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A Spot of Bother is a 2006 family dramedy by the author of the fabulously quirky bestseller, The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-time. It’s been sitting on my to-read shelf for about ten years since picking it up at a book fair, but I’m on a mission to read more tree-books this year, so selected it because I thought it would be funny. Sadly, it was not - it’s actually hard to believe it’s the same writer. I was forewarned by the mostly negative reviews, but wanted to make up my own mind. I didn’t hate it, but after 500 pages about some fairly awful people and a very meh ending, I wouldn’t recommend it either.

George Hall and his wife are distressed to learn that their prickly daughter Katie is getting married again, to a man they disapprove of for non-specific class-based reasons. Katie isn’t sure herself whether she loves Ray, but he is very good with her pre-schooler Jacob. Her brother Jamie is afraid of committing to his boyfriend Tony, but isn’t quite sure what he wants. Then George discovers a suspicious mole and that his wife is having an affair, and a mild mid-life crisis turns into a full-on nervous breakdown, but nothing can stop a runaway wedding�

I wanted to like this, I really did. I gamely pushed on, through the disjointed writing, the endless random inconsequential character names that litter the narrative, serving only to confuse the reader, the awful selfish family of middle-class twats, the grotesque depictions of aged sex and the painful lack of any actual humour. I did like poor stoic Ray, and the gay love story was sort of sweet, and it did finally get interesting around the mid-point when George attempts to cure his problem, but then it got pretty boring again. I persisted, waiting for some kind of pay-off: I suppose you could call it a happy ending in that all the characters get what they deserve, but the reader does not. I am therefore downgrading my initial 3 star rating to 2.