
by Christopher Boone, a fifteen-year-old boy who
possesses what Ian McEwan described as an
‘emotionally dissociated mind’ (the back-cover blurb
says that Christopher has Asperger’s Syndrome,
though there is no reference to this in the book
itself). Christopher, who lives with his father in
Swindon, tells us all we need to know about how his
mind works without the need to attach a label to his
forehead. If he sees four consecutive yellow cars it’s
a ‘Black Day’; five red cars and it’s a ‘Super Good
Day’. Christopher cannot bear physical contact, and
there are times when he feels so overloaded by
verbal and visual stimuli that he starts to groan or
scream. He is able to calculate complicated factoring
problems in his head, but cannot read most facial
expressions. His mind is logical and literal, and he
dislikes metaphor: ‘when I try and make a picture of
the phrase in my head it just confuses me because
imagining an apple in someone’s eye doesn’t have
anything to do with liking someone a lot and it
makes you forget what the person was talking
about.’ The conceit of the novel - the title of which
comes from a Sherlock Holmes story called Silver
Blaze - is that it’s the book that Christopher is
writing as a school project after discovering his Haddon’s next novel, The Red House (2012), is
neighbour’s dog dead in the garden. It’s a detective about an attempt at familial reconciliation. After the
story - the only kind of fiction Christopher likes - death of their mother, Angela and Richard gather
and one that takes him not only beyond the world he with their respective families in a house on the Welsh
has known, but also to discoveries of secrets his border. They have not seen much of one another for
family and neighbours have long held from him. He’s two decades. Their experiences of life, and their
the victim of falsehood and betrayal, and in light of memories of their childhood, differ. As with A Spot
the emotional chaos that surrounds him, his of Bother, the novel moves in and out of the minds
obsession with facts and figures assumes a heroic of the characters: a boy, three teenagers, and four
quality. adults, but it is now in the key of Mrs. Dalloway.
Whereas Haddon’s second novel is light comedy,
Haddon followed Christopher’s story with A Spot of
what he attempts with The Red House is a kind of
Bother (2006). Reminiscent of Sue Townsend’s
impressionism:
Adrian Mole books and the novels of David Nicholls
and Nick Hornby, it’s as easy and enjoyable a read, 'Say it began with shadows, that it was shadows
as those comparisons would suggest. Centred on the always. The sun above us, below us a dark figure
experience of the retired George, an ordinary fifty- that is ourselves and not ourselves. Look how it
seven-year old man who is now about to begin the follows me, see how we dance in time. Narcissus, all
long, shapeless period of life that will be given over of us, right from the beginning. Trace your hand on
to pottering about in the shed, A Spot of the rock wall of this cave, using flint, using charcoal.
Bother deals with ‘the fear of having nothing to Now the ghost of you will live on after you have
complain about’. When George discovers a lesion on gone.'
his hip, his imagination, which has been an
Although there are moments when this sort of thing
underworked muscle for too long, goes finally to
convinces, often the author gets carried away,
work, transforming the mark into a terrible
reaching for poetic aptness of the kind that leaves
cancerous growth. As the unavoidable reality of his
Christopher Boone in confusion. Despite Haddon’s
own mortality begins to undermine whatever
skill at scene-making and drama, and despite his
foundations he thought he had built beneath him,
natural ability to get inside the head of a character,
George struggles to maintain his sanity. The novel
there are, in a story about the way the ghosts of our
moves in and out of the lives and minds of George’s
past fight for the possession of our present, too
wife, son, and daughter - reading it is like listening
many ghosts fighting for possession of the narrative.
to gossip being relayed by someone who knows how
Not so The Sea of Tranquillity (1996), one of the
to plot real life and how to lighten it all with humour.
most beautiful of the several picture books that
Haddon has a gift for creating compassion, and is
Haddon has written, and, at 32 pages, as brief as it
able to make you care about the fate of his
is tender and impressionistic. A man looks back at
characters. Despite the superficially ordinary nature
his childhood obsession with space, recalling the
of the plot - husband worries about health, wife has
sense of wonder and awe he felt at the moon
affair, husband and wife’s daughter may or may not
landing, as he watched Aldrin and Armstrong
get married for the second time to an unsuitable
‘bouncing slowly through the dust’. The story ends
beau, husband and wife’s son may or may not bring
with the adult musing upon how he can still lose
gay lover to the wedding - Haddon has a natural feel
himself to views of the moon and thoughts of how
for the comic treatment of shared experience. This is
‘nothing ever moves year after year’. In a Mark
a story about the messy ordinariness of our lives,
Haddon story, there is usually a looking back and a
lives that revolve not around epic quests of historical
looking up.
significance, but marriages and divorces, love and
sex, births and deaths. The novel is particularly Garan Holcombe, 2013
sensitive to the effort involved in sustaining even the
most intimate of our relationships once romance has
become just another thing to work at and
compromise over.