A Spot of Bother

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. Copyright © 2006 Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker From Bookmarks Magazine Mark Haddon's first novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (HHHH Sept/Oct 2003), was a critical hit, a best seller, and a Bookmarks staff favorite; A Spot of Bother is a very different book, making the inevitable comparisons somewhat difficult. Critics agree that Haddon's style remains smooth, clever, and appealing, but they differ on the question of whether that's enough to overcome a somewhat predictable plot and an overly neat ending. The depictions of the Halls are accurate and humorous, and while Briticisms fly thick and fast, they add to the atmosphere and don't get too much in the way of American readers. Despite some shortcomings, A Spot of Bother is a charming, entertaining read. Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. Praise for THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME“Moving . . . Think of The Sound and the Fury crossed with The Catcher in the Rye and one of Oliver Sacks’s real-life stories.” —Michiko Kakutani, New York Times “Both clever and observant, and the effect is vastly affecting.” — Washington Post Book World “This original and affecting novel is a triumph of empathy.” — The New Yorker “Gloriously eccentric and wonderfully intelligent.” — Boston Globe “Disorienting and reorienting the reader to devastating effect . . . as suspenseful and harrowing as anything in Conan Doyle.” —Jay McInerney, New York Times Book Review “Funny, sad and totally convincing.” — Time “More so than precursors like The Sound and the Fury and Flowers for Algernon, The Curious Incident is a radical experiment in empathy. ” — Village Voice “One of the strangest and most convincing characters in recent fiction.” — Slate mark haddon is the author of the international bestseller The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time , which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction and the Whitbread Book of the Year award. In addition to the recently published The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea , a collection of poetry, Haddon has also written and illustrated numerous children’s books and received several awards for his television screenplays. 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. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 1It began when George was trying on a black suit in Allders the week before Bob Green’s funeral. It was not the prospect of the funeral that had unsettled him. Nor Bob dying. To be honest he had always found Bob’s locker-room bonhomie slightly tiring and he was secretly relieved that they would not be playing squash again. Moreover, the manner in which Bob had died (a heart attack while watching the Boat Race on television) was oddly reassuring. Susan had come back from her sister’s and found him lying on his back in the center of the room with one hand over his eyes, looking so peaceful she thought initially that he was taking a nap. It would have been painful, obviously. But one could cope with pain. And the endorphins would have kicked in soon enough, followed by that sensation of one’s life rushing before one’s eyes which George himself had experienced several years ago when he had fallen from a stepladder, broken his elbow on the rockery and passed out, a sensation which he remembered as being not unpleasant (a view from the Tamar Bridge in Plymouth had figured prominently for some reason). The same probably went for that tunnel of bright light as the eyes died, given the number of people who heard the angels calling them home and woke to find a junior doctor standing over them with a defibrillator. Then . . . nothing. It would have been over. It was too early, of course. Bob was sixty-one. And it was going to be hard for Susan and the boys, even if Susan did blossom now that she was able to finish her own sentences. But all in all it seemed a good way to go. No, it was the lesion which had thrown him. He had removed his trousers and was putting on the bottom half of the suit when he noticed 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. He had not felt like this since John Zinewski’s Fireball had capsized several years ago and he had found himself trapped underwater with his ankle knotted in a loop of rope. But that had lasted for three or four seconds at most. And this time there was no one to help him right the boat. He would have to kill himself. It was not a comforting thought but it was something he could do, and this made him feel a little more in control of the situation. The only question was how. Jumping from a tall building was a terrifying idea, easing your center of gravity out over the edge of the parapet, the possibility that you might change your mind halfway down. And the last thing he needed at this point was more fear. Hanging needed equipment and he possessed no gun. If he drank enough whiskey he might be able to summon the courage to crash the car. There was a big stone gateway on the A16 this side of Stamford. He could hit it doing 90 mph with no difficulty whatsoever. But what if his nerve failed? What if he were too drunk to control the car? What if someone pulled out of the drive? What if he killed them, paralyzed himself and died of cancer in a wheelchair in prison? “Sir...? Would you mind accompanying me back into the store?” A young man of eighteen or thereabouts was staring down at George. He had ginger sideburns and a navy blue uniform several sizes too large for him. George realized that he was crouching on the tiled threshold outside the shop. “Sir...?”George got to his feet. “I’m terribly sorry.”