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British author Mark Haddon’s most recent book, “Dogs and Monsters.” is a collection of eight short stories, several of which are resettings of Greek myths. In these stories, Haddon retells the original story and then travels them through time into the present day.
The Mother’s Story draws upon the story of the Minotaur, half bull and half man, who dwelt in a labyrinth beneath the king’s castle in ancient Crete. The myth states the creature was the product of a liaison between the queen and a pure white bull sent by Poseidon, the sea god, as a sign of his favor to the king. The queen raised the Minotaur as her son. In Haddon’s version the child is rejected by the king and his wife continues to visit the son in his captivity beneath the castle, ultimately sacrificing her life of ease in the royal court to take her son far away.
D.O.G.Z. opens with the story of Actaeon the hunter who unwittingly commits the forbidden act of gazing upon Diana, the goddess of the hunt as she bathes in a secluded woodland pool. He is cursed to become a stag who is hunted to the ground by his own pack of dogs and torn asunder. Haddon traces the history of the relationship between dogs and humans through history and literature. The story concludes with Laika, the dog launched into space by the Russians. The last paragraph of this story is among the most poignant in recent memory.
The Quiet Limit of the World draws upon the myth of Tithonus, a mortal who falls in love with Eos, goddess of the dawn. Eos implores her father, Zeus, to grant Tithonus the gift of immortality, which he does. Eos neglects to ask for the parallel gift of eternal youth, dooming her lover to everlasting life coupled with inexorable aging over the millennia into the present day.
The remaining five stories are drawn from other sources. They share a common thread of growth and discovery. They share, as well, a writing style bordering on the poetic, richly descriptive but not excessively florid.
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