{"id":281741,"date":"2026-02-09T06:01:08","date_gmt":"2026-02-09T06:01:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/281741\/"},"modified":"2026-02-09T06:01:08","modified_gmt":"2026-02-09T06:01:08","slug":"the-grim-reaper-is-not-all-hes-made-out-to-be-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/281741\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The grim reaper is not all he\u2019s made out to be\u2019 \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mark Haddon<\/a> had emergency root-canal surgery recently, but he\u2019s in loquacious form nevertheless as he talks about his new memoir, Leaving Home.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a book whose design strikes you even before you start reading, as it\u2019s full of photographs and drawings by the English author, who before writing The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, his best-known book, worked for years as a illustrator, both for magazines and for his own books for children. It resembles the sort of compendium that people of a certain age will remember from their schooldays. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a paean to encyclopaedias of my youth,\u201d Haddon says with a laugh, showing no sign of dental distress. \u201cAs a kid I wasn\u2019t reading books you\u2019re meant to read as a novelist in training. I was reading big fat encyclopaedias. I still have some of the school prizes I won as a swot in the 1960s, like a history of fossil man and a guide to the universe.\u201d<\/p>\n

It \u201ccan\u2019t properly be called nostalgia\u201d, he writes on the first page of Leaving Home, \u201cbecause the last thing I\u2019d want is to return to that age and those places where I was so often profoundly unhappy and from which I\u2019d have been desperate to escape from if escape had been a possibility\u201d.<\/p>\n

One of the book\u2019s many photographs shows Haddon\u2019s mother embracing the young boy and his sister, Fiona, but Haddon \u201chad no memory of being hugged by her, no memory of Mum saying she loved us, no memory of her showing us real affection as children\u201d.<\/p>\n

He doesn\u2019t harp on about an unhappy childhood: he just presents the evidence as he recalls it. There\u2019s no getting around the fact that his mother was a tricky customer, however. \u201cI\u2019ll take that, yeah,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

An \u201cardent Brexiteer\u201d who detested the idea of \u201cbeing connected to France by the Channel Tunnel\u201d, she didn\u2019t read books, didn\u2019t listen to music, ignored her son\u2019s artistic endeavours, regarded his grandparents as common and didn\u2019t visit his sister when she was hospitalised, with meningitis, because \u201cyour father has golf in the morning\u201d. <\/p>\n

The last words she said to her daughter, according to Haddon, were, \u201cI\u2019ve never believed a word you\u2019ve said.\u201d<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Mark Haddon: \u2018Writer\u2019s block is my default state\u2019Opens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll find his account of her very funny in places \u2013 but, then again, she wasn\u2019t your mother. \u201cMy sister and I survived partly by means of a very dark sense of humour,\u201d Haddon says. You\u2019d have little choice.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think she lived most of her life frightened \u2013 of change and difference and decay and death,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen she became ill in later years, it was partly because she had spent her life fleeing from anything that was difficult or challenging, and I think she treated the entire world like that. She really wanted things to stay the same forever. You can\u2019t live like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Haddon writes in Leaving Home: \u201cIn truth, I don\u2019t think she wanted children at all, but she had a lifelong fear of being different.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cYes, I\u2019m fairly sure,\u201d he says now. \u201cBut making the choice to not have children would have made you a pariah in small-town England at the time. Even now people write articles in the Guardian about the difficulty of maintaining that position, but back then it was almost impossible.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think what was particularly difficult for her \u2013 and this is what made my sister\u2019s position worse than mine \u2013 was that there\u2019s a certain generation of women who bought into the patriarchy wholesale. They were going to be mums and housewives, and then they saw their daughters and other young women enjoying freedoms they\u2019d given up. <\/p>\n

\u201cI think she was embittered seeing that, but she was not someone who could adapt to a changing world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Had she still been alive, would Haddon have told her about turning down an OBE in 2023? \u201cOh, dear God, no,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019d already turned down an invitation for a royal garden party, but I didn\u2019t mention that to her. Just dealing with the aftermath would have been too much hard work.\u201d<\/p>\n

He says he had four reasons for turning down the OBE. \u201cAnything that condones the idea of empire, I do not want to touch with a barge pole. Rishi Sunak<\/a> was prime minster, so I didn\u2019t want anything to do with him. I\u2019m very much a republican: on a bone-deep level, I dislike the idea that one family is seen as superior to others. The fourth thing is that I want to feel free in perpetuity to criticise the establishment when I see fit, and I think one of the unspoken roles of honours is to make you beholden.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a controlled hallucination: we conjure what we think is out there and adjust as we get new information<\/p>\n

