Rating: 3.5

This book has been waiting on my shelf for quite a long time and I finally decided to give it a try. Having read Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, I was pretty sure I was in for an adventure. This book is as British as it can get. The story is focused on a family — George, going into retirement while facing all the existential issues all of us have from time to time.

Jean, George’s wife who is having an affair with one of George’s ex-work colleagues while trying to find something that’s missing in her life.

Katie, who is on the brink of getting married but isn’t sure whether she is doing it for her son or for herself and if she’s truly in love with Ray.

Jamie, their gay son whose life has been moulded by what he considers to be lack of communication and now it’s a problem in his love life.

The book is divided into short chapters in these point of views as each character faces issues of their own. Though I didn’t particularly love the plot, I enjoyed the quirky characters. It’s the kind of book you read when you want to check your reading pace and want to read something light. It was surprisingly easy for me to get involved in the problems these characters created for themselves. At points the book felt like a drag, and the ending wraps up all too perfectly despite the drama that occurs in the earlier chapters. But if you’re mindlessly reading it and simply enjoying the British setting, the snobbishness of certain characters, the steadiness and reliability of some, you get through. It was interesting to how each family member differed from their partners.

If you’re looking for a mundane story with a focus on people and their problems along with some humour, give this book a try!

Plodded through the first half, but glad to have persisted. I didn't warm to the characters right away and Haddon took a while to develop their voices. Interesting, because characters were stuck in their ruts, and the writing itself seemed weighed down by that. Or perhaps, especially in comparison to The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time with its single character focus, Haddon had so many personalities on his hands that he needed a while to wrestle each of them into form and get them all moving in the right direction. In the first half, he seemed to be trying a little too hard to be profound.

Once their lives all started to disintegrate, especially when George started to truly lose it, things got interesting and very, very funny. George's pivotal scene in the bathtub was brilliantly rendered, and the novel picked up pace and started to cohere from that point on. The lead-up to and climax of the wedding scene was similarly fabulous, reading like a French farce.

A note on style: I loved (but again, only really noticed by the half-way point--was this intentional?) the step back in time and change of perspective at each chapter break as the story unfolded. The technique was not as overt and clearly-demarcated as Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, and more integrated with the main plot. The effect was one of truly being able to see the events from each character's perspective, and gaining empathy with each of them. The link to theme was therefore powerful, illustrating people bonded by blood and family ties, but feeling misunderstood, lonely and remote from each other because of their own lack of self-awareness and ability to empathize and communicate honestly with each other.

As the story went on, as the characters were growing closer to each other and gaining insight into their own motivations, the "steps back" became closer in time, which is perhaps why I only started to notice them at about the half-way point.

This one'll make a fine movie, I think. Is Hugh Grant old enough now to play George?

This account of a dysfunctional family and its descent into a chaotic wedding was a serious letdown after the 'Curious Incident'. Some may say it is unfair to compare two completely different books by the same author, but this is not about that. 'A Spot of Bother' failed to hook the reader with the creativity and compelling insights of its predecessor. It was abysmally long for a plot that lacked substance, and there were no real breakthroughs in a cast of mostly flat characters.

The writing was pretty good, but other than a couple of morsels of philosophy there was nothing memorable in this book. I finished reading it less than an hour ago and am already having trouble remembering the characters' names!

I hope Haddon turns this around in his latest novel, 'The Red House'.

Mark Haddon never misses!

This book was a rollercoaster and a half. I picked it up because I expected it to be comedic relief from a rather traumatic book I was reading and my oh my. Comedic relief? Certainly? But additional trauma too!

Enjoyed it greatly. It got a bit lengthy there in the build up to the wedding but I can forgive that. Feels a bit like a fever-dream to be honest because there are so many characters each with actual plots, so many events and happenings and then it simply ends with

“It was time to stop all this nonsense. He turned the page and stood up to find a corkscrew”

A Spot of Bother is an alternating-POV story about going quietly mad and loudly sane, and love under all our layers of repression and confusion: There’s newly-retired dad George, politely failing to bury his increasing obsessive thoughts of mortality under a zest for home renovations. Mom Jean, already balancing familial duty and work and volunteering, is just trying to find more time for her passionate affair with a long-time acquaintance. Their outspoken grown-up daughter Katie intends to marry her boyfriend Ray despite her suspicion that he’s wrong for her— because he’s right for her son. And emotionally-distant son Jamie just can’t explain to his boyfriend why he’s not invited to the wedding.

Haddon’s style is pretty sparse, but earnest. The characters’ dramas could easily become trite, but their awareness and wryness in the face of their situations instead lends an endearing realness. At times I almost felt a little cheated that the split narratives, by necessity, truncated the fuller version of each story. But even with the glimpses, I got a sense that each Hall lived in a world beyond just the necessary set pieces, full of friends and coworkers and exes—of complex relationships—a specificity that allowed me to be drawn into their struggles in spite of myself. The strongest parts of the novel are actually when the family members directly interact. We get to “see” the same events in their overlapping voices, which surprised me by highlighting the complexities of intention and communication (rather than falling into tedious exercise).

