Key to a non-crowd-pleaser
By Tom Shone |
July 8, 2012, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
"HOW rarely people were together," a character thinks toward the end of Mark Haddon's new novel. That may be true unless you happen to be a character in a Mark Haddon novel, of course, in which case togetherness is next to godliness. His plots are group hugs administered to the solitary, starting with Christopher Boone, the autistic 15-year-old narrator of his high-concept crowd-pleaser "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," published in 2003, a sweet-natured Rubik's Cube of a book in which amateur sleuthing around a poodle's death leads to the missing piece in a family jigsaw.
Haddon sought to hit the same sweet spot again in 2006 with "Spot of Bother," which exposes a seething suburban hotbed of lusts and betrayals swirling around a mild-mannered protagonist.
The same centripetal forces are at work in his broadest, most ambitious novel to date, "The Red House," in which two halves of a sundered English family attempt to unite for a week-long holiday. Angela hasn't spoken to her brother, Richard, in years, but after they briefly cross paths at their mother's funeral, Richard invites Angela and her clan (her husband, Dominic, and their kids: 17-year-old Alex, 16-year-old Daisy and eight-year-old Benjy) to stay with his family (his second wife, Louisa, and his stepdaughter, 16-year-old Melissa) in a rented home near Hay-on-Wye. The stage is set for the kind of tragicomedy that has rattled teacups from Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited" through to Ian McEwan's "Atonement." "Once you gather a group of people together in a country house then certain things try to force themselves in," the British writer Toby Litt once said. "Like ghosts. Like midnight flits. Like marital breakdown. Like meditations on the state of England. All of those things have to come through."
The surprise for readers who admired the glee with which Haddon deconstructed whodunit conventions in "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," is that this is pretty much what we get in "The Red House": midnight flits, marital breakdown, an argument, two runaways, even a ghost in the form of Angela's stillborn daughter, who turns up on the eve of what would have been her 18th birthday, a "little monster, features melted into the center of her face."
The novel sees Haddon cracking his knuckles and getting to work with any number of new technical tricks, most prominent, a stream-of-consciousness narration, dipping into the thoughts of each character for a page or even just a paragraph.
If you want truly great literature set in an English country house, you still can't beat Wodehouse's Blandings books for deep-core contentment and unbridled comic zip. "The Red House," on the other hand, reads as if it were written to silence those critics who damn Haddon with the faint praise of being too "readable." Mission accomplished.
Haddon sought to hit the same sweet spot again in 2006 with "Spot of Bother," which exposes a seething suburban hotbed of lusts and betrayals swirling around a mild-mannered protagonist.
The same centripetal forces are at work in his broadest, most ambitious novel to date, "The Red House," in which two halves of a sundered English family attempt to unite for a week-long holiday. Angela hasn't spoken to her brother, Richard, in years, but after they briefly cross paths at their mother's funeral, Richard invites Angela and her clan (her husband, Dominic, and their kids: 17-year-old Alex, 16-year-old Daisy and eight-year-old Benjy) to stay with his family (his second wife, Louisa, and his stepdaughter, 16-year-old Melissa) in a rented home near Hay-on-Wye. The stage is set for the kind of tragicomedy that has rattled teacups from Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited" through to Ian McEwan's "Atonement." "Once you gather a group of people together in a country house then certain things try to force themselves in," the British writer Toby Litt once said. "Like ghosts. Like midnight flits. Like marital breakdown. Like meditations on the state of England. All of those things have to come through."
The surprise for readers who admired the glee with which Haddon deconstructed whodunit conventions in "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," is that this is pretty much what we get in "The Red House": midnight flits, marital breakdown, an argument, two runaways, even a ghost in the form of Angela's stillborn daughter, who turns up on the eve of what would have been her 18th birthday, a "little monster, features melted into the center of her face."
The novel sees Haddon cracking his knuckles and getting to work with any number of new technical tricks, most prominent, a stream-of-consciousness narration, dipping into the thoughts of each character for a page or even just a paragraph.
If you want truly great literature set in an English country house, you still can't beat Wodehouse's Blandings books for deep-core contentment and unbridled comic zip. "The Red House," on the other hand, reads as if it were written to silence those critics who damn Haddon with the faint praise of being too "readable." Mission accomplished.
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