Mark Haddon - A Spot Of Bother

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A Spot Of Bother: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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As he demonstrated in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a canine murder mystery from the point of view of an autistic boy, former children's book author and illustrator Mark Haddon has a gift for reaching inside the inner world of characters whose minds should prove difficult to penetrate.
A Spot of Bother is Haddon's second novel aimed at adults, and again he writes his characters with great affection despite the fact that they're deeply flawed. Or, in the case of Bother's protagonist, George Hall, deeply insane.
The Halls are a family of people preoccupied with their own problems, largely centred around preparations for a backyard wedding. His daughter, Katie, is marrying a man no one, including Katie, thinks is good enough for her. Wife Jean is having an affair with one of George's former colleagues and struggling to plan the on-again, off-again wedding of her stubborn daughter. Son Jamie's reluctance to invite his boyfriend to Katie's wedding destroys that seemingly stable relationship.
Poor George finds his family falling apart and lacks the emotional tools to deal with the chaos head on. "Talking was, in George's opinion, overrated… The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely."
Newly retired George's own issues are an extreme example of the fretting the rest of his family – in fact, the rest of the world – exhibits. When he discovers a lesion on his hip, he leaps to the conclusion of cancer, and contemplates suicide. He gets caught up in the details of the how, discarding each method, including getting blind drunk and crashing the car – because what if he encountered another car?
"What if he killed them, paralyzed himself, and died of cancer in a wheelchair in prison?" George wonders.
The whimsical humour of the escalating hyperbole reveals a man who ponders the worst case scenario to an amusingly absurd degree. As the novel progresses, however, it becomes clear that this is no momentary flight of imagination or coping mechanism. George's insanity often escalates his worries beyond the point of reason.
The novel follows George's almost-logical reasoning. The spot could be more than eczema. The doctor didn't express himself with perfect certainty. He'd misdiagnosed Katie once. But George takes it several steps beyond reason.
Haddon doesn't inflict George with the cute insanity some fiction falls into, but the true-to-life confusion of being and dealing with someone who can seem no more odd than the average person on occasion, then lapses into genuine, over-the-top insanity.
A Spot of Bother is an often sweet, often heartbreaking story of a family falling apart and coming together. It's a deceptively funny, easy read with genuine poignancy. These compelling characters fumble their way through mental illness in the family the same way they fumble through their romantic relationships – sincerely, humorously, and ineptly.

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He opened the bag as they were driving home and spent a great deal of time examining the bottle. Whether he was horrified or relieved she couldn’t tell. Back in the kitchen she took charge of it, watched him swallow the first pill with a glass of water, then put the remainder in the cupboard above the toaster.

He said, “Thank you,” and retreated to the bedroom.

She hung up the washing, made a coffee, filled in the check and the order form for the marquee people, then said she had to pop out to talk to the florist.

She drove over to David’s house and tried to explain how impossible the decision was. He apologized for having made the offer at such a difficult time. She told him not to apologize. He told her that nothing had changed, and that he would wait for as long as she needed.

He put his arms round her and they held one another and it was like coming home after a long and difficult journey and she realized that this was something she could never give up.

56

Jamie was drinkinga cappuccino on Greek Street waiting for Ryan.

He wasn’t being entirely honorable, Ryan being Tony’s ex. He knew that. But Ryan had agreed to come, so Ryan wasn’t being entirely honorable, either.

Fuck it. What was honor anyway? The only person he knew with real integrity was Maggie and she had spent her life since college picking up nasty diseases in flyblown corners of West Africa. Didn’t even own furniture.

Besides, Tony had dumped him. If something happened with Ryan, what was wrong with that?

Fifteen minutes late.

Jamie got himself a second coffee and reopened Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained which he’d bought in one of his periodic fits of self-improvement (the exercise ball, that stupid opera CD…). At home he was reading Pet Sematary, but reading that in public was like leaving the house in your underwear.

This does not mean that the brain never uses “buffer memories” to cushion the interface between the brain’s internal processes and the asynchronous outside world. The “echoic memory” with which we preserve stimulus patterns briefly while the brain begins to process them is an obvious example (Sperling, 1960; Neisser, 1967; see also Newell, Rosenbloom, and Laird, 1989, p. 1067).

There was a review on the back from The New York Review of Books which described it as “clear and funny.”

On the other hand, he didn’t want to look like someone who was having difficulty reading Consciousness Explained . So he let his eyes drift over the pages, turning them every couple of minutes.

