Mark Haddon’s previous book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, was a bestseller and that golden egg of publishing, a ‘crossover’ book: one which, like Harry Potter, was read by both children and adults. It told the story of a boy with Asperger’s syndrome (a mild form of autism), employing the flat, affectless language that such a child might use. The plot, such as it was, involved the boy in nothing more dramatic than catching a train from Swindon to London; nevertheless, it was as gripping as any picaresque novel. It was an audacious and utterly original book.
After the giddy joy of opening his bank statements, what was Mark Haddon to do next? If he created another novelty disabled character he would be accused of cashing in on his own success; if he wrote an entirely different kind of book he risked losing his readership. A Spot of Bother is a sort of compromise. Its title sounds like the name of a 1970s sit-com, and this is exactly the novel’s niche. A semi-retired couple, George and Jean, live near Peterborough. They are parents to a bolshie feminist daughter, Katie, and a homosexual-only-he-hasn’t-told-them-yet son, Jamie. The drama takes place in the weeks leading up to Katie’s wedding: Haddon’s task is to see how many things can go wrong in the allotted time.
As in a sit-com, this is a world where a man building a shed in his garden is, of itself, a comic thing. Snobbery is never far beneath the surface: by considering themselves a cut above, George and Jean are set up to fall from a greater height. But the snobbery seems oddly anachronistic, as if it, too, is stuck in a television play of 30 years ago: Katie notices that her in-laws have ‘a small cabinet of china figurines in the dining room and a fluffy U-shaped carpet around the base of the loo’. George refers to the loo as ‘the little boy’s room’.
The style matches the content. No one ever walks, drives or goes anywhere: they endlessly ‘pop’ to the shops, to the doctor, to the loo. Nor do people have no sense of humour, or dislike washing-up; rather they ‘don’t do’ jokes or ‘don’t do’ the dishes. As if catering to the modern inability to concentrate on anything for more than a few seconds at a time, the book is written in extremely short — often one-word — sentences and divided into episodic, two- or three-page chapters: the literary equivalent of chicken nuggets. The language is so flat, so relentlessly ordinary, that you could go and stand in any bus queue in the land and read aloud from this book without anyone guessing that you weren’t simply reporting the trials and tribulations of your own family.
A child of six could read A Spot of Bother, but I don’t think they would want to. Unlike The Curious Incident, there are some quite graphic sex scenes, featuring old people and gay men (although not together); these might be unsuitable for the younger reader, but that never put a child off yet. What will lose Mark Haddon his younger readership is that George, the central character, is a chronic hypochondriac who thinks about death almost all the time. Only a few, intensely morbid children would enjoy reading about George. He may be a sit-com stalwart — a slightly misanthropic old chap who potters about, grumbling — but he is a sit-com stalwart with acute anxiety. Pretty soon this gives way to a full-blown, self-harming depression.
And this is where the book comes into its own. Dull old George, ‘the alphabetiser of books and winder-up of clocks’, descends into a state of complete collapse, a state where even Peterborough town centre feels intensely threatening. The sense that nowhere is safe, the breathlessness, the churning fear, the absurd rationalising of bonkers ideas into very good plans — all these are described with absolute fidelity. Mark Haddon may not have a second bestseller on his hands, but he’ll find a devoted readership among everyone who has ever suffered from a panic attack.
A Spot of Bother is not as good as The Curious Incident. It is hard not to feel that Haddon is writing to a formula, and the dumbed-down prose is as annoying as being spoken to, very slowly, by a doctor’s receptionist. But the emotional chaos at the centre of the book is brilliantly realised. If only the author had found somewhere more interesting than sit-com land to put it.
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