If you’ve ever seen one of these comedies, it’s hardly a surprise that all these threads erupt into a madcap ending. I think some readers might find George’s central story kind of crass and shocking and inexplicable at times. I sort of wished Haddon was less enigmatic about it, especially being the subject that was probably the hardest to comprehend or relate to. But real life is not tied up so easily.

And so when all the dust settled, I found myself left with some heartwarming end scenes and some open end scenes… but most of all, the overall sense of empathy for the ways people try to make sense out of the chaos.

(Reread April 2012: Nothing to add of insight, except to note poor Mark Haddon, doomed to forever have his work as "not as good as his first novel Curious Incident. Well those people are wrong. A Spot of Bothers's comedy of manners is just as accessible, and it shows more maturity regarding character development and less reliance on the so-called cute gimmicks he's been accused of propogating. I'm sure I've saved him from crying into buckets of money now, so this reread has gone to good cause.)

Although I can see why certain fans don't like this one as much as Haddon's first book, I liked it just as well. It has the same flavor as the first, but with multiple main characters instead of just one. Mark Haddon still does a fantastic job of showing rather than telling in terms of his characters--he really has a wonderful way of letting the reader get inside the characters' heads. I think that was part of what made his first novel great, and he has held onto that in this one. What made this one almost better than Curious Incident was the abundance of poignant moments. This book does not lack for meaningful segments but also doesn't overdo it. I sat and thought about certain passages for long periods of time--they took me back, made me laugh, and made me think. I highly recommend this book to those who liked the first book for more than just its focus on a kid with an "en vogue" mental illness.

Disappointing after beautifully sad and engaging "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time". Could not relate to the characters. Too many loose and shallow threads leading nowhere in particular. Or maybe just not my kind of book. Expectations too high because I loved the "Curious Incident"?
A book for lazy summer days, but not for the rest of the year when work, family and social obligations turn every hour in the reading chair into rare golden time.
On the other hand, there are so many books out there that I CRAVE to read, I wonder why I have the compulsion to finish books I do not fully engage in?

Lo empecé con ganas y lo terminé con hastío; faltando casi 100 páginas me planteé dejarlo. Y creo que de haberlo hecho mi experiencia de lectura no habría cambiado demasiado.
No me sedujo ni el qué ni el cómo. No hay experimentación formal. La narración es bastante ordinaria, con poquísimo insight del narrador sobre los personajes, las situaciones de comicidad (si bien detectables) no me arrancaron ni una sonrisa, el in crescendo del drama es bastante débil y la historia en sí es puro white people problems.
Venía entusiasmada con The curious incident... y prefiero quedarme con esa idea de Haddon como autor.

First (for me) there was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I still remember how I cried at the end, wept buckets, loved it. Then there was the book of poetry, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea. Great title. What was inside did little for me. And now, remaindered, hard-back, handsome, A Spot of Bother.

Expectations were lowered after the damp-squib poetry. Perhaps that was good because very quickly this novel started to delight me. It’s all relationships, all relationships in one family in which the central character (57 year old George – same age as me), is going potty, partly because of his fear of death and mostly because he walks in on his wife in bed with a former colleague. Such a possibility has simply never occurred to him and he doesn’t even tell them what he’s seen. It makes him profoundly sad – sad about his whole life and his place in the universe. His reaction, which looks to all intents and purposes like lunacy, is actually perfectly logical.

Meanwhile, there’s his daughter Katie, about to get married for the second time and not sure whether or not she loves the bridegroom (though she undoubtedly adores her son from her first marriage), and Jamie, the gay son who nearly loses the first partner he has ever loved simply because he hasn’t learned how to do relationships. And there’s David, the man George’s wife is ‘shagging’ (but it’s more than that). All these relationships having ups and downs. Short chapters. Poignant, memorable moments. Several times I was crying again, though lots of this is also funny.

Haddon is good at getting you inside the heads of each of the characters in turn – right inside. Jean, who is so surprised to find herself having this affair (“Something people did on television”) and trying to work out what’s missing in her life: “She washed up her sandwich plate and stacked it in the rack. The house seemed suddenly rather drab. The sale round the base of the taps. The cracks in the soap. The sad cactus.”

It’s simple, good, satisfying writing. The pace builds. You get more and more involved. The plot centres on Katie’s wedding – will it or won’t it happen? Will Jamie’s lover, Tony, actually appear? Will George run away (he does his damnedest)? Will Jean end up with George, or David?

The climax—and it is a sort of comic climax—you can see this as a film—is Katie’s wedding. Up to this point I was loving this book, identifying with each of the characters in turn and gradually working out that George really was the hero.

The final dénouement when George has it out with David is the point where the novel failed for me. By this time I expect my expectations were too high. I wanted something out of the ordinary to happen and I hadn’t quite seen that Haddon had dropped David’s point of view entirely as George’s took up more and more emotional space. George is the ‘Christopher’ of this book (never any doubt who you’re inside in the Curious Incident). I hadn’t quite seen that the novel was going to end up thunk in the middle of familyness: all these people who love each other, with the homosexual couple simply as a slight variation on the norm, decisions being possible to secure emotional ‘rightness’, the uncertainty and the madness a sort of passing phase.

