"A Spot of Bother" by Mark Haddon

You're a BAFTA winner and the author of 15 children's books. Your last novel was awarded more than 15 literary awards, including the Whitbread Book of the Year prize. Where do you go from here? If you're Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, you write about a family of four. Living in Peterborough. It opens in a changing room in Allders, and it doesn't really get much more rock 'n' roll than that. But, by goodness, A Spot of Bother is nothing short of brilliant.
George Hall is a retired 57-year-old whose wife Jean is having an affair. His son, Jamie, is gay, much to George and Jean's discomfort, and his daughter, Katie, is about to marry Ray, a man they most certainly do not approve of. Then George discovers a strange lump on his hip, which, he becomes convinced, means terminal cancer. So he works himself up without telling anyone of his fears until he decides to take drastic action. I can't say more about the plot without ruining the many wonderful episodes and shocking surprises that pop up along the way.
Just as he flawlessly mastered the voice of a boy with Asperger's in The Curious Incident, here Haddon has filled 390 pages with sharp and witty observations about family and daily life. "He had never liked expensive hotels. On account of the tipping... Who did you tip... and how much? Rich people either knew instinctively or didn't give a damn if they offended the lower orders." The awkwardness surrounding the wedding is rich comic territory for Haddon, especially when Jamie pays Katie a visit and meets Ray instead:
" 'You heard the news, then.'
'I did.' Jamie nodded. 'Congratulations.'
Congratulations?
Ray extended a beefy paw and Jamie found his own hand sucked into its gravitational field."
One recurring theme in the novel is the idea that when people try so hard to keep others happy, it can be at the expense of their own feelings. Haddon handles the undercurrents, gripes and accommodations of family life with aplomb, using everyday phrases subtly and effectively, as when it's announced that Katie is bringing Ray for lunch: "Bloody hell. That was all he needed. Jean bent into the fridge. 'Just try to be civil.'"
They are clearly very reserved parents, for whom appearance is all-important: "What was Katie doing? You could not control children, he knew that. Making them eat vegetables was hard enough." Even when Haddon pulls off one of the most gruesome scenes I've ever read (forget Palahniuk's Haunted, that's soooo last year), it is somehow completely believable.
This a superb novel, and I was shocked when it didn't made the Man Booker longlist. There may be a perfectly obvious, simple reason for its omission. After reading it though, I can't think of an explanation that's good enough.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Translator Translated" by Anita Desai

Image
Prema Joshi is a “prematurely aged” instructor of English literature at a girls’ college, “a tired woman going home from work with nothing to look forward to, nothing to smile about,” who sees a way out of her malaise when she unexpectedly gets a chance to translate into English a set of short stories written in one of India’s many regional languages. The focus here is the hierarchy that separates writer and translator, with the latter clearly in an inferior position and frustrated by it, and what happens when a translator violates that order. But Ms. Desai also uses the novella for satiric purposes, perhaps to exact vengeance on some literary nationalists in India; at one point Prema and her publisher attend a conference where they are hectored by “a pudgy man in a sweat-stained suit,” who imperiously demands to know, “What made you decide to translate these stories into a colonial language that was responsible for destroying the original language?” ... "Translator Transla...
Read more

"House of Lies"

Image
As pitches go it can't have been an easy one: "So our new show, House of Lies, is about a bunch of cut-throat management consultants and the way in which they con corporate clients out of money each week. As the strapline has it: Meet the One Per Cent sticking it to the One Per Cent. Yes, that's right, it's a half-hour comedy about wealthy slicksters screening right in the middle of one of the biggest economic depressions America has experienced. Good joke, huh?" The answer is er, no, not really. House of Lies, which will air on Sky Atlantic later this year, has many things going for it: an outstanding cast, including the charismatic Don Cheadle as the company's fast-talking boss, Marty Kaan, a devious expert at the art of the soft-sell; some genuinely funny one-liners; slick cinematography and a willingness to take risks with the format (Marty often breaks the fourth wall to explain to the television audience what certain terminology means, or how his ...
Read more

"The World we Found" (by Thrity Umrigar)

Image
A crisis reconnects four young firebrands from college who have grown apart as adults, in a story dense with sensitive scrutiny. Straddling India and the United States, this tale of friends reunited in disparate maturity is heavy on internal reflection, lighter on events. The highpoint of Armaiti, Nishta, Laleh and Kavita’s student years in late-1970s’ Bombay was their involvement in political activity, in particular a demonstration that saw two of them arrested. Now, three decades later, Nishta, renamed Zoha, has spent years in an oppressive marriage to Iqbal, a Muslim who has grown very devout. Impulsive Laleh is comfortably settled with her influential husband Adish and children; architect Kavita has finally come to terms with her lesbianism; and, in America, Armaiti has just been diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor, a catastrophe that pulls the four together again at Armaiti’s request. Laleh and Kavita are free to leave India immediately but Nishta has to be found, persuaded...
Read more