The Guardian
SOME DATA ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark Haddon was born in the UK in 1962. He’s an illustrator and writes books for children.
He has worked with people with physical and mental disabilities, as autism, and has been praised for his empathy. He’s a declared atheist and vegetarian.
He’s married, has two children and lives in Oxford, where he graduated in English.
His famous book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time was published at the same time in two different collections, one for children and another for adults. With this novel, he won the Whitebread Award in 2003 (Whitebread is a food brand) for stories based in the UK and Ireland.
He also won The Guardian Commonwealth Writers prize, but before that he had rejected the Order of British Empire.
More books by him are The Real Porky Philips, about a fat boy, and Titch Johnson, Almost a World Champion, about a boy who overcomes his image as a loser, and The Pier Falls, a collection of short stories.
In 2016, he had heart problems, and some years later he had sequels from the COVID, and that affected his writing abilities for a while.
THE PIER FALLS (New Statesman, 2104)
This story describes with minute precision the fictional collapsing of the Brighton West Pier in a summer afternoon in 1970. Actually, this pier was closed in 1970 because it wasn’t safe for visitors. It was built in the 1860s for the entertainment of tourists, and since then, it had undergone several reforms and enlargements. It was the second pier built there (the first was demolished), and afterwards another one was erected, the Palace Pier. The West Pier reached 340 metres in length and was 94 metres in width. There was a fun fair, arcades and a concert hall that could hold 1400 people, so it was a very impressive structure.
After it was closed, there had been several attempts to restore the construction, but it was too expensive. It suffered a pair of fires and, in the end, it was demolished, although they couldn’t do it completely and some parts of it remain standing.
SUMMARY
The narrative is a cold description of the facts, it doesn’t ooze any emotion and it has a deadpan tone. Most of the characters are strangers, anonymous; what isn’t anonymous are the pieces and fastener of the structure (plywood, rivet, girdle, girder, poles…), as if a technician was explaining the mechanical details. But, amid this sheer description of the facts and these impersonal people, we find some sparks of life and emotion that give to this detached report a human dimension.
The tale tells us the crumpling of the central part of a pier, the deaths of the people falling through the gap, the people in the section near the beach running away from the pier in panic, the rescue of the people stranded at the sea end of the pier, the recovery of the bodies and people fallen into the sea, and the people’s reactions after the accident.
We find the first detail that disconcert us in the sentence, “The word Royal is missing an o.” It’s a trivial detail that grips our attention because it is something so tangential. The letter “o” isn’t between quotation marks nor in italics, so at first sight you don’t catch the meaning. What has to do a missing “o” with the disaster? Perhaps was it an omen?
And then, there is something that announces the tragedy: “Nine minutes to five”, a simple statement telling us the time in the middle of a description of something that had to be permanent, the place. Anyone can imagine here a scene from the film Jaws: the action has stopped a second, and we know that a catastrophe is upcoming.
Then another premonition, clearer this time, about a rivet, is inserted. But the world goes on: the dolphins swim in their pool. And now again you can imagine a cinematographic scene: “The noise stops and there’s a moment of silence.” Silences contrasting with noises will be the soundtrack of the text. No music at all.
And next to this coldness, instants of pure terror flash to us, as when the man “wriggles like a fish.” The narrator starts reporting every now and then the time and the number of the casualties with exact precision.
But this was only a kind of introduction, because the biggest disaster comes now, when the belvedere collapses carrying forty-seven people with it. At this moment, however, we can identify one of the few men that have some identity, the arcade manager, a young man who has never been to London.
The magnitude of the tragedy are stated now with this sentence: “Three couples […] trapped in the ghost train [...] find themselves watching the end of the world.”
This mixture between what is extraordinary with everyday situations is what surprises the reader. Someone said that, in writing works, all literary devices can be reduced to these: repetition (e.g., a metaphor is a repetition of the same idea with other words) and opposition or contrast (where the narrator contrasts common with uncommon situations).
Another example of these contrapositions is when we see people trying to be heroes rescuing people (that is a magnificent behaviour), near the reality of people’s common actions or attitudes: “a man takes three photographs” and “he has opened the doors to January sale” (not any sale). The superficial persists along the apocalyptic.
The narrator also knows that emotions and suffering lead to confusing ways of expressing feelings, like when the people cheers a man that has finally caught his spaniel and has taken him ashore, or when “everyone is thinking how they will tell the story to their friends”, or “it’s exciting to think oneself as a potential target [of an IRA bomb]”, or when people want to be selected as a help by the victims reaching the beach. A man risks his life diving to the water 20 metres down and his wife, who then couldn’t find him, won’t forget him for a long time; a boy who has lost his parents invents a story that says they are living in France…
But if there is a clear hero in all the story, this is the nurse. Perhaps heros are beings who don’t exactly belong to our society, who don't match with the ordinary. In our case, she is a black woman in the middle of white western people; her name is Renée, and that means that perhaps she's a French woman amid British people; some people think that she is so alien, that they wonder if she is using voodoo. Definitely, she is a heroine: she and the boy she helps will stay in touch with one another for the next thirty years. There was another who would have liked to be considered a hero, the arcade manager, when he says (mentally) about himself, “I stayed at my post.” But he’s been rescued along with other people, and he disappears from the story.
And then, after everybody has been rescued and the victims moved away, all goes back to normal life again. Everybody meditates about the accident and considers that it would be more understandable if it was caused by a bomb: then it would have had an explanation, a justification. They remember that they had been in the same pier an hour ago, that same morning, or yesterday, so they are lucky to be alive and not dead.
The incident is closed and the everyday life comes back definitely to the city when, at 5 a.m., the TV crew arrives to the spot and start telling jokes. Now, “the pier is already becoming something you walk past.”
As an epilogue, we can mention the girl who ran away from his parents’ and they will never know that she died there. Three years later, a skull appeared on the beach. Whose was it? Some people were “more dead” than others.
QUESTIONS
-Sure you’ve been witness to some disaster. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
-At the end of the film Speed, where there’s a lot of tension between the two protagonists because their lives were at stake, they wondered if a relationship product of a heavy critical situation will last. What is your opinion?
-Sometimes we think that journalists are like scavengers (feed on carrion): they are always in search of disasters. Do you believe that another kind of journalism is possible?
-Do you think that trying to rescue people is something connatural in us, or that some people are readier to risk their lives to save anyone from danger than others?
VOCABULARY
mackerel, trawler, gaudy, awnings, saunter, portly, ride shotgun, rivet, fritters, redwood, judder, struts, scrabbling, belvedere, listing, spars, tread, prise, wind-cheater, spinal board, winchman, girders, Hornet, shorthand, helter-skelter, chipboard, Reaper, trip switch, prom, pipistrelles