Mark HaddonThe Red House

Loved Hadden's book, "A Spot of Bother" but couldn't get through this one. Utterly confusing narrative -- Just couldn't follow it. Unfortunately the situation and characters weren't involving enough for me to put in the effort.

I loved The Red House. I read The Curious Case of the Dog at Midnight long enough ago that I didn't have it to compare to, but Red House was good enough that I'm putting other Haddon books on my list. First, I thought the device of going into each character's thoughts and speech, as quickly and seamlessly as from paragraph to paragraph (and even within a paragraph) was fantastic. In addition, Haddon gave us fascinating, complex characters, with an extremely interesting set of conflicts and backstories. The setting: a vacation house where all the characters were confined and had to deal with each other, is a familiar one, but Haddon manages to give the setting nuances and colors that were fresh and unexpected, and with it to give us a really terrific story. The house and surrounding land and community are skillfully woven into the story and become an important aspect of getting to know each character.

Clearly Mark Haddon is a good author and not a one shot wonder. I've read both The curious incident with the dog and A spot of bother, and what surprises me is that this third novel is completely different yet again. Haddon describes how a woman and her brother try to find their way back to each other after the death of their mother. The brother, financially successful but just left a cold, childless marriage, and the sister, marriage in a rut, 2 teenage children and 1 rather weird sweet small son. Both think the other one 'has it all' and both resent each other for what they did or did not do in the past. In other words: a typical sibling relationship. The brother then decides to invite his sister for a holiday in the cottage with his new wife and step-daughter. What follows then, is a glimpse in each head and history, from the brother and sister to the youngest (who has a macabre view on the world). Because of that, it is not always easy to follow which perspective is next. What Haddon does well is to get inside each head with distinguishable different voices. And of course, there is scandal, twists and realizations as one could expect almost from a film about it. In fact, I constantly had the feeling I was reading a script for a film, and saw how the novel could be turned into a film. Well written, but I didn't get connected with the characters. So a good book to read on a holiday, but it's not a page turner.

I loved The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and A Spot of Bother, so I was very excited once I heard about this novel, and then became utterly disappointed with what a chore this one is to read. It's told in a stream of consciousness style when eight people get together -- an estranged brother and sister and their two families for a week of vacation after the brother and sister's mother died. The point of view shifts from one person's interior thoughts to the next from one paragraph to another, but often the switch occurs within a paragraph. Countless times throughout the book you have to re-read sections to figure out whose point of view it is, and a several times it's impossible to guess. Often there are passages when we get excerpts of what someone is reading -- and you can't always be sure which character it is. While this may be interesting the first few times, it quickly becomes tedious. Then there are riffs like this one:Marja, Helmand. The sniper far back enough from the window to stop sun flaring on the rifle sight. Crack and kickback. A marine stumbles under the weight of his red buttonhole. Dawn light on wile horses in the Kentii Mountains. Huddershfield, brown sugar bubbling in a tarnished spoon. Turtles drown in oil. The purr of binary, a trillion ones and zeroes. The swill of bonds and futures. Reckitt Benckiser, Smith and Nephew. Rifts and magma chambers. Eyjafjallajokull smoking like a witch's cauldron.It goes on like this for many more lines -- I'm not sure what it's supposed to be -- descriptions of all that's going on in the world, while these 8 people try to make sense of their lives?Late in the book, we just get a long list of every item in a novelty shop the characters visit. It was fun when Tim O'Brien used that trick in The Things They Carried because each person's possessions revealed their personality, but I'm not sure what knowing all the curios in this paritcular curio shop does for me or any of the characters.It's too bad because the character's dilemmas -- the sister is going crazy over memories of her deformed stillborn baby, her ambition-less husband is having an affair, the brother is learning his wife has secrets and he has to be a better husband -- are all very interesting, not to mention the children's various problems -- the most interesting of which is a teenage girl coming to a slow realization of her sexual orientation. There was enough tension and character development in the book to make it somewhat worthwhile, but you have to have a lot of patience for artsy, fartsy writerly technigues to get through it. (Some readers might like the experimentation, but I obviously am not one of them.)