“Would you mind accompanying me...?”George looked down and saw that he was still wearing the suit trousers with the fly undone. He buttoned it rapidly. “Of course.” He walked back through the doors then made his way between the handbags and the perfumes toward the menswear department with the security guard at his shoulder. “I appear to have had some kind of turn.” “You’ll have to discuss that with the manager, I’m afraid, sir.” The black thoughts which had filled his mind only seconds before seemed to have occurred a very long time ago. True, he was a little unsure on his feet, the way you were after slicing your thumb with a chisel, for example, but he felt surprisingly good given the circumstances. The manager of the menswear department was standing bedside a rack of slippers with his hands crossed over his groin. “Thank you, John.” The security guard gave him a deferential little nod, turned on his heels and walked away. “Now, Mr....” “Hall. George Hall. My apologies. I . . .” “Perhaps we should have a word in my office,” said the manager. A woman appeared carrying George’s trousers. “He left these in the changing room. His wallet’s in the pocket.” George pressed on. “I think I had some kind of blackout. I really didn’t mean to cause any trouble.” How good it was to be talking to other people. Them saying something. Him saying something in return. The steady ticktock of conversation. He could have carried on like this all afternoon. “Are you all right, sir?” The woman cupped a hand beneath his elbow and he slid downward and sideways onto a chair which felt more solid, more comfortable and more supportive than he remembered any chair ever feeling. Things became slightly vague for a few minutes.Then a cup of tea was placed into his hands.“Thank you.” He sipped. It was not good tea but it was hot, it was in a proper china mug and holding it was a comfort. “Perhaps we should call you a taxi.” It was probably best, he thought, to head back to the village and buy the suit another day. 2He decided not to mention the incident to Jean. She would only want to talk about it and this was not an appealing proposition. Talking was, in George’s opinion, overrated. You could not turn the television on these days without seeing someone discussing their adoption or explaining why they had stabbed their husband. Not that he was averse to talking. Talking was one of life’s pleasures. And everyone needed to sound off now and then over a pint of Ruddles about colleagues who did not shower frequently enough, or teenage sons who had returned home drunk in the small hours and thrown up in the dog’s basket. But it did not change anything. The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely. How anyone could work in the same office for ten years or bring up children without putting certain thoughts permanently to the back of their mind was beyond him. And as for that last grim lap when you had a catheter and no teeth, memory loss seemed like a godsend. He told Jean that he had found nothing in Allders and would drive back into town on Monday when he did not have to share Peterborough with forty thousand other people. Then he went upstairs to the bathroom and stuck a large plaster over the lesion so that it could no longer be seen. He slept soundly for most of the night and woke only when Ronald Burrows, his long-dead geography teacher, pressed a strip of duct tape over his mouth and hammered a hole through the wall of George’s chest with a long metal spike. Oddly, it was the smell which upset him most, a smell like the smell of a poorly cleaned public toilet which has recently been used by a very ill person, heady and curried, a smell, worst of all, which seemed to be coming from the wound in his own body. He fixed his eyes on the tasseled lampshade above his head and waited for his heart to slow down, like a man pulled from a burning building, still not quite able to believe that he is safe. Six o’clock. He slid out of bed and went downstairs. He put two slices of bread into the toaster and took down the espresso maker Jamie had given them for Christmas. It was a ridiculous gadget which they kept on show for diplomatic reasons. But it felt good now, filling the reservoir with water, pouring coffee into the funnel, slotting the rubber seal into place and screwing the aluminium sections together. Oddly reminiscent of Gareth’s steam engine which George had been allowed to play with during the infamous visit to Poole in 1953. And a good deal better than sitting watching the trees at the far end of the garden swaying like sea monsters while a kettle boiled. The blue flame sighed under the metal base of the coffeemaker. Indoor camping. A bit of an adventure. The toast pinged up. That was the weekend, of course, when Gareth burned the frog. How strange, looking back, that the course of an entire life should be spelled out so clearly in five minutes during one August afternoon. He spread butter and marmalade on the toast while the coffee gargled through. He poured the coffee into a mug and took a sip. It was hair-raisingly strong. He added milk till it became the color of dark chocolate then sat down and picked up the RIBA Journal which Jamie had left on his last visit. The Azman Owen house. Timber shuttering, sliding glass doors, Bauhaus dining chairs, the single vase of white lilies on the table. Dear God. Sometimes he longed to see a pair of discarded Y-fronts in an architectural photograph. “High-frequency constant-amplitude electric internal vibrators were specified for the compaction, to minimize blowholes and to produce a uniform compaction effort . . .” The house looked like a bunker. What was it about concrete? In five hundred years were people going to stand under bridges on the M6 admiring the stains? He put the magazine down and started the Telegraph crossword. Nanosecond. Byzantium. Quiff. Jean appeared at seven thirty wearing her purple bathrobe. “... Read more