A Spot of Bother
By Mark Haddon
Jonathan Cape
***

Reviewed by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar

With his first novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon won critical acclaim, several prizes, and legions of fans, adult and children alike. With the resultant high expectations, a second novel was bound to be a tough act – with A Spot of Bother Haddon, though, seems to have decided to bow out of any sort of contest, even with himself.

The title, A Spot of Bother, refers to a patch discovered by newly-retired George Hall on his thigh. The Doctor diagnoses it as eczema; Hall, however, decides he is dying, and from then on, breaks into frequent erratic acts, much to the consternation of his wife Jean who is having an affair with one of George’s ex-colleagues and herself feeling alternately happy and guilty. Their daughter Katie announces early on her desire to marry a second time – the groom in question, Ray, is regarded as wholly unsuitable by her parents and brother Jamie, who then expend considerable energy debating whether they should stop her and how. They finally settle on a gameplan “to treat her like an adult”. Meanwhile, gay Jamie’s boyfriend, Tony, is sulking because Jamie is pussyfooting on the issue of taking Tony to his sister’s wedding. When he finally decides, “all that bollocks about provincial bigotry… and it didn’t matter if his father tied himself in knots over bedroom arrangements,” Tony decides to call the relationship off.

The charmingly idiosyncratic tone of Christopher, the autistic narrator of Curious Incident, kept the pages zipping with a singularly objective yet heart-warming recounting. With its multiple-voice narrative, A Spot of Bother though becomes a lumpy ‘Tales of woe’ that should keep the reader engaged, if not enthralled, but fails to. The voices are distinct, yet unremarkable, except for George’s with his hysterically-calm observations as he routinely works his way out of frequent panic attacks. Once, musing on Katie’s impending wedding: “No. He had got everything back to front. It was not the job of the bride’s father to like his prospective son-in-law (he could feel sanity returning even as he formed the thought). That was the job of the best man.”

The pages are easy read, dry witticisms abound and Haddon does humour well; however, the individual parts never stack up to a satisfying read. One cannot shake off the feeling that one is meandering through the ‘family-drama’ terrain, the pleasantly pointless narrative focused on daily problems, refusing to be rescued even by Katie’s frequent wild sputtering. Katie is not sure whether she loves Ray or likes him for the sense of security he provides her and her son. Ray wonders if Katie likes him for his house. Haddon never takes us to the point where we feel for these dilemmas. Even George – overanxious, depressed, going senile ? – leaves one with a grudging sense of knowing the man and yet not.

After the novel has opened with a sequential airing of mundane conflicts in various relationships, the disagreements pile up and the individual protagonists split hair and the reader wonders when Haddon will deliver that masterly surprise stroke which will make everything come together? Eventually, never. The book starts with disagreements and ends with make-ups and the in-between periods of plodding could be out of a ‘Conflict resolution’ manual – a lot of discourse. This despite George Hall’s avowed belief that talking was overrated. Towards the end Haddon attempts to liven the book with a bit of British style bawdry humour, straight out of Bridget Jones Diary, as George, delivering his speech at Katie’s wedding, decides to jumps over table tops and lunge for his wife’s paramour.

^Top