Impossible to follow, depressing. I struggled to finish it, but I shouldn't have bothered. Went straight into the recycle bin.

Maybe if I could read in one or two sittings, I would get it, but that's not how I read. I using read at bedtime so it might take me a week to read a book. I find this very confusing so far. I am about half way through and it is a struggle. I really liked "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night." Mark Haddon has a wonderful command of the English language. I love his writing, but the characters in this book are too confusing for me. I am going to finish it though. He is too good a writer not to take the book to the end.

I was engrossed by the book. The twists and turns were intriguing. Things left unfinished were disquieting, which can be fun, can be frustrating. The characters were wonderfully complex. If you read Haddon's first book, expect the same insights and compassions for characters but this is a much different novel. I will continue to read his books. They offer unique opportunities to understand people with lives different from mine. As a professor, I may even use some of the characters as case studies in Counseling. The characters certainly all struggled with their own demons.

I have only felt like this once before. The first episode of The Office gave me the uncomfortable feeling that I recognised these people and even elements of myself. Like the stars of Abigail's Party, these people's issues and psyches are peeled back for examination. I imagined that only a world leading psychologist could understand and explain the inside of their mind and emotions. I should not be surprised, this is the third Mark Haddon book I have read. I would have no hesitation in recommending his books to anyone, but beware, they may cause you emotions you thought were gone or at least jaded. Don't look for answers or comfortable endings, just wallow in his insights and wonderful prose.

Reading The Red House was for me, for the most part, an uncomfortable experience. Streams of consciousness, random staccato sentences, wide ranging cultural references, many of them mysterious, disjointed paragraphs; fragmented, confusing glimpses of unattributed interior thought processes; all wildly busy in an attempt to engage you, or maybe, arrogantly not caring if they fail. I feared the book was almost unreadable. I wondered if I could be `doing with it'. I pressed on. It couldn't all be like this. Squilllions of non-sequiturs, mad lists of thoughts, the seven days dragged painfully by. By Wednesday it felt like months. A glimmer of pleasure and one extra star in that by Thursday MH had begun to get over himself a little, perhaps even he got bored with the pseudo James Joyce Ulysses style he adopted, when a sad grey wraith of the really good book this could have been floats over the final few days.The premise, a disparate family forced to be together for a week, with no decently easy escape; is intriguing, but the delivery so differently written and awkward, the tantalising central appeal was sabotaged. I was truly ready to be swept up in this domestic drama, one of my favourite genres; that's why I chose it. I tried hard to connect, anchor myself in, and sort out the various family members who are thrown at us at great speed. That took many pages.Following the death of their alcoholic demented widowed mother; Richard, who is a magnanimous medical man, struggling with his own demons, decides to get to grips with/offer an olive branch to his emotionally estranged teacher sister Angela and her family. "Angela and Richard had spent no more than an afternoon in each other's company over the last fifteen years".Angela's `recovering from a breakdown' househusband is the carelessly guilty Dominic; their children are testosterone fuelled Alex (17), newly religious Daisy (16), and Benjy, just a bouncy, bothered boy (8). Lingering around, constantly at the edge of Angela's mind, is the ghost of their eighteen years ago Sirenomelia afflicted and stillborn daughter, Karen.Richard's new wife is Louisa, who, suffering from briefly being marked out as being a little WAG-like, makes him stepfather to smouldering Melissa, love/lust object to two of the party. The air must be cleared all round and hopefully the family will emerge as kinder more thoughtful people by the end of the week. This to me was the message of the book. It's easy to hold a fixed opinion about a person until you are faced with them day in day out and can learn to see the whole picture.The holiday rental, the title role, sourced and paid for by Richard, is on the Welsh Border, near Hay-on-Wye. Converging upon The Red House, the blue touch paper, together with the stove, is lit. I wanted to know much more about this place - sadly only lazily portrayed as a cliché riddled two dimensional rough draft of a holiday cottage - tatty Scrabble game in a drawer, 51 playing cards, job lot of prints on the walls, dreary cast off books on the shelves, twee visitors book entry about a deer in the garden, a mistakenly unsecured owners cupboard filled with odd objects of value to them. I needed the house and surrounds to at least gradually come to some kind of life. Apart from a brief early morning visit from a fox and some scarey plumbing descriptions it just lay there dead.Memories, from all corners, push their way up to the surface. Rebalancing and shifting of attitudes is required. Revelations surprise and illuminate. Everything reaches the boil, secrets, yearnings, and fears; as this mix simmers away we are treated to some pretty gross teenage detail; there my eyes started skimming the text instead of reading it. Too much information. Brief excitements of at last some comprehensible drama begin to pepper the dreadfully disorganised text. Constantly having to work which of the eight was talking/thinking became exhausting. It began to feel as though The Red House was actually a jumbled up jig saw, possibly with pieces missing, such as you might find in a stereotypical holiday cottage...I don't know whom this is meant to be for. I (61) did really enjoy and relish the last two books by Mark Haddon. So I have previously been in his sights. Perhaps when you have two monster successes editors leave you to it and the blurb writes itself. I looked up the Random House synopsis, which began with the word `brilliant', followed by the bleakly useful phrase `extraordinary narrative technique'. We are promised that it is `sure to entrance the millions of readers' of previous two novels. Well not this one at any rate, sorry to say. Reading it was like pushing water uphill.N.b. for a master class in the dilemmas of a doctor, family guy; time framed into one day and not a week, Saturday still stands out in my bookish memory. Perhaps Richard was even based on Henry Perowne?Comment Comment (1) | Permalink | Most recent comment: Mar 22, 2012 8:17 PM GMT

