Collapse of a sensible party

At 57, George is preposterously unexceptionable. He lives in a village with his wife, Jean, with whom he has raised two children, Katie and Jamie. He has spent 30 years with a firm that makes playground equipment. He dislikes foreign holidays but is fond of pottering about in the garden and partial to a glass of red wine. He thinks talking is overrated. He is a solid, dependable man who has earned the right to a peaceful retirement.

Fate, however, has other plans, beginning when, purchasing a black suit in Allders for the funeral of his modestly lamented squash partner, Bob (whose bonhomie, George admits to himself, he always found tiring), George notices a small oval of puffy flesh on his hip and concludes that he has cancer. The speed with which his life starts to unravel in the instants after this (wholly erroneous, as it turns out) bit of self-diagnosis is vertiginous. It is as though that patch of puffy skin were the final element required to construct an alternative, horror version of his pleasant life.

For while George lurches along the road to nervous breakdown, every member of his family is involved in his or her own crisis. His wife, Jean, has (greatly to her own surprise) embarked on a torrid affair with one of George’s former colleagues and is worried about how she is going to keep it secret now that George is around the house all day.

Their daughter, Katie, a single parent with a philosophy degree and a fearsome temper, is making plans to marry a man named Ray who makes the whole family feel uneasy; not (heaven forbid) because he is thick, working-class and has a brother in prison. It is just that he has, as Katie’s brother Jamie puts it, “strangler’s hands”.

And then there is Jamie — not, as George puts it to himself, “the most robust of chaps” — whose orderly life collapses in a second when he is too embarrassed to invite his lover, Tony, to Katie and Ray’s dreadful nuptials.

Here, then, is a little constellation of people accustomed to circling one another in orbits that are, if not wholly comfortable, at least bearable, who find the forces that held them together suddenly gone. The sensation is as terrible — and as comic — as a sudden failure of gravity. Haddon explores the effects of the Halls’ dissolution with a fine regard both for the terror and the comedy of their situation.

Cutting rapidly, in short chapters, between the points of view of his four main characters, Haddon writes about the grisly minutiae of family life with the beady observation and ear for domestic surrealism of a younger Alan Bennett. Like Bennett, he has a fascinated affection for the strangeness of surburban life, which he records with a humanity that eschews caricature and allows every character a measure of dignity amid the profoundest indignity.

If one were determined to find a flaw it would be that, while Haddon’s observation and ear for dialogue are faultless, his characterisation and plot construction are not quite. A faint creaking is audible in George and Jamie’s respective crises, and in the tidying-up of the final paragraphs; while Katie never quite achieves the sharp focus that brings everyone else vividly to life.

These are cavils, however. A Spot of Bother is a painful, funny, humane, novel; beautifully written, addictively readable and so confident that there was no need for Haddon’s publishers’ nervous jacketing of it in a design that places the title of The Curious Incident above the title of this equally accomplished work.

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Mark Haddon appears at THE TIMES Cheltenham Literature Festival October 6-15. Call 01242 227979 www.cheltenhamfestivals.com