Mark Haddon earned praise for his first effort ""The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time"" because of his ambitious creation of an autistic narrator. In ""Night-Time,"" Haddon's cognitively limited main character still manages to carry the depth and beauty of Haddon's message. In Haddon's new book, ""A Spot of Bother,"" it would be a mistake to deem the book ""simplistic"" despite the first glimpses of the book's ordinary characters.
Haddon's main character is George, a middle-management retiree. He and his wife, Jean, are edging out of the flimsy comfort of middle age and into the declining years of senior citizenship. George putters around in his garden, building a studio for his drawing hobby. Jean works in a bookstore now that their children, Katie and Jamie, have moved out.
In the opening scene, George is trying on a suit for the funeral of a co-worker who lost a battle with cancer. He is complacent, stating that he found the man ""slightly tiring."" In the midst of his almost crude, but human, musings, George finds a small lesion on his hip. He promptly blacks out. George is immediately overwhelmed by his unconscious fears of age and death we are all usually repressing to keep ourselves sane.
When George symbolically regains ""consciousness,"" the reader quickly becomes immersed in secret, internalized realities of the characters, who take turns narrating Haddon's short chapters. Their neuroses, flaws, and drama quickly surface and undercut their normalcy.
Their troubles, though substantial, are not necessarily uncommon. The lesion turns out to be nothing more than a small skin rash, but faced with his first encounter with true mortality, George spirals into depression and obsession with death, and his wife reveals that she is carrying on an illicit affair. Jean loves George, but after several years of marriage and the inevitable fade of diurnal married love, she pursues her feelings for another one of George's co-workers. Katie endures her family's opposition to her blue-collar fiance and Jamie struggles with his identity as a homosexual.
Haddon pushes the reader to ask if their troubles really are the common troubles of a twentieth-century family, thriving behind mahogany doors and well-kept lawns.
The characters stubbornly carry the burden of their insecurities and wrangle with paranoia that other members of the family will discover their carefully kept secrets. Restraining themselves, however, only leads to further chaos and mental strain. Their troubles do not find relief until their secrets are purged and they are forced to openly deal with the distance and lies within their familial relationships.
Within the short, breezy chapters, Haddon entertains the reader with his subtle observances of the humor lying dormant in our ordinary lives. With a certain amount of tenderness, he exploits the quirkiness of the human spirit. There's nothing new about their petty fights, selfish tendencies, and chain-smoking. Haddon's prose is innovative. He expertly shows us that every stage of life comes with stubborn baggage you can never abandon at your fancy. In the end, it may keep us going, even if it keeps us from ever being totally sane.
