A Spot of Bother

One of the reasons I bought this book was the fact that I loved Mark Haddon’s other book, “Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” (a review for another time). I read that book more than 5 years ago and I still remember what a powerful story it was. So naturally, when I saw his newer book, I have no qualms about buying it . I’ve had this book and read it possibly more than 3 years ago, yet for the life of me, I cannot remember anything about it when Silver Bullet started telling me what a book it was. For some reason, I thought the book was just so-so and didn’t leave with me any impression that was worth remembering.

Hence, when Silver Bullet brought it on our vacation and started laughing his ass off every few pages, I really began to wonder what did miss. When he related it to me, I remembered only bits and pieces. He then urged me to give it another go, and since I was running out of books after he was done with it, I relented and gave it another shot. I vaguely remembered the book being super-eccentric. I reckon I must not have been very focused when I read it the first time; and probably left it half-way because the main character got on my nerves after a while. (I actually DID finish reading it the first time round as I found out later)

If you can get past the somewhat ludicrous insanity of the characters in this book, it will be a good, hilarious read. The Hall family, especially the main character, who is on the brink of dementia, is quite a nutter. In fact, the entire family is so dysfunctional that it can be rather nerve-wrecking, bordering on irritability and annoyance.

That being said though, I actually enjoyed the author’s style of writing, which is full of comical, imaginative and sometimes odd and even graphically bizarre description of things, English style humour. You just need to get past the some of the  insane eye-ball rolling moments of eccentricities!