Product Description

A Washington Post Best Book of the Year

A Spot of Bother is Mark Haddon’s unforgettable follow-up to the internationally beloved bestseller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.

At sixty-one, George Hall is settling down to a comfortable retirement. When his tempestuous daughter, Katie, announces that she is getting married to the deeply inappropriate Ray, the Hall family is thrown into a tizzy. Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and quietly begins to lose his mind.

As parents and children fall apart and come together, Haddon paints a disturbing yet amusing portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #59739 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-14
• Released on: 2007-08-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Recent retiree George Hall, convinced that his eczema is cancer, goes into a tailspin in Haddon's (Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) laugh-out-loud slice of British domestic life. George, 61, is clearly channeling a host of other worries into the discoloration on his hip (the "spot of bother"): daughter Katie, who has a toddler, Jacob, from her disastrous first-marriage to the horrid Graham, is about to marry the equally unlikable Ray; inattentive wife Jean is having an affair—with George's former co-worker, David Symmonds; and son Jamie doesn't think George is OK with Jamie's being queer. Haddon gets into their heads wonderfully, from Jean's waffling about her affair to Katie's being overwhelmed (by Jacob, and by her impending marriage) and Jamie's takes on men (and boyfriend Tony in particular, who wants to come to the wedding). Mild-mannered George, meanwhile, despairing over his health, slinks into a depression; his major coping strategies involve hiding behind furniture on all fours and lowing like a cow. It's an odd, slight plot—something like the movie Father of the Bride crossed with Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" (as skin rash)—but it zips along, and Haddon subtly pulls it all together with sparkling asides and a genuine sympathy for his poor Halls. No bother at all, this comic follow-up to Haddon's blockbuster (and nicely selling book of poems) is great fun. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
Haddon's acclaimed debut novel, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," brilliantly imagined the inner world of an autistic teen-ager. Here the hero is similarly uncommunicative and detached, this time because of a stiff upper lip. George, recently retired, thinks talking is "overrated" and greets the death of a friend with relief "that they would not be playing squash again." Obsessed with his own mortality, he barely registers the dramas around him: his wife is having an affair, his daughter is marrying a man she's not sure she loves, and his son is afraid to bring his boyfriend to the wedding. Haddon has a deft comic touch, but he pushes his characters too hard toward epiphanies, and in the end this antic farce is merely affable, without surprises.
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From The Washington Post
As psychiatrist R.D. Laing once observed, the family is a machine designed to inflict insanity. Sometimes the build-up of stress merely leads to a never-ending tension, that guarded silence of an armed camp when the worn-out legionnaires await the attack at dawn. At other times, the stresses go even further, breaking forth in unending arguments, crippling anxiety, depression, the abuse of drink and drugs, emotional coldness, infidelity, delusion, violence, perhaps even murder or suicide. Sounds pretty bad, right? To Mark Haddon, in his superbly entertaining new book, any or all of these is hardly more than "a spot of bother."

Haddon's first novel, the prize-winning bestseller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, managed a teeter-totter's balance between humor and pathos, with a mystery thrown in to boot. In A Spot of Bother he takes on marital and domestic strife, and somehow manages to make us smile, even laugh, as we follow the upheavals in the tormented Hall family as it gradually spins out of control. Haddon's particular genius, however, lies in the unobtrusive way he makes us identify with his characters. Any of us might be George Hall or his wife, Jean, or his adult children, Katie and Jamie. We have felt what they feel, thought their thoughts, glimpsed their faces in our own bathroom mirrors.

A recently retired mid-level executive, George Hall is the kind of guy who potters around in the backyard building a shed, reads the occasional Flashman novel and plans to take up drawing, maybe even watercolors, now that he has some time. Jean is quite proud of him. Her friend "Pauline's husband started to go downhill as soon as they handed him the engraved decanter. Eight weeks later he was in the middle of the lawn at 3:00 a.m. with a bottle of Scotch inside him, barking like a dog." Before A Spot of Bother is over, Pauline's poor husband will seem relatively well adjusted.

