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First (for me) there was The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. I still remember how I cried at the end, wept buckets, loved it. Then there was the book of poetry, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea. Great title. What was inside did little for me. And now, remaindered, hard-back, handsome, A Spot of Bother.

Expectations were lowered after the damp-squib poetry. Perhaps that was good because very quickly this novel started to delight me. It’s all relationships, all relationships in one family in which the central character (57 year old George � same age as me), is going potty, partly because of his fear of death and mostly because he walks in on his wife in bed with a former colleague. Such a possibility has simply never occurred to him and he doesn’t even tell them what he’s seen. It makes him profoundly sad � sad about his whole life and his place in the universe. His reaction, which looks to all intents and purposes like lunacy, is actually perfectly logical.

Meanwhile, there’s his daughter Katie, about to get married for the second time and not sure whether or not she loves the bridegroom (though she undoubtedly adores her son from her first marriage), and Jamie, the gay son who nearly loses the first partner he has ever loved simply because he hasn’t learned how to do relationships. And there’s David, the man George’s wife is ‘shagging� (but it’s more than that). All these relationships having ups and downs. Short chapters. Poignant, memorable moments. Several times I was crying again, though lots of this is also funny.

Haddon is good at getting you inside the heads of each of the characters in turn � right inside. Jean, who is so surprised to find herself having this affair (“Something people did on television�) and trying to work out what’s missing in her life: “She washed up her sandwich plate and stacked it in the rack. The house seemed suddenly rather drab. The sale round the base of the taps. The cracks in the soap. The sad cactus.�

It’s simple, good, satisfying writing. The pace builds. You get more and more involved. The plot centres on Katie’s wedding � will it or won’t it happen? Will Jamie’s lover, Tony, actually appear? Will George run away (he does his damnedest)? Will Jean end up with George, or David?

The climax—and it is a sort of comic climax—you can see this as a film—is Katie’s wedding. Up to this point I was loving this book, identifying with each of the characters in turn and gradually working out that George really was the hero.

The final dénouement when George has it out with David is the point where the novel failed for me. By this time I expect my expectations were too high. I wanted something out of the ordinary to happen and I hadn’t quite seen that Haddon had dropped David’s point of view entirely as George’s took up more and more emotional space. George is the ‘Christopher� of this book (never any doubt who you’re inside in the Curious Incident). I hadn’t quite seen that the novel was going to end up thunk in the middle of familyness: all these people who love each other, with the homosexual couple simply as a slight variation on the norm, decisions being possible to secure emotional ‘rightness�, the uncertainty and the madness a sort of passing phase.

I like this novel. I like it a lot. But the ending is not profound. It is just okay. One other slight reservation was when each relationship reaches its intensest moment, compare the language Jamie and Tony get with what’s accorded to Katie and Ray:

“Jamie just pulled him close and snogged him in the middle of the dancefloor for the whole three minutes and three whole minutes of Tony’s cock pressed against him was more than he could actually bear and he was drunk enough by now, so he pulled Tony upstairs and told him not to make any noise or he’d kill him and they went into this old bedroom and Tony fucked him in full view of Big Giraffe and the boxed set of Doctor Dolittle.�

“He lifted her head and put a finger on her lips to stop her speaking and kissed her. It was the first time they had kissed properly in weeks.

He led her upstairs and they made love until Jacob had a nightmare about an angry blue dog and they had to stop rather quickly.�

Katie and Ray make love. For the boys, Jamie gets a magnificent fuck. Hm. I do see, putting them together, that both sexual experiences are set against a sort of comical and appealing reality of innocence and childhood (Big Giraffe and angry blue dog). And I guess it all depends what you’re trying to do in a novel. This one does have something to say about the difficulty of relationships and how the word ‘love� doesn’t always seem to match whatever it is you have � and still whatever it is you have may be the right thing, the loving thing.

But it pushes a little bit farther than that, I think, and then draws back at the end in favour of a neat pattern, a good structure, a satisfactory ending. I’m glad I read it though, and I want to see what Haddon does next.