The Literature of the Neurodiverse: Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother

I wrote in an earliest post of how difficult I have been finding it to read Mark Haddon’s second novel, A Spot of Bother, without having autism on my mind or, rather, brain. George Hall, the novel’s protagonist, is just-retired from a managerial position at a company that manufacturers not-quite-top-of-the-line but not the cheapest (worst) playground equipment. He is a man who, while he would prefer a certain amount of order in his life, subjugates this inner desire in order to best address the chaos the world has laid at his doorstep. George is shown to concentrate the most when building a studio where he can draw and take up those pursuits he had set aside as a responsible family man: “There were six courses above the sill on either side…….He spread the mortar and slotted the first one into place” (p. 52; also pp 36-7). Indeed, he concentrates so much while building the studio that he continually falls into reveries about his childhood and his previous life, and especially of his displeasures, such as holidays and flying in airplanes (p. 9 and ff.).

But is there really only one protagonist—one perspective—in this book?

Above all, it is George’s family—a wife, Jean, who is cheating on him a strong-tempered daughter, Katie whose “mind has always been a mystery to him” (p. 27); a gay son, Jamie with whom he “had never done the father-son stuff” (p. 55), as well as his own parents including an alcoholic father and a mentally ill uncle (p. 39)—who have long brought a steady stream of disorder to him. George can be described as scrupulously decent: His wife Jean thinks of him as “formal, almost military” (p. 38) and “honest” and “still dependable” (p. 39). While George is the established protagonist, the central character, of Haddon’s narrative, the author writes A Spot of Bother from the perspectives of the four members of George’s family and thus attempts the trick in writing of producing four different voices. Here is what each family member thinks (to him or herself) about the announcement of Katie’s engagement to Ray:

• George: “What was Katie doing? You could not control children, he knew that. Making them eat vegetables was hard enough. But marrying Ray? She had a 2:1 in philosophy. And that chap who had climbed into her car in Leeds. She had given the police a part of his ear.” (p. 11)
• Katie: “They hated the idea. As predicted. Katie could tell.
  “Well, they could live with. Time was she’d have gone off the deep end. In fact, there was a part of her which missed being the person who went off the deep end. Like her standards were slipping…….
  “Ray wasn’t an intellectual. He wasn’t the most beautiful man she’d ever met. But the most beautiful man she’d ever met had shat on her from a great height. And when Ray put his arms around here she felt safer than she’d felt for a long time.” (p. 13-4)
• Jamie: “Jamie ate a seventh Pringle, put the tube back in the cupboard, went into the living room, slumped on the sofa and pressed the button on the answer phone.
  “‘Jamie. Hello. It’s Mum. I thought I might catch you in. Oh well, never mind……’
  ……
  “God, his sister had done some stupid things in her time but this took the biscuit. Ray was meant to be a stage. Katie spoke French.” (p. 30)
• Jean: “Jean undressed while David was showering and slipped into the dressing gown he’d left out for her. She wandered over to the bay window and sat on the arm of the chair.
  “It made her feel attractive. Just being in this room. The cream walls.” (p. 37)

You can test for yourself whether you think each character’s voice and viewpoint distinctive (of course, the quotations above are only short selections; I am still undecided about this myself). Haddon switches from character to character with each chapter, and the effect is somewhat like reading Virginia Woolf’s six-voiced novel The Waves.

To write a novel with such a polyphony of voices is not a new technique. The Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin speaks of the “polyphonic” (from the ancient Greek poly meaning “many” and phone meaning “voice”) as it emerges in the novels of Dostoevsky. As the literary theorist René Wellek writes:

Bakhtin asserts that Dostoevsky created a totally new kind of novel he calls “polyphonic”: i. e., it consists of independent voices which are fully equal, become subjects of their own right and do not serve the ideological position of the author. He is undoubtedly right in emphasizing the dramatic nature of Dostoevsky’s novels, the ? Dostoevsky created, the power of empathy he shows with the most diverse ideological points of view and attitudes to life but, I think, Bakhtin is simply wrong if he pushes this view so far as to deny the authorial voice of Dostoevsky, his personal angle of vision. “”Polyphony” is, after all, only a metaphor, an analogy when applied to the novel, as it is in the nature of a literary work to occur in a linear time sequence. The application to literature is quite old. [my emphases

What Haddon’s “ideological position” as the author of A Spot of Bother is another topic that requires further thought, though it might be helpful for a reader of the novel to ask her or himself how an author’s own distinct voice emerges from a novel whose story is told through the interweaning of several voices. I would like to suggest that A Spot of Bother is part of the literature of the neurologically different—of neurodiversity—that Haddon’s first novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, is in a much more obvious manner. Haddon’s first novel is written with a first-person narrator, Christopher, while A Spot of Bother’s narrator is thoroughly omniscient. Instead of seeing the world through the eyes of a fictional neurodiverse character (Christopher), the reader of A Spot of Bother is taken into the minds of several, diverse characters, “fully equal” and “become subjects of their own right.”

Perhaps it is not George who is the sole protagonist and main actor of the novel, but a chorus of him and Jean, Katie, and Jamie, too. And perhaps a chorus of voices and perspectives—of neurologies—at the core of a narrative is one key aspect of the literature of the neurodiverse.