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’.
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