Squeezed behind a table at his favourite Oxford restaurant, a mess of books and papers spread about him, Mark Haddon, 43, doesn’t look like a millionaire novelist, he looks like a geography teacher.
The only benefit to this, he says, is that people don’t recognise him. Even better, he has remained largely oblivious to the impact of what he calls “my big book”. While most people have been unable to board so much as a Tube without nine copies of his 2003 novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time flapping in their face, Haddon has only once encountered someone reading it in the flesh. “I was in a cafe in London and saw that this woman was nearly all the way through it. I couldn’t resist running up to her and going, ‘It’s me! I wrote that. Do you want me to sign it for you?’ But she just recoiled.” He gives one of his sweet, fey giggles. “I kept trying to explain, but she got more and more scared, looking up at me as if I was some knife-wielding psycho.”
This is a typical Haddon anecdote — boyish, jokey, and one it’s impossible to imagine Norman Mailer telling. Haddon says he will talk to anyone and hates pretence of any sort, such as when he won the Commonwealth Writers’ prize two years ago and refused to meet the Queen because he didn’t like the implication that she was better than everyone else. In fact, Haddon’s whole shtick is that he is anti-pomp, a hangover from his Doc Martens and CND days as a student in the early 1980s. His novels are set not in high or low society, but in a middling netherworld of Swindon and Peterborough culs-de-sac. His characters drive white vans and Mondeos. They eat cheap sweets and choc ices. They read Andrew Morton biographies and, on occasion, watch all four Lethal Weapon films back to back. In Haddon’s world, what is traditionally thought to be cruddy and mediocre in British life is celebrated, even eulogised, as the best of it.
Such inverted snobbery has turned him into that rare creature, a critically adored novelist who actually sells books. To date, Curious Incident — the story of Christopher Boone, a 15-year-old schoolboy with Asperger’s — has won 16 literary prizes (including the Whitbread) and been published in 42 countries. “I knew I’d made it when they sold it to the Faroe Islands, a country whose geographical location I wasn’t entirely sure of,” he says. His publishers were probably more pleased with the sales figures: about 10m copies.
So what do you do after your novel is such a monster hit, I ask? “That’s the tough part,” he says. “You must write another one, mustn’t you? Unless you’re Harper Lee or something, though I’ve heard whispers that even Harper’s doing a follow-up. To Kill a Mockingbird II.” He whistles. “Can you imagine the pressure?” Can you? “Yes,” he laughs. “I can, a bit. I’ve had one big hit, and that’s fantastic, because I’ve done the single thing I set out to do in life: write a successful literary novel. If I’d got to 65 without doing it, I think I’d have ended up a cranky, difficult person on his way to a psychiatric ward, so I’m not going to pretend for a minute that success wasn’t a relief.
“But a one-off success is also scary, because I am, as yet, not proven. The one thing I’d like A Spot of Bother [his second adult novel, published next month] to do is make people think not that I am the writer of one good book, but that I am a good writer.” As the thought takes hold, his giggles cease and the smiley mouth droops with worry. “Of course, I know there have been quite a few people who have written one really good book, then slipped away somewhere and been forgotten. I really, really hope that’s not me.”
Before fame and fortune, Haddon, the son of an architect who specialised in abattoirs, grew up in the Midlands, boarding at Uppingham, a school known mostly for cold showers and contact sports. “It was a cruel place that I only survived by being big and funny,” he says. He shone not in English but in maths (he wrote all the tricky numbers bits in Curious Incident himself). By his late teens, however, his inner artist had him by the throat, and he left for Oxford to read English. He graduated in the early 1980s and, like most of his right-on friends, opted for an ethically sound career volunteering as a carer in Scotland.
As he has never been able to hold down a “proper job” for more than six weeks, he soon quit this for a Masters at Edinburgh before moving to east London, where, for many years, he wrote children’s books and drew illustrations for magazines such as New Statesman. “It was like an upmarket version of being a night security guard,” he remembers. “You got paid fairly well, but there was zero glory and you felt pretty unfulfilled most of the time. All I wanted to do was write for adults and paint seriously. Instead, I wrote five dreadful novels that have never been published.”
He married Sos Eltis, an academic, and the pair moved to Massachusetts so she could take up a teaching position, returning to Oxford in the mid-1990s. Haddon remained an unhappy artist throughout, the type who would lie in a waterless bath wailing for hours about writer’s block, and who once drove to the farthest tip of Scotland on a whim, desperate for it to offer up some inspiration.
Eventually, inspiration came. “I knew when I finished Curious that it was good, but it was still a surprise when it actually took off.” He says he loved the attention — flown around the world by his publishers, addressing literary festivals, going on American television — and gave up wailing in the bath to became known in the book world as a jolly nice chap. He even resisted the pitfalls of the newly crowned literary bigwig, the urge to fondle groupies and befriend Bono. As his millions swelled, he simply bought a bigger house in Oxford for his wife and two young sons, Alphie and Zac.
With one book, Haddon had joined the top tier of British novelists. Now he stands on a precipice, wondering if he can do it all again.
The first signs are not good. Last week, the omission of A Spot of Bother — which chronicles a few months in the life of the depressed, recently retired George Hall and his dysfunctional family — from the Man Booker longlist was seen as a serious snub. The critics are murmuring dissent, and it seems impossible that his latest will enjoy anything like the success of his last. Is Haddon prepared for the backlash?
“Yes and no. Everyone I’ve spoken to says they like it, but they could all be lying, I suppose,” he says. Do you read your reviews? “Yes. Obsessively. All of them. Even the ones on Amazon. Until now, most of them have been good, but I’ve had bad, too, and they sting. To write in the first place, you need a mixture of huge self-criticism and outrageous arrogance. I’m sure most literary authors with ambition have planned their Booker speech many times over, so being cut down to size is painful. Everybody wants to belong, don’t they?”
Haddon says that, before success, he used to imagine the British literary establishment as a house. In this fantasy, he would stand outside with his nose pressed to the window, fogging up the glass, watching Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian McEwan spar by the fire while Jeanette Winterson nagged them to do the washing-up. “I was desperate to belong back then,” he says simply. “Maybe, deep down, I still am.”
A Spot of Bother is published by Jonathan Cape on September 7
