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ABOUT THE BOOK
George Hall, the hero of Mark Haddon's wonderful second novel, doesn't understand
the modern obsession with talking about everything. 'The secret of contentment,
George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely.' Some things in life, however,
cannot be ignored.
At fifty-seven, George is settling down to a comfortable retirement, building
a shed in his garden, reading historical novels, listening to a bit of light
jazz. Then Katie, his tempestuous daughter, announces that she is getting remarried,
to Ray. Her family is not pleased - as her brother Jamie observes, Ray has 'strangler's
hands'. Katie can't decide if she loves Ray, or loves the wonderful way he has
with her son Jacob, and her mother Jean is a bit put out by all the planning
and arguing the wedding has occasioned, which get in the way of her quite fulfilling
late-life affair with one of her husband's former colleagues. And the tidy and
pleasant life Jamie has created crumbles when he fails to invite his lover,
Tony, to the dreaded nuptials.
Unnoticed in the uproar, George discovers a sinister lesion on his hip, and
quietly begins to lose his mind…
Haddon's working title for the novel was 'Blood and Scissors' which will give
readers a clue as to what to expect from Mark Haddon's superb follow up to The
Curious Incident…
'Amusing and brisk and charming'
Guardian
'A painful, funny, humane, novel: beautifully written, addictively
readable and so confident'
The Times
'Wry, warm-hearted and entertaining'
Telegraph
 ABOUT
THE AUTHOR
Mark Haddon was born in Northampton in 1962. He graduated from Oxford University
in 1981, returning later to study for an M.Sc. in English Literature at Edinburgh
University. He then undertook a variety of jobs, including work with children
and adults with mental and physical disabilities. He also worked as an illustrator
for magazines and a cartoonist for New Statesman, The Spectator,
Private Eye, the Sunday Telegraph and The Guardian (for
which he co-wrote a cartoon strip). After a year living in Boston, Massachusetts
(1997-1998) with his wife they moved back to England and, dissatisfied with
his illustration work because it was causing him headaches, he took up abstract
painting, which he now regularly sells.
His first book for children, Gilbert's Gobstopper, appeared in 1987 and
was followed by many other books and picture books for children, many of which
he also illustrated. These include the Agent Z series and the Baby
Dinosaurs series. From 1996 he also worked on television projects, and created
and wrote several episodes for Microsoap, winning two BAFTAs and a Royal Television
Society Award for this work. He also wrote the screenplay for the 2004 BBC adaptation
of Raymond Briggs's Fungus the Bogeyman.
In 2003 his novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,
was published and has been hugely successful. It is the first book to have been
published simultaneously in two imprints - one for children and one for adults
- which initially surprised the author who saw it as his first adult novel.
It has won a string of prestigious awards, including the 2003 Whitbread Book
of the Year. Haddon is possibly the only person to win the Commonwealth Writers
Prize for best first book with his 17th book! His second novel, A Spot of
Bother, was published in 2006 and shortlisted for the 2006 Costa Novel Award.
His first book of poetry, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl
and the Village Under the Sea, was published in 2005.
Mark Haddon teaches creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and Oxford University.
In his spare time (although it's amazing to think that he might have some) Mark
does marathon canoeing and as he puts it, 'various other masochistic sports
activities'.
AUTHOR INTERVIEW
So this book is a bit of a changeup-relatively conventional.
Where else could I go? Curious Incident was a very odd book.
All those devices-the disabled narrator, the charts and maps ...
Yes, it was kind of tricksy, but it was tricksy in a way that covered its tracks
quite well, didn't it? If I got stranger still, I'd probably be off the map.
But there's a quieter oddness about this book which isn't obvious.
Such as?
Well, George is profoundly normal, but he's going through a mental illness you
tend not to see in books. You see a lot of depression and florid mental illness,
but not that grinding, horrible anxiety that a lot of people suffer from.
It's also very realistic-is it closer to your own experience?
