A Spot of Bother

The newly released novel by Mark Haddon, author of "the curious incident of the dog in the night-time". It is a gift from a friend. I am a huge fan of Haddon's previous novel so I'm pretty much putting up very high hopes for his new release.

The story only started to get interesting when one of the main characters, George began losing his mind, which is towards the middle of the 400+ pages novel. Only then that I had sped up my reading. Haddon had managed to portray vividly the mind of mentally-disturbed people, in both his novels. It is nice to know what crazy people think.

"A Spot of Bother" is a story about the process of an old, retired man going insane, bearing the stress from knowing his wife's affair, his skin cancer, his daughter's marriage to (in his opinion) the wrong man, giving a speech on his daughter's wedding... The story was told in various points of view, all from him and his family.

Very much similar to Haddon's first novel, "A Spot of Bother" has a mentally-disturbed character; and it has a... what I would call, a 'hanging' ending, which doesn't land anywhere. But I would say that this book ends in a rather abrupt manner, though I cannot give any suggestions on what to be added. Overall I think this is a good book, but not one of the my best, highly-recommended. And as usual, one's first novel is always the best.