When the psychologist Adam Phillips said that the modern gothic wouldn't be set in a castle or on a moor, but in a family, he doubtless had Mark Haddon's The Red House in mind. Outwardly, there's nothing gothic about Haddon's tale. Herefordshire, risotto, the whole pretty willow-patterned picture of middle class life. Yet, like the emotions - spoken and unspoken - that are presented in the book, Haddon rejoices in dissecting every element of this ostensibly comfortable world. It makes for a thrillingly gory operation.A mother has died. Her two surviving children meet at a farmhouse outside Hay-on-Wye. The daughter has with her an indifferent husband and three markedly different children, while her brother has his new wife and challenging stepdaughter in tow. The clash of these factions and the detritus they drag with them is the subject of Haddon's study. Reported, like a diary, the tantrums and tedium of family holidays unfold with alarming familiarity.Yet, seeing the immediate shortcomings of such a post-Joanna Trollope world, Haddon chooses a engagingly adumbrated style. Often incongruous lists, smashed conversations and omniscient chunks of prose without clear character ownership unfold his palimpsest of passion and regret. Everyone has a voice, from the assumed authority figure of Richard (a successful medical consultant with a negligence case in the offing) through to Benjy (a violently imaginative 8 year old). It's to Haddon's considerable credit that none of them is authorially short changed.The thrust of the narrative therefore emerges in its characters' inability to understand their companions' motivations and histories. Rather than a meeting of minds, The Red House offers a battle of wills. Old grudges die hard and new ones fix themselves just as permanently on the familial horizon. And, when told with Haddon's stylistic aplomb, such a Chekhov-meets-crunchy-nut-corn-flakes character study sparkles.

It's not that I can fault the entailing plot that centres around 2 siblings bringing their families together following the death of a parent, nor can I fault the unique way in which Haddon`s writing adds to the unfolding drama. However there is something about the ever changing rapidity in which Haddon switches from first to third person, which makes it difficult for the reader to engage or gain a sense of empathy with the characters.Perhaps it's a case of me enjoying the story, but not the way in which it is written. Overall I don't think I would either recommend or not recommend the book. What I would recommend is fir a prospective reader to trial a chapter before commuting to the book.

After reading 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime', and 'A Spot of Bother', I was delighted to begin another book by an exceptional author. Within pages I was hook! This book is fantastic, and while I doubt it can compete with the iconic presense that 'The Curious Incident...' has made, it certainly was an absolute brilliant book to read!