Every other person who talked to me assumed that The Curious Incident was based
on someone I knew or it was the result of huge amounts of research. So I'm really
loath to allow people to do the same thing with this book. But show me the artist
anywhere who's had an utterly stable mental life and I'll buy you hot dinners
for the rest of your life.
You could probably afford it-your first novel sold millions of copies. But
A Spot of Bother has had mixed reviews. Does that bother you?
Only if something someone says chimes with a secret worry I've already had myself,
and that hasn't happened yet. Some people will be annoyed that it's not Curious
Incident II. But that's what I set out to do anyway.
So you don't really feel that fabled anxiety over the sophomore slump?
I feel it mostly as an absence of that grinding ambition which used to be there
all the time-a feeling of not having written a book that was really going to
work. For which reason I didn't do a two-book deal-I wanted the freedom to finish
a novel and, if it was rubbish, chuck it in the bin.
"A spot of bother," the phrase, brings to mind Wodehouse and other
comic novelists.
I think Britain has this tradition which suggests that if you make the readers
laugh too much, you can't really be serious. Whereas I think one of the functions
laughter can perform in a book, as in life, is that it's a reaction to genuine
horror.
So what tradition are you writing in?
I think of the films of Mike Leigh, which are also very realistic, very believable,
but also slightly pushed to extremes, and very funny and very sad and quite
painful at the same time.
It seems a very British phrase.
It's a phrase you only use when there's a meteorite coming toward you and you're
trying to concentrate on your cup of tea and cucumber sandwiches instead.
Taken from the New
York Magazine
STARTING POINTS FOR YOUR DISCUSSION
- What do you think is the spot of bother of the title? Does every character
have a spot of bother, or is it just George?
- Do you think Katie does love Ray? Was she right to marry him?
- Why do you think Jean has an affair? Did this affect your feelings towards
her character, and George's?
- Mark Haddon writes about some very serious subjects - mental illness, adultery,
prejudice - but often in a humorous way. Would you describe A Spot of Bother
as a comedy?
- Why do you think Jamie tells Ray that he loves Tony before he tells Tony
himself?
- A Spot of Bother includes several pairings of siblings: Jamie and
Katie; Becky and Tony; Ray and Martin; Jean and Eileen. Which are the closest?
Are any of their relationships similar to your relationship with your siblings?
- Many of the characters are driven by concerns about loving or being loved
by the right people: do you think the characters resolve these issues? Does
everyone end up with the right person at the end of the novel?
- Do you think it's fair to say that A Spot of Bother is a very British
novel?
- Each character has their own issue to deal with: George's illness; Jean's
affair; Katie's wedding; Jamie's feelings towards Tony. Who did you feel the
most sympathetic towards? Are their problems self-inflicted?
- What was your favourite moment in the book?
OTHER BOOKS BY MARK HADDON
Gilbert's Gobstopper 1987
Toni and the Tomato Soup 1988
A Narrow Escape for Princess Sharon 1989
Agent Z Meets the Masked Crusader 1993
Titch Johnson, Almost World Champion 1993
Agent Z Goes Wild 1994
At Home (Baby Dinosaurs series) 1994
At Playgroup (Baby Dinosaurs series) 1994
In the Garden (Baby Dinosaurs series)1994
On Holiday (Baby Dinosaurs series)1994
The Real Porky Phillips 1994
Agent Z and the Penguin from Mars 1995
The Sea of Tranquillity 1996
Secret Agent Handbook 1999
Agent Z and the Killer Bananas 2001
Ocean Star Express 2001
The Ice Bear's Cave 2002
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time 2003
The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea 2005
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING
Case Histories ~ Kate Atkinson (2004)
A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian ~ Marina Lewycka (2005)
Stranger than Fulham ~ Matthew Baylis (1999)
ADDITIONAL ONLINE RESOURCES
Mark Haddon website
Mark Haddon blog
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an extract.
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