Mark Haddon: ″ Myths survive because they are ambiguous "

Mark Haddon, in August 2019 during the Edinburgh Film Festival.Roberto Ricciuti / Getty Images

As a child, Mark Haddon (Northampton, 58 years old), whom the world will always remember for

(Salamander), wanted to be a scientist.

Specifically, he wanted to be a paleoanthropologist.

He wanted to study hominid remains from the Rift Valley in Ethiopia, he recalls.

He's sitting on a cushioned couch when he takes the video call.

Behind it is a shelf crammed with books and comics —among them,

, by Emil Ferris—, a scarf is tied around his neck.

The place from which he speaks is his home in, he says, "quiet Oxford."

He has run again.

You are sufficiently recovered from the double

to which he underwent early last year to be able to do so.

Why didn't you end up studying paleoanthropology?

"Oh, I wasn't good enough at math, and I realized there could be something more exciting in literature than science," he replies.

• "You have to leave space for the reader to imagine" (Interview in 2011)

The way he discovered it is not at all canonical.

In class, she recalls, “they showed us a couple of books of poetry with hideous photographs about the horrible things that human beings do to other human beings, and the mixture of those beautiful words in the face of the brutality of the images caused fireworks to explode. in my head, what the hell was that?

Since the 2003 publication of the novel starring Christopher Boone, the boy with Asperger syndrome who investigates the case of a murdered dog - and, incidentally, illuminates the dark side of his dysfunctional family - Haddon has tried unsuccessfully to overcome that peak, following, in the distance, in the footsteps of the Boones.

That is to say, until

(Salamandra), everything he had written —for adults, since he is also the author of children's books— was, in a sense, a family drama.

In

, on the other hand, he opts for a return to the Homeric.

“I guess it all started when I realized that my friends spoke more than one language, and I didn't.

I decided to study at least a couple, and I thought why couldn't I study Greek and Latin, ”he says, proud of his eccentricity.

That he ended up taking an interest in ancient myths was, he says, "inevitable."

In

reworks the story of Apollonius of Tire - the adventures of Prince Pericles in his flight after discovering that King Antiochus is abusing his daughter - but not the original, but the

, half written by William Shakespeare and George Wilkins, “a minor Shakespeare play, which is hardly talked about” and which to some extent disliked him “because of the way the protagonist's voice is stolen.” “It never made sense to me that the The action focused on the man who flees and the adventures he lives. She was experiencing the tragedy, and didn't it make more sense that all this was something that she imagined to justify her abandonment? ”she wonders.

That's what he did.

She gave voice to those who never had it, the girl who suffers abuse and it was her, it was "her adolescent mind" who invented "the absurd deeds of Pericles" as someone who creates a kind of "balm, an ointment" to calm pain.

And through it he told a story that is at the same time all stories.

The story of how Shakespeare and Wilkins wrote

, the original mythical story, and a present-day story in which the king is an unscrupulous millionaire, and Angelica an orphan in the hands of a monster.

A journey through time and space that mixes characters and eras "to tell the story in the best possible way."

If his prose seems more colorful than usual, it is because he has tried to take language to extremes that it had not gone to before.

And always with Virginia Woolf, his favorite writer, "the one who kept the door open in my case, and to which I return again and again", in mind.

The survival of myths

Does this world without a clear future lead us to return to the past, to explain ourselves through myths?

“The myths survive because they are ambiguous enough that each generation can take them to their own ground.

They have so many faces that you will always find one that talks about you ”, he answers.

On the other hand, he prefers not to make any kind of prediction about what may or may not become fashionable, literarily speaking, because, he says, “the forces that act on the novelist have little to do with what happens in the world, in reality ”.

“When you read a book like mine, you are reading something that started five years ago in the writer's mind.

Writing novels obeys a wide frequency, and it is the duty of the writer to ignore what is happening today.

At the end of last year a lot of novels were written about Brexit, and who is interested in Brexit today?

Literature is not and should not be that ”, sentence.

“Sometimes it seems that when something works, they all jump into the jugular, as if someone had opened a door for them to enter, right?” He wonders.

He opened it himself in 2003. Nowadays, he tries to reject everything that has to do with that book, which was a blessing at the time but which, over time, has become a kind of curse.

Being the author of

became, for a time, a full-time job.

Today he volunteers and, above all, he paints.

He hardly ever writes.

“I wish I could be like Hilary Mantel, and write 2,000 words a day.

What I do most is go for a run and get bored.

But getting bored is part of the writer's trade.

It is very easy to have ideas, the difficult thing is to classify them, and bring them to life.

And that does when you do nothing.

When you get bored ”, he confesses, still wearing his scarf, and Emil Ferris's comic in the background.