\u2014 \u00a0Haddon on consciousness<\/p>\n

Given his mother\u2019s emotional remoteness, it\u2019s perhaps no surprise that Haddon grew up with phobias and a certain hypochondria. He thought he had skin cancer at one point and multiple sclerosis at another \u2013 then had all health anxiety removed by having his chest opened for a triple heart bypass, after which death was no longer a terrifying prospect.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s nothing like touching the hem of the robe of the grim reaper to realise he\u2019s not all he\u2019s made out to be,\u201d Haddon says, beaming. \u201cActual death is so much less scary than the fear of death.\u201d <\/p>\n

He escaped the reaper\u2019s clutches only to succumb to long Covid, the debilitating effects of which stretched on for years. In 2024, as he recounts in his memoir, he ended up in the emergency department after cutting himself because there was \u201cjust too much pressure inside my head\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not something that\u2019s happened to me very often,\u201d Haddon says. \u201cI think, for me and for a small number of people, it\u2019s just a case of getting immensely frustrated and angry with what\u2019s going on in your head.\u201d <\/p>\n

His account of the incident in Leaving Home is brief and matter-of-fact. \u201cOne of the reasons there\u2019s not much context or explanation in there is because I don\u2019t really have much context or explanation myself. If you\u2019re suffering in that complicated, messy mental way, it\u2019s much easier to suffer in a physically painful constraint.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some people find solace in faith at difficult times in their lives. But religion, for Haddon, is a \u201cbaroque edifice constructed to reassure human beings that they aren\u2019t just animals briefly colonising a lump of rock in the Orion-Cygnus arm of the Milky Way before being utterly and unendingly forgotten\u201d. <\/p>\n

At times of pain, however, including when his wife, Sos Eltis, an Oxford academic, was hit by a car while pregnant, did the thought of crying out for divine intervention ever arise?<\/p>\n

\"MarkMark Haddon and his wife, Sos Eltis, after receiving his award for The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-time at the Whitbread Book Awards in 2004. Photograph: Bruno Vincent\/Getty <\/p>\n

\u201cActually, it did,\u201d he says of his wife\u2019s accident. \u201cIt went briefly through my head but then left, because there was stuff to do. I do remember when I was feeling mentally unwell, at my absolute worst \u2013 particularly when I was frightened of dying in the abstract \u2013 I thought how good it would be to believe that it was not the end.\u201d<\/p>\n

Haddon\u2019s work has been influenced by the notion of the \u201cplausibly hypothetical\u201d, which the critic James Wood identified<\/a> in Hilary Mantel as a literary mode that enables you to write without necessarily knowing everything about your subject: get a few facts right, then let the writing take over. <\/p>\n

He offers his own book The Porpoise<\/a>, from 2019, some of which takes place in Jacobean London, as an example.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019re writing a novel that\u2019s historical, I\u2019d suggest don\u2019t get bogged down by research, because you\u2019re never going to please the experts,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat you have to please is the ordinary reader out there, and what they want is not historical accuracy. They want to feel they\u2019re in safe, confident hands.\u201d<\/p>\n

You enter another universe, in other words.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you lose yourself in a book, there is something profoundly strange and paradoxical happening, which is that you\u2019re fully conscious in that world but totally unconscious in this world,\u201d he says. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe philosophy of consciousness is the graveyard of many intellectuals, but most psychologists and neuroscientists now talk about us as if we were reading the world around us like a book. <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a controlled hallucination: we conjure what we think is out there and adjust as we get new information. I sometimes think the world is a book, another invented world we\u2019re conscious in, and there\u2019s no \u2018real\u2019 world behind it \u2013 it\u2019s all hallucination.\u201d<\/p>\n

Are we straying towards the simulation hypothesis here, the idea that our reality is merely a computer program on some higher being\u2019s laptop?<\/p>\n

\u201cThat one drives me up the wall,\u201d Haddon says with a smile. \u201cWhat\u2019s extraordinary about a novel, or any kind of writing that makes you suspend your disbelief completely, is that it\u2019s still squiggles on the page, little black marks on white paper, and yet we have these intense, vivid experiences. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe page dissolves, the words disappear, and you\u2019re there, reading but not reading. Some of my most profound artistic experiences are about moving back and forwards across that boundary, leaving my body completely behind.\u201d<\/p>\n

Leaving Home: A Memoir in Full Colour is published by Chatto & Windus<\/p>\n

Samaritans\u2019 free helpline is at 116-123, or email jo@samaritans.org<\/a>; Pieta House is at 1800-247247, or text HELP to 51444<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mark Haddon had emergency root-canal surgery recently, but he\u2019s in loquacious form nevertheless as he talks about his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":281742,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46,144775,144776],"class_list":["post-281741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-mark-haddon","tag-rishi-sunak"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281741"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281741\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281742"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}