One afternoon George goes downtown to buy a black suit for the funeral of a former colleague. While trying on the trousers, he notices "a small oval of puffed flesh on his hip, darker than the surrounding skin and flaking slightly. His stomach rose and he was forced to swallow a small amount of vomit which appeared at the back of his mouth. Cancer." George immediately realizes that he will now have to kill himself, the only question being when and by what means. His mind reviews the options.

George's mind is, in fact, always reviewing the options. If not quite a hypochondriac, he nonetheless suffers from a hyperactive imagination, and he consistently imagines the worse. In the past, whenever he had been forced to fly, "he stared doggedly at the seat back in front of him trying desperately to pretend that he was sitting in the living room at home. But every few minutes he would hear a sinister chime and see a little red light flashing in the bulkhead to his right, secretly informing the cabin crew that the pilot was wrestling with some fatal malfunction in the cockpit."

Naturally, George tells no one about his fear that he's dying of cancer. And, as life will have it, after he returns home, he learns that his divorced daughter has unexpectedly decided to marry her utterly inappropriate boyfriend, Ray. "The main problem, George felt, was Ray's size. He looked like an ordinary person who had been magnified. He moved more slowly than other people, the way the larger animals in zoos did. Giraffes. Buffalo. He lowered his head to go through doorways and had what Jamie unkindly but accurately described as 'strangler's hands.' " But Katie is more than a little desperate, and just might be marrying Ray because he can give her a decent home and because he loves to play with her 2-year-old, Jacob. Good enough reasons, no? It's really unfair that her family doesn't approve of him.

Besides, who are they to judge? Brother Jamie is gay, after all, and their mother has recently begun "shagging one of Dad's old colleagues," even if Dad himself seems to imagine that his wife's new silk scarves and a distinct "twinkle" are due to her enthusiasm for an Italian-language class. Meanwhile, George continues to suffer silently. "With blinding clarity he realized that everyone was frolicking blindly in a summer meadow surrounded by a dark and impenetrable forest, waiting for that grim day on which they were dragged into the dark beyond the trees and individually butchered." Occasionally, he reassures himself that the lesion is nothing, maybe just some eczema; at other times, that it's invisibly, quietly spreading throughout his body. One night he wanders up to Jean "holding a soiled Q-tip to ask whether she thought it was normal to have that much wax in one's ear." He starts sipping lots of wine, then taking pills.

George may be the extreme case here, but everyone around him is suffering. Katie's girlfriends ask if she really loves Ray, and the next day her gorgeous ex-husband, Graham, invites her out for coffee. Jamie's perfect London existence starts to unravel when he decides that he simply can't face bringing his boyfriend, Tony, to the wedding. Jean realizes that her own carefully balanced life was "becoming looser and messier, and moving slowly beyond her control." Which does she want more, her kind, attentive lover or her distracted husband and angry children?

Haddon relates these ever-spiraling emotional crises in short, three- or four-page chapters, shifting the viewpoint from one Hall to another, gradually tightening the focus so that all the storylines will come to a head on the wedding day. To my mind, this clockwork timing just slightly undermines A Spot of Bother. Haddon has made us suffer his characters' confusions, heartaches and desperation. But then their problems are all resolved in an oddly conventional, even pat, Hollywood finale. The truest eloquence, it's been said, includes an occasional stutter. Mark Haddon never stutters. A Spot of Bother is too expert and smooth for that.

Still, one should hardly disdain fine craftsmanship, especially when a novel gets so many things exactly right. You will be hard put to find a more realistic 2-year-old in fiction than young Jacob, with his passion for Bob the Builder videos and his manly pride in going poo. Jean's lover, David, despite his provincial urbanity, is -- surprise, surprise -- a truly kind and respectful man. Indeed, the most admirable people in the entire book are David; Jamie's carpenter-boyfriend, Tony; and the long-suffering Ray.

What matters most, though, is the way that Haddon fleshes out his characters with details and quirks that might have been stolen from the reader's own psyche: At one point, for instance, Katie takes up "the ballpoint pen Ray had been playing with and lined it up with the grain of the tabletop. Maybe if she could place it with absolute accuracy her life wouldn't fall apart." Been there, done that.