He thought about the new Web site and wondered whether the background music had been a mistake. He remembered last year’s trip to Edinburgh. That purr of tires on the cobbles outside the hotel. He wondered why no one used them these days. Ambulances and wheelchairs, probably. He imagined Ryan placing his hand very briefly on his thigh and saying, “I’m so glad you got in touch.”

Twenty-five minutes late. Jamie was beginning to feel obtrusive.

He gathered his belongings and bought a Telegraph from the newsagent on the corner. He bought a pint of lager in the pub over the road, then found an empty table on the pavement from which he could keep an eye on the café.

Three minutes later a man wearing leather trousers and a white T-shirt slid onto the bench on the other side of the table. He put a motorcycle helmet down on the table, mimed a little gun with his right hand, pointed the barrel at Jamie’s head, cocked his thumb, made a clicking noise and said, “Estate agent.”

Jamie was a little disturbed by this.

“Lowe and Carter,” said the man.

“Er, yeh,” said Jamie.

“Courier. We’re in the building across the street. Pick up stuff from your place every now and then. You’ve got a desk in the far corner by the big window.” He held out his hand to be shaken. “Mike.”

Jamie shook it. “Jamie.”

Mike picked up Consciousness Explained, which Jamie had left on the table where it could give a general impression without needing to be physically read. There was a thick Celtic band tattooed around Mike’s upper right arm. He examined the book briefly then put it down. “A masterful tapestry of deep insight.”

Jamie wondered whether the man was psychiatrically ill.

Mike laughed quietly. “Read it off the back cover.”

Jamie turned the book over to verify this.

Mike sipped his drink. “I like courtroom dramas myself.”

For a second Jamie wondered whether Mike meant he liked doing things that resulted in him going to court.

“John Grisham, that kind of stuff,” said Mike.

Jamie relaxed a little. “Having a bit of trouble with the book myself, to be honest.”

“Been stood up?” Mike asked.

“No.”

“I saw you sitting across the road.”

“Well…Yeh.”

“Boyfriend?” asked Mike.

“Ex-boyfriend’s ex-boyfriend.”

“Messy.”

“You’re probably right,” agreed Jamie.

Glancing over Mike’s shoulder, he saw Ryan standing outside the café, looking up and down the street. He seemed balder than Jamie remembered. He was wearing a beige raincoat and carrying a little blue rucksack.

Jamie turned away.

“Tell me a secret,” said Mike. “Something you’ve never told anyone.”

“When I was six my friend, Matthew, bet me I wouldn’t pee in this flowerpot in my sister’s bedroom.”

“And you peed in the flowerpot.”

“I peed in the flowerpot.” Out of the corner of his eye Jamie saw Ryan shake his head and begin walking off toward Soho Square. “I guess it’s not a secret, technically, because she found out. I mean, it smelt really bad after a few days.” Ryan was gone. Jamie relaxed a little. “I had this little plastic guitar I’d got on holiday in Portugal. She burnt it. In the garden. But it burnt, like, amazingly well. I mean, Portugal probably didn’t do Trading Standards in 1980. I remember this scream and the sound of strings snapping. She’s still got this scar on her arm.”

His parents would look at Mike and assume he stole cars. The razor cut, the five earrings. But this…this thing passing between them, this nameless charge you could feel in the air…it made everything else seem shallow and stupid.

Mike held his eye and said, “You hungry?” and seemed to mean at least three things.

They went to a little Thai restaurant on Greek Street.

“I used to do tiling. Upmarket stuff. Fired Earth. Marble. Slate. Kitchens. Fireplaces. The bike’s for money. Get me through the Alexander Technique and massage courses. Then I’m going freelance. Make some money so I can move back up north so I can afford a place with a consulting room.”

A fine drizzle was falling in the street. Jamie was three pints down and the lights reflecting off the wet vehicles were tiny stars.

“Actually,” said Jamie, “the thing I like best about Amsterdam…well, the whole of Holland, actually, is…there are these amazing modern buildings everywhere. Over here people just build the cheapest thing possible.”

Jamie was a bit vague about Alexander Technique. He couldn’t really imagine Mike doing any kind of therapy. Too much swagger. But every so often Mike would touch Jamie’s hand with a couple of fingers or look at him and smile and say nothing and there was a softness there which seemed sexier for being so well hidden the rest of the time.

Nice arms, too. Little ridges of flesh over the veins, without being wiry. And strong hands.

The massage. He could imagine that.

Mike suggested they go to a club. But Jamie didn’t want to share him. He looked at the salt cellar and steeled himself and asked if Mike wanted to come back to his place and felt, as he always did, that little lurch, half thrill, half panic. Like the parachute jump. But better.

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