I like this novel. I like it a lot. But the ending is not profound. It is just okay. One other slight reservation was when each relationship reaches its intensest moment, compare the language Jamie and Tony get with what’s accorded to Katie and Ray:

“Jamie just pulled him close and snogged him in the middle of the dancefloor for the whole three minutes and three whole minutes of Tony’s cock pressed against him was more than he could actually bear and he was drunk enough by now, so he pulled Tony upstairs and told him not to make any noise or he’d kill him and they went into this old bedroom and Tony fucked him in full view of Big Giraffe and the boxed set of Doctor Dolittle.”

“He lifted her head and put a finger on her lips to stop her speaking and kissed her. It was the first time they had kissed properly in weeks.

He led her upstairs and they made love until Jacob had a nightmare about an angry blue dog and they had to stop rather quickly.”

Katie and Ray make love. For the boys, Jamie gets a magnificent fuck. Hm. I do see, putting them together, that both sexual experiences are set against a sort of comical and appealing reality of innocence and childhood (Big Giraffe and angry blue dog). And I guess it all depends what you’re trying to do in a novel. This one does have something to say about the difficulty of relationships and how the word ‘love’ doesn’t always seem to match whatever it is you have – and still whatever it is you have may be the right thing, the loving thing.

But it pushes a little bit farther than that, I think, and then draws back at the end in favour of a neat pattern, a good structure, a satisfactory ending. I’m glad I read it though, and I want to see what Haddon does next.

i don't know why people who've read the curious incident of the dog in the night-time would find this second novel a let-down. it seems to me equally tender, sweet, and heartbreaking. it's also hilariously funny. haddon does heartbreaking and funny with such grace, simplicity, and verbal virtuosity, it's wonderful. i admire this writer greatly.

what i admire most about him is that he shows us the behavior of "crazy" people who do "crazy" things from the inside, and from the inside these crazy things make total sense. george's shenanigans are as meaningful and entirely understandable to us as christopher's shenanigans, and, just like in the first novel, we are quite surprised that people around these two should not be more compassionate and understanding, because both george and christopher seem lost in an earnest, brave, broken, and entirely adorable way.

there's a lot here about class, and i imagine other non-english people might find it as hard to make sense of as i did. i mean, ray seems absolutely perfect from all possible points of view, as does tony, but the stuff of class gets in the way tremendously, and one is left quite perplexed until one remembers what one has learned about england from the movies, and it makes a little more sense.

the little kid jacob is picture perfect. haddon has a thing with little kids (of all ages).

another thing that haddon does really really well is show how people like george and christopher, i.e. people who either are different or become different at some point in their lives for some very painful reason, manage to break down barriers and distances in others that would otherwise be as immutable and untouchable as the rotation of the planets. and then everyone feels better.

except there is hell to pay, for everyone, and this is the really heartbreaking part, the amount of pain haddon packs in his books. i was discussing this just now with someone and realized that the highest common denominator between dog and bother is terror. and i don't do terror very well. but this book eases you into terror gently, and by the time you realize that the book is killing you you are too caught up to stop reading it.

anyway, i really liked this book. it doesn't dispel the terror, or maybe it doesn't do so entirely, but it might make you feel like you are not the only one to live in a constant state of terror, and that's a little soothing unto itself.

Like many others I really enjoyed Mark Haddon's book of 'The Curious Incident of the dog in the Night-Time' so I began 'A Spot of Bother' with high hopes.

George is having a tough time of it as his daughter Katie announces she is getting married to someone who her family is not keen on. His son Jamie is coming to terms with his own life choices when his partner Tony walks out on him, while his parents are still trying to come to terms with the lifestyle Jamie has chosen. George discovers a lesion on his leg and slowly loses the plot convinced he is dying of cancer. His ability to keep his mind is not helped when he discovers his wife Jean is having an affair. As the blurb on the book says: "the way these damaged people fall apart - and come together - as a family is the true subject of Mark Haddon's disturbing yet very funny portrait of a dignified man trying to go insane politely".

It was certainly an interesting read and I did like Haddon's characterisation and his ability to get inside the head of each member of this crazy, yet scarily normal, family. I think my biggest difficulty with the book was that some of the descriptions were more graphic than I felt they really needed to be.

I did enjoy the book but certainly not in the same way as I enjoyed the Curious Incident. Not one I'd choose to read again.

Plitki , emocionalno nezreli , dosadni, ali zaista dosadni i ni malo zanimljivi likovi. Njihova razmišljanja i odluke djeluju kao odluke male djece, teško je uopće vezati se za bilo koji od glavnih likova u romanu. Sve mi je djelovalo nekako loše. Razgovori neuvjerljivi , ništa nije uvjerljivo niti smisleno, čak ni duhovito, a vidi se koliko je autor forsirao upravo to.