I went back to compare some of my older 3-star reviews and decided to drop this one down 1 star based on that.

It wasn't good. It wasn't bad.
It was just *shrugs* ..meh.

George reminded me of Harold Fry in The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry , a character with whom I could not connect at all. Feeble, weak and unresponsive to surroundings (had a bit more balls though).

Apparently books about retired old men are really not my thing.

Mark Haddon does deserve some credit as his book was easy to read and did seem all the while to be leading up to something.

Somewhat of an anticlimactic ending with none of the answers I had been looking for.

It wasn't good. It wasn't bad.
It was just *shrugs* ..meh.

After enjoying Curious Incident I’ve had this on my to-read shelf for a long time, but what a colossal disappointment it turned out to be. 500 pages of paper-thin characters going through a series of events with scant insight or wit. Each chapter (some of which are less than a page in length) is written from a different character’s perspective, but their internal monologues all sound the same. The book’s excessive length is attributable in part to Haddon’s constant references to things like “that time in Margate with Maureen and Geoffrey”, which I think aims to build the world beyond these four characters but rings too hollow to be effective. Nothing about this world felt real or interesting, and nothing about these characters felt illuminating or engaging. If I weren’t the sort of stubborn person who always finishes a book once I’ve started, there’s no way I would have made it past the first 100 pages.

Also, one chapter is basically one character retelling an episode of Bob The Builder to us, which is right up there with the most inexplicable editorial choices I have ever encountered in my long life of reading books.

really weird but kinda funny

I pretty much hated this book. It was the type of book that you read because you liked the author's other work, but it's so aggressively bad that it makes you reconsider whether or not you actually liked the author's previous work upon closer consideration.

So what was so bad about it? Well, for the one the characters simply didn't ring true. They all felt poorly sketched out, just a bunch of people having what Haddon would have you believe are constant epiphanies about their sad little lives. He writes in such a way that you can tell he wants the reader to think it's a stunning revelation that this character is having, when it's just another dull moment in a rather dull story. If I had a dollar for every time Haddon made a one sentence paragraph meant to reveal some larger truth about the character's personalities, I'd be a rich man. He also has a nasty habit of ending each "chapter" (there are well over 100 of them, most 2 pages or less) with some half-assed "cliff-hanger", something better suited to the James Pattersons and R.L. Stines of the world.

Haddon doesn't seem to understand his characters, and he doesn't seem to care to, either. He simply throws a jumble of people into awkward situations and has them (over)react like a bunch of unlikeable, selfish jerks and then comment to themselves that, perhaps, they are acting like unlikeable, selfish jerks who are overreacting to what are, in reality, fairly mundane situations. They're sad, selfish little people, yet Haddon seems to think they are endearing.

Finally, he ends the book fairly abruptly and with a neat little bow on top that doesn't suit it. Everything works out for everyone involved, yet no one seemed to learn anything or grow as people. They all ended exactly where they began with no growth whatsoever. I've heard people who are familiar with autism claim that Haddon's sketch of the child in 'A Curious Incident of the Dog in the NightTime' was actually woefully inaccurate and quite offensive, and seeing the way he handles his characters' problems in this story, I'm much more inclined to believe that. Just an awful, awful book. Haddon seems to think he's writing a British version of 'The Corrections', but he's painfully mistaken. I'll probably not read anything by Haddon again.

Mark Haddon writes of a middle-aged man named George Hall, who is struggling with retirement, his gay son and his boyfriend, his daughter announcing a man he doesn't like, and his wife, who is having an affair with his ex-colleague. Because of all of this, George begins to lose it.

The story revolves around each of the characters, told from the 3rd person omniscient, weaving their problems and thoughts around one another. The book is extremely engaging and I found myself immediately drawn in each time I picked it up. Haddon writes well and is able to portray his characters both in angst and in happiness, which adds to the plot since one finds themselves identifying with the feelings of love, confusion, and upset. It is also an interesting perspective of how parents try to relate and understand their grown children and their decisions.

Lähes modernin klassikon maineeseen nousseen romaaninsa Yöllisen koiran merkillinen tapaus, 2003 (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, 2003) jälkeen Mark Haddonin toinen aikuisille suunnattu romaani Harmin paikka, 2009 (A Spot of Bother, 2006) oli suuri pettymys. Romaani keskittyy pyörittelemään vanhan englantilaispariskunnan ja tämän lähisuvun arkiongelmia. Eläkkeelle jäänyt George Hall kärsii itsetuhoiseen ahdistukseen asti kuolemanpelosta ja tämän vaimo Jean hyppii vieraissa. Tytär Katie on menossa naimisiin, mutta epäröi onko tuleva puoliso Ray sivistykseltään ihan tarpeeksi korkeaa tasoa hänen standardeihinsa. Poika Jamie on homo, mutta ylenkatsoo suhdettaan Tonyn kanssa pitkälti samoista syistä kuin siskonsakin.

Romaanin ensimmäinen runsas satasivuinen neljännes on minnekään johtamatonta lässytystä ja uuvuttavaa arkiongelmien pyörittelyä. Epäkiinnostavat ja epäsympaattiset henkilöhahmot eivät lukijan kiinnostusta lisää. Kerronnasta puuttuu irvingmäinen huumori ja pilke silmäkulmasta sekä syvällisempi, eksistentialistinen pohdinta. Puuduttavan alun jälkeen kerronta saa hieman jännitettä, kun henkilöhahmot tulevat tutummiksi, ja tuleva katastrofi eli hääjuhlat lähestyy, mutta ei tarpeeksi jotta kiinnostus henkilöiden lukuisiin arkiongelmiin oikeasti heräisi. En yleensä jätä aloittamaani romaania kesken, mutta tällä kertaa se oli hyvin lähellä. Voin henkseleitä paukutellen kuitenkin todeta, että en antanut periksi, vaan sain koko teoksen kahlattua läpi. Ja myönnetäköön kohtuuden nimissä, että olihan siinä muutama hieman vetävämpikin kohta.

