The Book Tower

George has been having a bad time. He thinks he might have cancer, and is prepared to do something quite drastic about it involving a pair of scissors. His discovers that his wife is having an affair. His son has split up with his boyfriend. His daughter is getting married to an unsuitable man. And so on…

A Spot of Bother charts a family crisis from four different perspectives. It’s an enjoyable although fairly untaxing read, with its best chapters by far being those that deal with George’s own particular nightmares. Convinced he is dying, sure he is going mad, he begins to drift from one waking dream to the next:

The film was rather good.
Some forty minutes in, however, the camera lingered on the face of Christopher Lee who was playing the evil Saruman and George noticed a small area of darkness on his cheek. He might have thought nothing of it except that he remembered reading a newspaper article about Christopher Lee having died recently. What had he died of? George couldn’t remember. It was unlikely to have been skin cancer. But it could have been. And if it was skin cancer then he was watching Christopher lee dying in front of his eyes.
Or perhaps it was Anthony Quinn he was thinking about….
When he looked at the screen again he found himself watching close-up after close-up of grotesquely magnified faces, every one of them bearing some peculiar growth or region of abnormal pigmantation, each one of them a melanoma in the making.
He did not feel well.

Haddon handles George’s breakdown very well, and I challenge any reader not to be moved by his plight. His son, Jamie, is also very well drawn but I didn’t have as much enthusiasm for the female characters in the book because I suspected that Haddon wasn’t as excited about them either, or maybe George and Jamie are the only likeable characters in the novel. The story should really belong entirely to George, and although Haddon does tackle an interesting and worthwhile topic, I just wish he’d dipped his toe in the water a little more often.

What’s lacking in this novel is an original first person voice to take the reigns and really run with it. At times Haddon is content to coast along in a comfortable school of Nick Hornby/Guardian columnist turned author writing style, introducing such well worn characters as tedious toddlers, odd but sympathetic doctors, eccentric uncles and aunts and annoyingly over-smart sisters of lovers and friends of the bride. We do, however, get some interesting prose that seems to have crept in from the cutting room floor of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, references that could have been culled from the unusual although original imagination of a young boy:

His hands were shaking and there were ripples in the tea like in Jurassic Park when the T-Rex was approaching.

Suddenly she was in a great deal of pain and walking like the butler in a vampire movie.

He was lying in the centre of the bed with the duvet pulled to his chin, like a frightened old lady in a fairy tale.

Although there’s not enough of this type of writing, A Spot of Bother can be very funny, despite it dissolving into farce at times, such as in the climactic wedding scene. Fans of Tony Parsons’ suburban drama will enjoy this, although anyone expecting another Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time will be forgiven for not wanting to bother at all.