Having enjoyed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, it is unsurprising I found another Haddon novel a pleasant read. When the novel begins, it seems it is about a dysfunctional family – the Halls in Peterborough; dysfunctional in a most British way. George Hall, retired and a complete hypochondriac, begins the novel by considering suicide because he has a lesion on his skin which he convinces himself is a life-threatening cancer. Jean Hall is having a love affair with one of George’s previous colleagues, David, and torn between her family life with George, and the chance for another life with David. Katie, their daughter, divorced from Graham and with a young son, Jacob, announces her intention to marry her new boyfriend, Ray, who is working-class and rich, and quite unlike her. Jamie, their son, is a well-adjusted, successful man in many ways except he desperately seeks a happy gay relationship.
George’s condition spirals down as he begins to experience some physical symptoms but becomes convinced at the same time that he is going insane. He accidentally discovers Jean and David having sex in his bed, but backs away before they know he has seen them, and leaves the house for a night, before returning, still saying nothing. Katie and Ray have a hiccup in their relationship before the wedding, and Jamie’s boyfriend, Tony, breaks up with him.
The writing style is deadpan, the humour in the understatedness of how the Halls go about under-dramatising the dramatic in their lives. It is also painfully hilarious watching them tiptoe around each other’s sensibilities.
Jamie tries to ask his father about Katie’s upcoming wedding, but misunderstanding, George is instead at pains to reassure Jamie he accepts Jamie bringing a boyfriend, even though they both know the senior Halls are uncomfortable with his homosexuality:
“I think…George sat down and adjusted the chair so that it was precisely the right distance from the table. ‘I think you should bring someone’.
p74
Watching a friend’s funeral, the clearly atheist George thinks in his prosaic way,
But you either had faith or you didn’t. No re-entry, no refunds.
p59
When asked to say the Lord’s Prayer,
George said the passages he agreed with out loud […] and mumbled through the references to God.
p64
That encapsulates George – a reserved man who tries very hard to accommodate others and particularly not to give offense, while attempting not to be forced into doing things he definitely does not want to do.
George does not think himself a particularly good father, not having done much father-son stuff with Jamie, he thinks, and distantly supportive of his alarmingly aggressive daughter. A lot of the novel is as follows – some interesting personal reminiscing, followed by not a lot of ambition or intent to change:
George recalled only too well how much he had hated his own father. A friendly ogre who found coins in your ears and made origami squirrels and who shrank slowly over the years into an angry, drunken little man who thought praising children made them weak and never admitted his own brother was schizophrenic and who kept shrinking so that by the time George and Judy and Brian were old enough to hold him to account he had performed the most impressive trick of all by turning into a self-pitying, arthritic figure too insubstantial to be the butt of anyone’s anger.
Perhaps the best you could hope for was not to do the same thing to your own children?
p77
When George is admitted to hospital, Jamie thinks
in some obscure way he had caused this, by not ringing Katie back, by standing Ryan up, by not loving Tony, by not telling Stuart the whole truth.
p263
This is typical of how the characters in this novel do guilt – by overclaiming their share partly out of a narcissism that leads them to temporarily believe everything revolves around them and therefore is their fault and doing, and yet also knowing perfectly well at the same time that the events are unconnected. The reaching for culpability seems to be an irrational nervous tick for many a character in the novel. That said, there is always levity and humour too in Haddon’s writing, following up Jamie’s misplaced guilt with some level of satisfaction:
“He had always rather liked emergencies. Other people’s at any rate. They put your own problems into perspective. It was like being on a ferry. You didn’t have to think about what you had to do or where you had to go for the next few hours. It was all laid out for you.
Like they said. No one committed suicide in wartime
p263
It is typical of Haddon to deftly weave in the altruism of prioritising the urgent needs of others, with the comfort of abdicating responsibility, all albeit temporarily, as a respite apparently. In such ways, it is a clever book, functioning on several levels at once. But it is also unfortunately a rather cliched book, following a time honoured and rather worn plotline
Katie and Ray redecide to get married afterall, and the second half of the book is all about the wedding – the chaos in a most British fashion, the cock-ups and mishaps and collision of different characters’ motives, agendas, and plans. I suppose Haddon had to play it out to its predictable end, but the second half was more slapstick comedy, and just a little less good reading. Nevertheless, don’t let this put you off – it is still a very easy, pleasant, even rollicking read. The chapters are short. Many are just a few pages, some are just one page, or even one paragraph – the novel moves swiftly, the pacing is good, the storytelling even and consistent and practised. I am not at all sorry to have read this, but I won’t be bothering to read it again.
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