To write a book that portrays different perspectives well is a difficult thing to achieve, and Haddon does it so effectively. Not only did we get to see George’s point of view, but also those closest to him, and as a reader it made it so easy to empathise with everybody’s situations.

The short chapters perfectly set the scene of each character’s frame of mind, and they never once felt confusing. The further on I got, the more overwhelming the chapters started to feel - but I say that in the most positive way, as I felt that the tone of the storyline was meant to make you feel like that.

A lot of people, myself included, become adept at hiding their true thoughts and feelings from others, so George’s character felt so special to me. His family all had their own flaws & differing emotions and, simply put, the story felt so real.

This book is an excellent read, the witty one liners and dry humour interwoven makes for a very funny read at times. What's clever is that it's also poignant, heartfelt and sad at the same time, very clever writing. Highly recommended if you need something on the lighter side in between other books. I loved the characters, especially George whom I now want to adopt as my Grandad.

Firstly, I'd like to point out I have NOT read The Curious Incident.. but given the hype surrounding the author I was expecting big things.
To be honest, if this was his first book we probably wouldn't know who Mark Haddon is. I am not sure it would even get published. It doesn't mean it's a completely bad book - it will keep you hooked during that morning tube ride, but it doesn't stand out.
Considering the profoundness of the characters epiphanies you could think the author is ten years old. The style doesn't make you think otherwise as the sentences are connected by endless and... and.. and.. I know Haddon was going for wry and humourous but it's a tricky thing. He was definitely trying too hard and made me cringe quite often. He was also clearly abusing the word 'clearly'. The editor clearly changed some of the 'clearlys' to 'apparently' and 'obviously' but at least one 'clearly' per every other page made it through.
There were lots of cliff hangers achieved mostly by characters not having a mobile phone, not answering their mobile phone or forgetting their mobile phone. Not exactly very sophisticated.
On the other hand if Mark Haddon really is ten years old I'm changing my rating to four stars. It's just that I'd always thought that writers were supposed to write well. I was wrong. Clearly.

This was an odd read for me, lots of ups and downs. In the beginning I couldn't care much about the characters because they were so shallowly drawn. There were some completely ridiculous parts in the middle, and I wonder if such serious situations deserve to be farcical.

I persevered and ended up liking most of the characters a little more. It was all tied up a little too neatly though, I doubt all of this family's problems are truly over.

I will say the author has a good way with words and I found a lot of humor in his descriptors.

"What they failed to teach you at school was that the whole business of being human just got messier and more complicated as you got older"

All families are crazy one way or the other. The Halls are a bit more colorful and the author makes sure they bring out all their colors. Welcome to the wedding of Katie Hall and Ray. As the nearly runaway groom Ray says 'Weddings are about families' and the family is the entire cake!

The world of George Hall, the father, turns upside down when he discovers a lesion on his hip and realizes his mortality. Jean, the mother, has found love after all this while, just with another man. Jamie the gay brother just broke up with his boyfriend. Katie and Ray have problems of their own which stems from a simple fact - that they don't love each other.

Mark Haddon's narrative with the wry humour and almost nonchalant portrayal of the absolute chaos of a wedding is perfect! The story could easily have become a drama of a disintegrating lives - but the writing makes sure they discover family and come out strong. Some of the situations were plain funny.

Even the side characters - be it the babysitting bridesmaid or the visiting relatives with their dogs are etched funnily.

This was definitely a strong second book (though the third was a washout for me). Enjoyable!

A Spot of Bother is a 2006 family dramedy by the author of the fabulously quirky bestseller, The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-time. It’s been sitting on my to-read shelf for about ten years since picking it up at a book fair, but I’m on a mission to read more tree-books this year, so selected it because I thought it would be funny. Sadly, it was not - it’s actually hard to believe it’s the same writer. I was forewarned by the mostly negative reviews, but wanted to make up my own mind. I didn’t hate it, but after 500 pages about some fairly awful people and a very meh ending, I wouldn’t recommend it either.

