Mark Haddon was at the Oxford Playhouse on Friday performing a talk/essay especially written for the occasion, in support of the Playhouse‘s fundraising appeal. Haddon was alone on a stage set up for another play to be shown later that evening, there to deliver what was ostensibly an autobiographical talk, but what turned out to be a very intricately written, extremely engaging, and ultimately quite moving, work of poetry.
He ranged from school days, playing darts badly in the common room, to the moon landing, to strange fan mail after the success of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, via recitations of Henry David Thoreau and Louis MacNeice, with a bit of his own poetry seamlessly woven in.
As well as being an author, Mark Haddon also teaches students how to write, and he explained how he tells them that specific details are what brings writing to life, but that the gaps that the writer creates for the reader to fill are just as important. He subtly illustrated his own point by flowing undetectably from his own poem, Great White, about a terror of sharks, to a story about how he loves to swim in the Thames. This story wove in and out of another story about how he tried to combat his fear of flying by learning to fly himself. He would keep returning to these stories, and to a particular image of a single drop of rain on a floating feather, teasing poignancy out of the seemingly mundane.
Haddon managed to create a sense of wonder in tiny details, and clearly never wanted to lose his own sense of wonder at the universe. In writing, and in his approach to life, he said that it is not so much the answers that matter, but understanding the enormity of the questions. If said questions are being asked by Mark Haddon then I certainly want to listen.
Original review here
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