A Spot of Bother

by Mark Haddon

Book Overview

'A painful funny humane novel: beautifully written, addictively readable and so confident' The Times Discover this brilliantly comic and moving bestselling novel by the award-winning author of The... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0307278867
• ISBN13: 9780307278869
• Release Date: August 2007
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.2" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

One Wedding and a Breakdown

Following up on his brilliant 1st novel, Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, with A Spot of Bother, Mark Haddon has demonstrated that he has mastered the understanding of the human heart and psyche. In Curious Incident, he captured the essence of autism, opening up a window into the mind of a teenager with that mysterious condition. In Bother, Haddon tackles depression and anxiety, with surprising insight, humor, and compassion. Without explicit analysis, Haddon depicts the remarkable way in which common human fears can disguise themselves as something quite different. George is the family member with the most disturbing problem, but his wife, son, and daughter are grappling with serious life-stage issues of their own. As George tumbles deeper and deeper into his private, irrational dark hole, Jean tries to recapture the excitement of her youth, Katie struggles with a dependence/independence conflict, and Jamie must come to terms with his sexuality and fear of commitment. All of their problems explode at Katie's wedding, in a comical, poignant, worst case scenario of a resolution. Beautifully written, right on the money story about the fears with which we all grapple at some point in our personal journeys. Warmly recommended.

A dysfunctional family wedding

I loved "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," and I didn't think "A Spot of Bother" could possibly live up to its predecessor. I was wrong. Amazingly, Mark Haddon's second book is even more brilliant than his first one. It also has a completely different feel to it than Haddon's first book, which makes it even more impressive. "A Spot of Bother" is a hilarious look at the life of a dysfunctional British family. There's George, a recent retiree who is convinced that his eczema is actually cancer and slowly starts losing his mind. George's wife, Jean, is secretly having an affair with her husband's former colleague, David. Jamie, George and Jean's son, doesn't think his parents have accepted the fact that he's gay, and he's also having major problems with his boyfriend, Tony. Katie, George and Jean's daughter, has a young child from her disastrous first marriage and is about to marry Ray, a man that no one in her family can stand. I really enjoyed this book. It's a comical farce with plenty of laughs, but it's also a touching family tale that all readers will probably be able to relate to on some level (which is a scary thought). I can't wait to see what Haddon writes next.

You might look like a lunatic to other motorists

As a lifelong book junkie, I approached audio books with a hefty amount of reluctance - not because I would prefer to listen to the same 50 or so "classic rock" songs over and over again on the radio, but because the whole audio thing seemed to violate the sanctity of the book. Listening to a book seemed like a pale imitation of actually reading a book. Well, I tried out my first one a few years ago, and since then have listened to numerous audio books. Household chores and the daily commute to work are radically transformed when there's a good book to listen to. There are still some books that I simply must enjoy in their good old printed form, but some books make the transition to audio so well, I don't even think twice about listening as opposed to reading. I love Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series and have never "read" a single one of these books. A Spot of Bother, the second novel from Mark Haddon of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time fame is one of those books that makes for a wonderful listen. Once again Haddon excels at telling the story of a slightly out of whack family in a way that makes the mundane events of everyday life simultaneously dramatic and hilarious. This time rather than an autistic narrator, Haddon tells the story, by way of third person narration, of the recently retired George Hall, his cheating wife, his daughter and her impending marriage to the despised Ray and the romantic misadventures of his homosexual son. The title refers to a spot found on George's leg, which, though his doctor diagnoses as eczema, George decides is definitely cancer. At several points in the story, I found myself laughing out loud, a sight which must have made fellow motorists think I was as mad as George. The scene in which George's botched home surgery is described had me squirming at the gory description and laughing like a loon at the same time. The audio is narrated by Simon Vance, who does an excellent job capturing the voices of the various characters and whose timing and delivery for the comic scenes made an already funny book that much more of a delight. A Spot of Bother is a fun, light read. Anyone who has a slightly nutty family (and who doesn't?) will certainly take some comfort in the misadventures of the Halls.

A deeply empathetic novel peopled with real characters

From A Spot of Bother: A Novel: "If he were given the choice he would rather someone had broken his leg. You did not have to explain what was wrong with a broken leg. Nor were you expected to mend it by force of will. ... What he felt mostly was a relentless, grinding dread which rumbled and thundered and made the world dark, like those spaceships in science-fiction films whose battle-scorched fuselages slid onto the screen and kept on sliding onto the screen because they were, in fact, several thousand times larger than you expected when all you could see was the nose cone. The idea of genuinely having cancer was beginning to seem almost a relief, the idea of going into hospital, having tubes put into his arm, being told what to do by doctors and nurses, no longer having to grapple with the problem of getting through the next five minutes." Mark Haddon's follow up novel to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time is another sort of exploration into the darker, more obscure regions of the human mind. Instead of an adolescent main character with Asperger's Syndrome, in A Spot of Bother Haddon portrays a 61-year old who begins to think he's losing his mind shortly after finding a mysterious skin lesion on his hip. George Hall is convinced he has cancer, and that there's nothing that can be done for him. He's plunged into a dark, confusing sort of despair in which the world seems to wobble on its axis, throwing life as he knew it into an alternate nightmarish dimension. Fear overtakes him, often crippling him, and he begins having panic attacks he believes are a further proof of the cancer he's convinced himself is ravaging him. Meanwhile, his daughter is planning her second marriage to a man he and his wife disapprove of. His wife is having an affair with a former colleague of his, and his homosexual son lurks like an unsolved problem in the background. George Hall is falling apart. Mark Haddon's second novel is stellar. It's at times riotously funny, deeply empathetic and peopled with characters the reader comes to identify with so closely it's not surprising to find yourself actually worrying about them. Well, at least I hope it's not surprising to find yourself worrying about fictional characters! Perhaps I've just hit on fodder for Mark Haddon's third novel, devoted to the notion that readers can actually come to care so much for fictional characters they build a delusional world around them. All royalty checks accepted, Mr. Haddon. A Spot of Bother is a book not to be missed. Thanks so much to Doubleday for sending me a review copy of this book.

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.