George Hall and his wife are distressed to learn that their prickly daughter Katie is getting married again, to a man they disapprove of for non-specific class-based reasons. Katie isn’t sure herself whether she loves Ray, but he is very good with her pre-schooler Jacob. Her brother Jamie is afraid of committing to his boyfriend Tony, but isn’t quite sure what he wants. Then George discovers a suspicious mole and that his wife is having an affair, and a mild mid-life crisis turns into a full-on nervous breakdown, but nothing can stop a runaway wedding…

I wanted to like this, I really did. I gamely pushed on, through the disjointed writing, the endless random inconsequential character names that litter the narrative, serving only to confuse the reader, the awful selfish family of middle-class twats, the grotesque depictions of aged sex and the painful lack of any actual humour. I did like poor stoic Ray, and the gay love story was sort of sweet, and it did finally get interesting around the mid-point when George attempts to cure his problem, but then it got pretty boring again. I persisted, waiting for some kind of pay-off: I suppose you could call it a happy ending in that all the characters get what they deserve, but the reader does not. I am therefore downgrading my initial 3 star rating to 2.

I'm not really sure what to say about this one. I really can't generate strong feelings one way or another on its behalf. It wasn't bad but it wasn't good - and conversely, it wasn't good but it wasn't bad. It had likable moments and parts that I laughed at. And some of Haddon's descriptions were priceless (e.g., the "chickeny scrotum" bit). But then there was the rest of it. I kept feeling that if it was either good or bad, I would have relished finishing it so that I could relish talking about it.

But it wasn't. And so I didn't. It was, I guess, the most mediocre book I've ever read. Everything works as a perfect counter-balance for everything else.

The characters are almost uniformly unlikeable - as well as being flatly conceived. But then the tone of the book is largely humourous and brisk. Every event in the novel feels contrived and every dialogue scripted. But the things that are said are sometimes funny and the situations make it possible for more funny things to be said. And so on.

In then end, if you ask me whether I liked the book, I'd simply have to respond with a shrug and one of those perplexed looks that doubles for I don't know.

NOTE: far more interesting than the actual book is the author's account of the bloody illustration that ended up on newer additions of the book. Unfortunately, mine was a not-so-endearing cover. I think I probably would have enjoyed the book more had I been properly primed for it by the cover.

Having read  Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, I expected my sophomore foray into Haddon's style of novel-writing to be a bit of a departure. If you don't know already the book was written from the point-of-view of a boy with Asperger's Syndrome (a functional form of Autism) and delivered with a fair amount of empathy that warmed the reader to an otherwise antisocial and charmless character.

However, I felt that even from an omniscient point-of-view, Haddon hardly piqued my personal interest in any of the central players in this book. It's written in a matter-of-fact style that hearkens back to that of Curious but fails to deliver a real story. The jacket hinted that the hero would be George, a retired father and cuckold with a nagging topical infirmity but my mind wandered so often that I found it far more interesting to read the book as though the protagonist was the tension between each of the family members centered around him. (Try this - it was actually more fascinating than trying to patiently wait for a real story). The bottom line is that the novel goes nowhere while switching from character to character where the writer may or may not be attempting to impress the reader with his gift for communing with unrelated elements of human discord. In other words, English people are boring. This may not be the case but the book makes a strong argument to the contrary.

On the positive side, he does seamlessly transition between voices throughout the book with some alacrity and I do think he has a penchant for delivering a fitting description of what one's state of mind is in the most mundane of circumstances. I was also impressed by how well he wrote without using a cliché chain of simile after simile. Again, this is another symptom of my mind wandering from lack of interest but I am fond of writers who can deliver their craft without a notepad full of brilliant adjective phrases right next to the computer.

In any case, I would still recommend taking a look at it if you read Curious and plan to keep tabs on Haddon's evolution from writing children's books. As for me, put on the spot, I may not bother.

This book was much better than I thought it would be. I found myself drawn into it unlike other novels which lately don't seem to hold my interest.

The writing style is completely different from "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" which was refreshing. He showed ability in this book to write a normal, even typical, story.

What drew me in was the same thing that drew me to Herman Hesse. He uncannily describes emotions that I've felt on almost every page. Hesse does that brilliant thing of making all human experience universal and Haddon does that to a lesser degree in this book.

I was continually surprised by the main character, even though he never did anything out of character, and so even though I guessed on what note the book would end, I was still surprised and delighted by the events at the end.

I'm almost tempted to say it's better than "Curious Incident" because it's less gimmicky, more of a real novel. He doesn't reinvent the wheel, he writes a good story with interesting ideas.

Actually at one point today, I was so shocked and disgusted by one part that I got nauseous. So my new protocol for a book is if you don't want to throw up, it can't be that good.

