The Red House

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.

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!

A difficult genre to pin down. Elements of this suggest something supernatural, but nothing of the sort emerges. Maybe a psycological thriller? No, there is no threat like that here. It is simply a story of two families brought together. Parental woes, teen frustrations but it is told with a style that nudges toward the poetic.i don't mean in terms of rhyme there is a rhythmn to the narrative. At first the structure is a little jaring (Such a person SAYS this, another person IS THINKING that, instead of SAID and THOUGHT) but you quickly get caught up[ in the story and HOW its told no longer matters.Absorbing.

Read this or tried to for our book group and none of us warmed to the book. Found it disjointed, hard to keep up with the various characters and too much about the characters not enough of a story. Also hard to follow and most of us gave up before the end.