In several ways, Mark Haddon's new novel recalls last year's On Beauty, Zadie Smith's similar portrait of a dysfunctional, i.e., typical, family. Love hurts and heals, and half the time while reading A Spot of Bother you won't be sure whether to laugh or cry. Which is, I suppose, precisely the point.

Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

An endearing family tale
Mark Haddon had quite a challenge coming off of the quirky, wonderful "Curious Incident of the Dog in Night-time." How could you possibly follow that up? Haddon takes the noble approach by trying a different tact this time around; while "Incident" was seen solely from the point of view of one person (who just happened to be autistic), "Bother" takes on an entire family whose lives get shaken up in the weeks before the daughter's wedding. It's a very different approach that thankfully keeps Haddon's quirky sense of humor. Haddon also challenges himself by presenting us with some deeply shallow, selfish characters that for the first hundred pages are pretty severely unlikable. I was thoroughly convinced that there was no way I could ever care what happens to such wretched people, but Haddon proved me wrong. First, let's meet them: there's the matriarch, Jean, who has been having an affair with a former colleague of her husband; Jamie, the gay son, who has just been dumped by the boyfriend he stubbornly refused to invite to the wedding to meet his family; daughter Katie, whose nuptials may be cancelled because she can't decide if she loves her fiance or not; and George, the patriarch who suffers a complete mental breakdown after retirement and the appearance of a lesion on his hip (the titular spot of bother). Jean, Jamie, and Katie start out completely insufferable, but after the first hundred pages they have been forced to re-examine their lives and become determined to be better people. They discover their softer, more human sides and set about righting the wrongs they have committed. In no time at all I was hopelessly caught up rooting for them to get their lives back on track. George has the opposite problem: he has always been relatively stable, if emotionally distant. Caught up in a passed-mid-life crisis, he completely unravels. It is utterly fascinating -- and scarily realistic --to witness his descent into madness, and it gives the family drama a powerful edge that makes it all the more resonant. In the end I thoroughly enjoyed "A Spot of Bother" and its characters. And I really can't wait to see what Haddon comes up with next.

Don't Give Up On This One
Following up a book of rare excellence like Mr. Haddon's first novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is difficult. Seeing the world through the eyes of an autistic child like Christopher John Francis Boone is a real revelation. Seeing the world through the growing madness of George Hall in A Spot of Bother may not be the same but it is a worthy successor.

And, let's face it, George may be the one going clinically insane here, but he is surrounded by a family that could certainly try any man's nerves: a wife cheating on him with a former co-worker, an argumentative daughter marrying a man she's not sure she loves and a gay son who has trouble sustaining relationships. Haddon's success in this novel is that he manages all this madness in a way that seems very real.

To be honest, he handles it in such a realistic way that the first third of the novel is a bit of a slog. Interesting in the sense that you are getting to know these characters but trying in the sense that you are waiting for something more to happen. Then, around page 100, events start to accelerate and they don't let up until the final explosion and the wedding reception at the end of the novel (foreshadowed nicely, I might add, by real fireworks--the kind that explode in colors in the sky).

Far be it from me to give away any of the actual events. Needless to say, he pushes the boundaries of believability but doesn't quite break them. If there is a problem here, it's that everyone else except the four adults in this family seem so normal while they struggle with each other's craziness. But, then again, maybe that's how the world seems when we compare our families to the world at large. Which may be why this novel is fun to read.

Yes, it's different from The Curious Incident
Haddon's trademark wit--an improbable mixture of acerbic wisecracks and compassionate quips--is alive and well in A Spot of Bother. Here, Haddon proves himself to be a masterful story-teller and not just a one-shot wonder. He makes the mundane seem miraculous and embraces the often ugly complexities of family life. Each family member is imbued with both innocuous foibles and categorical flaws, and the book, like its defective characters, comes together as a cohesive unit. It's kind of like Little Miss Sunshine--but better.