A man thinks he might have cancer whilst his family is all over the place life-wise; oh, and he might be having a mental breakdown! From Mark Haddon, who brought us 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" comes another character study, this one being a delightful dark comedy nearing farce at times, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

For those of you that actually read my reviews (thank you so much), you'll know that first and foremost, for fiction, what matters most to me is story, and in that vein I would consider Haddon a pretty good storyteller in this book; a great example being that his inner monologues for the main protagonist are so on point :).

A Spot of Bother is humorously neat, and also dare I say, a spot of a pleasant read. 8 out of 12, Four Star read!

2007 read

"A Spot Of Bother" is a humane, humorous look a man slowly unravelling in retirement and the reaction of his family to his slide into mental illness. It gets us inside the heads of an older couple and their adult children, showing, with a mix of wit, acute social observation and admirable empathy, how they try to cope with lives that are not the ones that they expected to live but are the only ones they have.

As the title suggests, this is a very polite, very English view of dealing with personal crises by trying to pretend that they're not happening, or, if they are, then convincing yourself that they can be fixed by carrying on as normal for as long as possible.

George Hall has always been a quiet, responsible man. Now he is slowly, quietly, and with as little inconvenience to others as he can manage, being overwhelmed by mental illness. He suffers from constant anxiety and panic attacks that bring him to his knees. He has convinced himself that what his doctor diagnoses as eczema is really a fatal form of cancer.

He is aware that this is probably not a rational conclusion but it's not a belief he can free himself from. Nor can he share that belief with others, especially with the way things are with his family. So he continues alone until he does something that no one can ignore. Although this sounds like a source of humour and is handled lightly at times, the thing that came through most strongly to me was how George's illness isolated him, leaving him deeply afraid, quietly desperate and totally unable to ask for help. This felt very real to me.

Jean, George's wife of many years is portrayed honestly and non-judgementally. Given her frustration at having George under her feet all the time after decades of having to live her life mostly in his absence and her affair with an ex-colleague of George's, she could have been a stock comedy figure. Instead, we see the world through her eyes understand that her life and her loves aren't that simple.

George and Jean are put under stress by their children who are going through dramas of their own and who both seem to be attracted to men who are not from either the class of the culture that their parents would have chosen.

Their divorced with one child daughter, Katie, announces her intention to marry the not-quiet-smart-enough-or-well-read-enough Ray. He's very nice of course and so good with Katie's son. He's solid, dependable chap, but is he really someone their daughter should marry?

Their gay but only recently come out of the closet son, Jamie has a relationship with a very working-class young man that the family has never met. The upcoming wedding stresses Jamie's relationship and makes him question the comfortable but perhaps overly-safe life he's built for himself.

What I enjoyed most about this book was the skilled storytelling. The chapters are short. Each one immerses the reader in the mind of a member of the family. The plot is carefully crafted to get the most humour and tension from the interlocking characters while the voices of the characters keep the story real, reflecting the ambiguities and confusions and complex emotions of people who are dealing with what life is dishing out to them.

I recommend listening to the audiobook version of "A Spot Of Bother". It's narrated with skill and precision by Alex Jennings.

La primera novela de Mark Haddon que leo me ha parecido aceptable, aunque dista mucho de ser genial. Con una estructura muy simple (capítulos muy cortos y frases telegráficas) más propia de un libro infantil que de una novela para adultos, el autor nos muestra un retazo de la vida de los Hall, una familia más o menos disfuncional (como todas en realidad) que prepara la boda de su hija. La historia llena de giros más o menos imprevistos,no llega a ser un drama, pero desde luego tampoco es una comedia. Y lo curioso es que te lo venden como si fuera una típica comedia familiar con unos leves matices tristes. Debo ser yo, pero a mi su lectura no me pareció graciosa ni entrañable.

Con una ausencia casi espeluznante de descripciones tanto de los personajes como del paisaje en general, la acción de los personajes va discurriendo sin que llegues a saber muy bien por que, dado que tampoco hay explicación ninguna acerca de la personalidad de los mismos, más allá de alguna pincelada. A mi parecer esto hace que el libro resulte plano y sin gracia, dado que después de casi 500 páginas no sabes nada de los protagonistas.

Caso aparte es el final. Algo abrupto para mi gusto, casi como si el autor no quisiera seguir escribiendo.

Es un libro que se deja leer, aunque a veces se te salten las lágrimas o te asombres de los mucho que se parecen todas las familias entre sí.