The human characters in Mark Haddon’s second collection of short stories often find themselves out of joint with time and with their surroundings: thrust into a world altered by a sudden slippage. The Wilderness, which the book’s afterword tells us was inspired by HG Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau, sees a young woman sailing over the handlebars of her bicycle and into the jaws of a ravine, where she lies, expecting death, for several days. Rescued by a passerby, her problems are only just beginning: she wakes in a mysterious compound, where she eventually discovers rows of caged animals and, ultimately, caged women. It is not unreasonable to imagine that she might soon be joining them.
Evidently, it’s an unsettling premise, but Haddon’s interest lies not in its most outlandish elements – the possibility of gene-editing programmes that may strip away what makes us recognisably human – but in the unsteadiness and disruption already lodged in our minds, ready to make us mistrust what appears to be in front of us. It’s there too in The Temptation of St Anthony, which retells the trials that tormented Anthony the Great during his withdrawal from the world, most notably in the form of the shapeshifting devil, at one moment appearing as his sister to berate him for abandoning her, at another as legions of disciples ready to flatter his ego. It takes a stray dog to bring him back down to earth.
Haddon is clearly drawn to myth and legend: there are also reworkings of the story of the Minotaur, the death of Actaeon, and of the love affair between the beautiful youth Tithonus and Eos, goddess of the dawn. Each of them is propelled by a fascination with the boundaries between humans and other animals; in The Mother’s Story, the Minotaur – in myth the child of Pasiphae and a bull – is here figured as a “mooncalf”, a child disowned by his father as “a repellent chimaera, part human, part ape, part God alone knows what”. The child is, as in the original myth, a challenge to male authority, a freak whose terrifying aspect can be used to keep the commoners in line. That Haddon rewrites the story’s ending to produce an altogether happier outcome for its “monster” demonstrates his insistence that there are different ways into understanding the processes of demonisation and alienation.
A shift in perspective allows us to continue narratives after they seem to have ended, as in D.O.G.Z., which starts with Ovid’s account of the hunter Actaeon’s transformation into a stag and subsequent destruction by his own hounds, a punishment for glimpsing the goddess Diana bathing. “The metamorphosis is complete. Why linger?” wonders Haddon, before imagining the dogs “meat-drunk, bellies fat, the fur of their legs, chests and faces gluey with blood already hardening to a scabby crust in the sun’s heat”. But what if the dogs themselves were changed by their act of slaughter; if they felt somewhere the stirrings of an empathy they couldn’t understand, and the weight of an irrevocable brutal act? The story finishes with a bravura spin through history to meet other dogs, from the hound of the Baskervilles to Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Flush to the painful, pathetic image of the Russian space dog Laika (I wanted to direct Haddon towards William Connor’s contemporaneous Daily Mirror column on Laika, though I suspect he’s already found it).
We limit our understanding when we narrow the frame, when we see ourselves, individually or plurally, as the main character. These delicately worked and impressively patient stories show us what other visions might reveal themselves when we are not in too much of a hurry to get to the end.
• Dogs and Monsters is published by Chatto & Windus (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