Arvioni: 2,2 tähteä viidestä.

Easy reading, but too fixated on the often unlikeable characters. In this family the daughter is marrying for the second time, and the 600 plus pages are leading to the wedding that is opposed by the rest of the family in a quiet sulky way. Dad suddenly has an infinitesimal health scare and starts going nuts adding to the busy self centered schedules of the other members.

This book was so uncomfortable to read - really had to push through to finish. Nothing like the curious incident of the dog in the night which was super charming and beautiful to read. So many times I wanted to stop reading it oops

As we approach the end of my first year of recorded and reviewed reading, I have read almost no bad books. The Fermata was bad, but the guy could write, he just decided to write something we all thought was fucking awful.

This was a bad book.

Oh how do I hate this book? Let me count the ways:

1) Every word in this novel is written in conversational, lazy prose. "Absolutely" is used repeatedly for emphasis. "Cue" something or other. The kind of verbal junk we are all guilty of in verbal conversation, but letting it form the bulk of your novel is unforgivable. I felt like I was reading a second-year English essay. Honest to god, I'm not exaggerating. Junk prose. Never a hint of an interesting sentence structure.

2) This device, used repeatedly, I'm guessing to give the novel some appearance of depth. Let's call it the Family Guy Device. "The day was turning out badly. Almost as badly as that barbecue with David Morris and Bettie Constance in Salford last summer, thought George." STOP RANDOMLY FUCKING DROPPING NAMES I'VE NEVER HEARD BEFORE AND WON'T HEAR AGAIN. There's enough one-dimensional characters to keep track of without my having to check off new names against the list every two chapters. I can't tell you how many times this was used in the course of 500 pages.

3) 500 PAGES? To tell this story? Are you kidding me?

4) The relentless assault of pop-culture references. Lethal Weapon, The 6th Sense, The Lord of the Rings, BBC Radio 4. Wedding music is "that Bach Double Violin piece from the compilation CD Dad gave her from Christmas last year." And it's not just the pop-culture bits (Oscar Wao was full of Lord of the Rings stuff), it's that they are brought up again and again and again, but not one character betrays any interest that dips below to most shallow and obvious cultural stables. It felt like examples of tastes were deliberately chosen so that no reader would ever miss a reference. These people, is seems, are the most banal people you have ever met.

5) 500 FUCKING PAGES?

Picture a wet Sunday afternoon, and you are spending it at a slightly run-down shopping centre in the outskirts of town. You check out the record store, but whoever's stocked their shelved has decided to focus on boy-bands and Nickelback and club-anthem compilations. The book-shop is full of ugly, glossy cookbooks and footballer biographies. You glance into the clothes shops but the mannequins all look like the men you feel most uncomfortable around in the pub at weekends. You go to the cafeteria to kill some time, and sit under bright fluorescent lighting at grey plastic tables and eat a bun seemingly made out of another kind of plastic. The tea is tepid and has an oily film on its surface.

And it's not the afternoon you're experiencing in this place, it's the people around you, when you realise that even if you asked them, they wouldn't see what's wrong with this. They wouldn't understand your problem.
This novel was a 500 page trek through everything that tires and disappoints me most about the modern world, and I'm sorry if that illuminates some fault in me and not the novel, but that's the way I feel.

I can't help but compare this to a recent read about another highly-dysfunctional family: Zoe Heller's The Believers. Whereas The Believers struck me as mean-spirited, the family annoying and largely unsympathetic, Mark Haddon has created an hilarious, endearing, wacky and wonderful group of slightly deranged souls.

Recently retired George Hall quietly begins to lose his mind while his wife quietly conducts a passionate affair with a rather hairy former colleague of George's; son Jamie is a successful estate agent who can't seem to fit love into his tidy life; daughter Kate reluctantly agrees to marry Ray, whom her family regards as a Neanderthal, but grudgingly admits is good for her young son, who is learning the triumph of pooping in the toilet rather than in his nappies. This family falls apart in the most tragic and hilarious of ways. And try as they might to deny their love for one another, the Halls put each other back together with grudging affection- if not with a total loss of dignity.

Be prepared for bodily fluids issuing from all known orifices and some manufactured ones. And to fall in love with a Neanderthal.

oh i loved this! haddon induces the same empathy for these characters as he did for the boy in curious incident, which is a much harder task considering that these characters are just flawed self-absorbed adults and not children suffering from mental illness. by flawed self-absorbed adults i of course mean me and you. he has a remarkable talent for dialogue and delivery, which is, to me, the trickiest thing to do well. you dont want to put it down, and you dont want it to end, and you so badly want for all of the characters to sort themselves out and love each other again. (the only thing i didnt like was the vast number of characters, many of them unnecessaryily mentioned in passing on page 21 and then casually referenced again on page 300 as if you are meant to remember them...although i think what he was trying to do there is create a conversational style...). its one of the few books ive finished and thought immediately, i will read this again one day. chock full of undeniable goodness.

I liked the description of the confusion experienced by George and the relationships between family members although I sometimes felt that the lack of empathy and understanding was a bit unrealistic and some characters came across as selfish and after so much drama the ending came over as a bit flat.