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Curious Incident of the Lesion on the Hip
Mark Haddon By DAVID KAMP
Mark Haddon’s book titles seem to belong to “Wallace & Gromit” film shorts. His first novel, published three years ago, was called “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” The new one is called “A Spot of Bother.” Neither book has anything to do with a plasticine man-dog duo propelled by stop-motion animation. But, like Nick Park, the mastermind behind “Wallace & Gromit,” Haddon trades in a cheerful, quirky, life-goes-on drabness that’s particularly English. And totally brilliant.
“A Spot of Bother” concerns a retiree named George Hall. He’s a decent, sympathetic figure who used to hold a managerial post at a company that manufactured playground equipment. “In a modest way,” Haddon writes, “he had increased the happiness of a small part of the human population.” George now spends his days pottering about his home in provincial Peterborough, an hour north of London, doing acutely provincial English middle-class things — drinking his coffee from a “stripy” mug, waiting as the toast “pinged up,” building a studio in his garden, where he plans to resume his long-dormant hobby of drawing. He’s a bit of a fogy, preferring solitude to company and not wholly comfortable with the fact that his grown son is homosexual. (“It was the thought of men purchasing furniture together which disturbed him.”) But George is a nice fogy. “Things changed,” Haddon reasons on his protagonist’s behalf. “Mobile phones. Thai restaurants. You had to remain elastic or you turned into an angry fossil railing at litter.”
At the outset of the book, George discovers a lesion on his hip. His doctor diagnoses it as eczema. George, disbelieving, is convinced he has fatal cancer. Meanwhile, there are other rumblings of trouble. George learns that his wife, Jean, is carrying on an affair with one of his former work colleagues. George and Jean’s daughter, a high-strung, hot-tempered divorcée and single mom named Katie, has announced that she’s going to marry her boyfriend, Ray, who is kindhearted and prosperous but too discomfitingly working-class for Mum and Dad’s tastes. And the gay son, Jamie, is going through a rough patch with his boyfriend, Tony. These circumstances conspire to make George depressed — first just a little, and then, as time goes on, a lot.
This standard-issue suburban-melodrama stuff is a far cry from “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” which won raves for its bravura concept — its narrator is an autistic teenager whose unorthodox thought processes subvert the norms of conventional storytelling. “A Spot of Bother” isn’t nearly as audacious, and in other hands and other media, its plot elements wouldn’t amount to much, maybe a weepy nighttime soap or a lesser Steve Martin comedy.
But Haddon is too gifted and too ambitious to write a hacky second novel. In fact, he’s so wondrously articulate, so rigorous in thinking through his characters’ mind-sets, that “A Spot of Bother” serves as a fine example of why novels exist. Really, does any other art form do nuance so well, or the telling detail (“the pig-shaped notepad on the phone table”) or the internal monologue? A dust-up with her fiancé prompts Katie to consider her checkered romantic past: “They took up so much space. That was the problem with men. It wasn’t just the leg sprawl and the clumping down stairs. It was the constant demand for attention.” A church funeral provides George with the occasion to ponder the role of Christianity in his life, or its lack thereof: “He looked round at the stained-glass lambs and the scale model of the crucified Christ and thought how ridiculous it all was, this desert religion transported wholesale to the English shires. Bank managers and P.E. teachers listening to stories about zithers and smiting and barley bread as if it were the most natural thing in the world.”
Beyond the zingers and tragicomic domestic set pieces, Haddon is especially heroic in capturing the tortured dynamics of nuclear-family life: the roles children never grow out of, even after they’ve become adults; the close-quarters intimacy that simultaneously binds and enervates (Jamie sums up his father as “the alphabeticizer of books and winder-up of clocks”); the ever-shifting alliances; the short-lived feuds; the commiserative phone calls about how loco everyone else in the family is. In one swift passage, Katie pinballs from treating Jamie as her dearest confidant to punching him upside the head for being indiscreet to good-naturedly gossiping with him about “Mum’s fancy man.”
“A Spot of Bother” does share one major trait with “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” In both, about halfway through, Haddon douses his story with accelerant and sets it aflame; abruptly, what has been a rather gently paced book becomes an urgent read, and pages start turning in double-time. It wouldn’t be sporting of me to reveal how, precisely, this happens, but in neither book does the author force matters with sudden ice storms or deluges of frogs or any other kind of dubious ex machina. Haddon is an unmagic realist, a guy who finds enough pathos and humor in the everyday to fashion stories that transport, entertain and keep you reading past your bedtime.
In an uncharacteristic meta-moment in which he seems to be winking at the reader, Haddon writes, “The human mind was not designed for sunbathing and light novels.” He’s talking about George’s aversion to vacations, but he also seems to be poking fun at himself, or wondering if the sort of breezy books he writes have any lasting value.
Well, when they have the kind of heart and intelligence that “A Spot of Bother” does, they certainly do. In a modest way, Mark Haddon will increase the happiness of a small part of the human population.
