Written by Mark Haddon
A Spot of Bother is the follow up book to Haddon’s massively successful novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. It’s completely different in terms of plot, character and tone, but in its observations of the human condition, it’s just as wonderful.
It focuses around George, your typical, stiff upper lipped, post-WWII baby boomer, now retired… and slowly becoming unraveled. It’s not dark, and it’s not depressing, but it does occasionally become frightening, as he becomes a worried, repressed hypochondriac. He’s worried about his daughter marrying a man he thinks is totally incompatible with their lifestyle and class. He’s worried about his wife’s affair with another man, he’s worried about his gay son and trying to deal with him as a human being…and he’s worried about dying from a cancer he’s convinced he has, but actually doesn’t.
In the exploration of these characters and their domestic situation, A Spot of Bother manages a rare task: turning suburban city life and its straightforward, mundane problems into compelling situations, revealing an endless well of character development and relationship counseling. It’s something very few writers can do successfully - to my mind, Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride is the quintessential suburban life-as-backdrop-to-amazing-story by which all others must be judged. In that respect, Mark Haddon comes up trumps.
It’s very funny, very poignant, very witty, and very British. It comments without preaching, it wallows in sadness without being totally depressing, and it revels in the joys of life and the feeling that everyone belongs with someone. It’s mines the deep vein of everyday existence without resorting to cliche…and it will make you race to its glorious, happy conclusion, with no treacle & no saccharine overload. Just the simple, unadulterated pleasures of a life worth living.
This is the sort of book you read on a bleak day, when you need to know that the sun will shine once more. It certainly radiates from this novel…
