Quite an odd book, I must say. The synopsis promised that "Mark Haddon has once again (!) managed to write a funny, insightful, and full of life novel. The author is unfamiliar to me and his talent was not previously known to me. I was expecting something from the category of stories with mysteries and clues, and got a third-rate nonsense. Let's see if Mark succeeded in what he promised.
In 2003, Haddon won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and in 2004, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Overall Best First Book for his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, a book which is written from the perspective of a boy with Aspergers syndrome. Haddon's knowledge of Aspergers syndrome, a type of autism, comes from his work with autistic people as a young man. In an interview at Powells.com, Haddon claimed that this was the first book that he wrote intentionally for an adult audience; he was surprised when his publisher suggested marketing it to both adult and child audiences. His second adult-novel, A Spot of Bother, was published in September 2006.
Brother and sister, who had lost sight of each other for twenty years, meet at their mother's funeral. They each had their own lives, their own problems and worries. Richard is so moved by seeing his dear sister that he decides to invite her and her family to the country estate for a week, with the aim of getting to know each other better and becoming friends, if that is possible. His wife, accustomed to the beautiful life, and her impertinent and capricious daughter from his first marriage are not happy with the idea of burrowing into the wilderness for a week, but they could not disobey the head of the family. Angela's family of three children and her unloved husband, who can not feed his family, very much enjoyed the invitation to a free vacation.
Each chapter tells the reader about one day of vacation. In each subsequent chapter, we see not only the events of that day of the week, but also a part of each character's past life. These jumps in time and from one family member to another occur without any warning. At first it doesn't add to the pleasure of reading, later you get used to it and stop paying attention.
The author immerses the reader in the life of each family with its problems, confronts the perversions of all kinds and makes you dig into this dirty laundry up to your shoulders. All of the men gathered in the Red House eventually develop clear mental disorders related to the lack of sex. Richard glances voluptuously at his wife at every family dinner and suffers from the urge to drag her to the matrimonial bed as soon as possible. Dominic (Angela's husband) reminisces endlessly about his loudly moaning mistress, who thanks him for the sex. Seventeen-year-old Alex (Angela and Dominic's son) first presents Richard's sixteen-year-old adopted daughter in erotic scenes, hiding his erection in public, then masturbating while presenting her mother. Who else do we have left of the boys? Yep, there's Angela's eight-year-old son left. Even little Benji knows more about homosexuality and communism than I do, and is occasionally interested in "sex stuff. I'm surprised he hasn't been mixed up in some dirtier story. I confess, I was expecting it.
The tangle of nastiness unwinds every day, exposing more and more details that are better kept quiet. One of the sixteen-year-old girls is over-experienced in sex and marijuana use, the other is addicted to religion and lesbianism at the same time. The girls are so different in character and attitude towards life, so equally unpleasant and even disgusting.
The author has piled everything that foreign writers nowadays like to discuss in their literature: homosexual relationships, sex among teenagers, bullying at school, attempted suicide, a stillborn baby with signs of deformity, dying of cancer (testicles, that's important), child abuse, etc.
We think back to what we were promised in the synopsis and are convinced that it was lies that lured us here. Funny? It's hilarious. Insightful? Too insightful. It's a full of life novel... there's no better way to put it, it's just so full of life. I know Mark Haddon didn't write the synopsis, but whoever wrote it was obviously unfamiliar with the book.
Relatives planned to get close, some of them succeeded in the physical plane, but the warmth of the soul was not, and did not become. There was no rest, no friendship either.
All the characters in the book are unpleasant, with their own cockroaches the size of rats. Didn't have to experience an ounce of sympathy for any of them. All fixated on their own, the author made them out to be a bunch of limited and horny types.
By the end of the book it seemed to me that something tragic, maximum, should happen to touch the hearts of indifferent relatives, to unite them, to make them feel for each other, the author kind of hinted at it, but the ending was banal beyond belief.
This article was sponsored by Kamlesh Patel
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