Mark Haddon: ‘Curious Incident was like a gold-plated ball and chain’
Since his global bestseller, Mark Haddon has struggled to write a ‘big novel’. He talks about his fantastical new book, The Porpoise, and his recovery from heart surgery
A third of the way through Mark Haddon’s new novel, The Porpoise, a character succumbs to a failing heart. Haddon, who spent his boyhood reading science books rather than children’s stories, has a particular nerdish fascination with how such things work, so the precise manner of this man’s demise is described over a page and a half, starting with the calcified lumps of cholesterol that have narrowed his arteries, and ending at the moment when the wall between the heart’s four chambers “is thin and ballooning and becoming weaker … until, at last, the flesh tears and there are no longer four chambers, only one wrecked vessel of twitching flesh in which the blood pools and squelches”.
Haddon himself has recently escaped a similar fate. In February – long after the novel was finished – he was pulled into hospital for a double heart bypass. Plus, he adds punctiliously, “the redirection of a left internal mammary artery on to my coronary artery”. (He has now read two books about heart surgery, and jokes: “I could have a good crack at it myself.”) Unlike his utterly dissipated character, Haddon, at 56, is a physically fit vegetarian, whose only symptom was something amiss on his regular runs. “I couldn’t run up big hills, then small hills, without stopping. It wasn’t that I was exhausted. I was exhausted for a minute, and I’d have to stop, but then I could go again.” He mentioned it to his GP, who sent him for a scan. “They said: ‘Get in here, quickly.’ I could have been that man who just keels over by the frozen fish in Sainsbury’s.”