As he demonstrated in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a canine murder mystery from the point of view of an autistic boy, former children's book author and illustrator Mark Haddon has a gift for reaching inside the inner world of characters whose minds should prove difficult to penetrate.
A Spot of Bother is Haddon's second novel aimed at adults, and again he writes his characters with great affection despite the fact that they're deeply flawed. Or, in the case of Bother's protagonist, George Hall, deeply insane.
The Halls are a family of people preoccupied with their own problems, largely centred around preparations for a backyard wedding. His daughter, Katie, is marrying a man no one, including Katie, thinks is good enough for her. Wife Jean is having an affair with one of George's former colleagues and struggling to plan the on-again, off-again wedding of her stubborn daughter. Son Jamie's reluctance to invite his boyfriend to Katie's wedding destroys that seemingly stable relationship.
Poor George finds his family falling apart and lacks the emotional tools to deal with the chaos head on. "Talking was, in George's opinion, overrated... The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely."
Newly retired George's own issues are an extreme example of the fretting the rest of his family — in fact, the rest of the world — exhibits. When he discovers a lesion on his hip, he leaps to the conclusion of cancer, and contemplates suicide. He gets caught up in the details of the how, discarding each method, including getting blind drunk and crashing the car - because what if he encountered another car?
"What if he killed them, paralyzed himself, and died of cancer in a wheelchair in prison?" George wonders.
The whimsical humour of the escalating hyperbole reveals a man who ponders the worst case scenario to an amusingly absurd degree. As the novel progresses, however, it becomes clear that this is no momentary flight of imagination or coping mechanism. George's insanity often escalates his worries beyond the point of reason.
Article comments
1 - Gordon Hauptfleisch
"The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely."
A nice refinement to my "ignore it and it'll go away" philosophy of life and auto maintenance! Thanks for another good review.
2 - Diane Kristine
I hope it works better for you than George! But I do think procrastination is underrated. Sometimes problems really do solve themselves if you ignore them. I'm hoping that clunking in my engine is one of them ...
3 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net, which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States. Nice work!
4 - Gordon Hauptfleisch
Congratulations & (non-existent) Fabulous Prizes! This article has been chosen as an Editors' Pick.