The Red House

Mark Haddon

Penguin

Otago Daily Times, March 26th 2012

Like many people I loved Mark Haddon’s debut novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Unfortunately his latest book, The Red House, left me decidedly disappointed. 

The basic plot concerns the complexities of family relationships, encapsulated in an attempted reconciliation between Angela and Richard, siblings who have had very little to do with each other since their teenage years.  When their mother dies, Richard decides it is time to rebuild burnt bridges and invites Angela and her family to spend a week with his own in a rented cottage on the Welsh border. 

The novel details the events that unfold over seven days as the two households rub uncomfortably together, a series of uneasy truces punctuated by moments where intra- and interfamilial conflicts bubble to the surface.  The point of view jumps from character to character, often alternating between paragraphs in an almost Woolfian stream of consciousness.  Events outside the time frame of the novel are alluded to but left unexplained, and dialogue is italicised with no speech marks, making it hard at times to identify the speaker. 

This technique is quite effective, putting the reader in the position of voyeur peering through the windows of the character’s lives.  The problem is that I didn’t care about any of them.  Each character is conflicted about something – successful doctor Richard beset by self doubt and concerned about a looming medical negligence suit, Angela haunted by thoughts of a daughter stillborn 17 years earlier, the idealistic teenaged Daisy whose born-again Christianity is challenged by her emergent sexuality and so forth – but seven of the eight felt like stereotypes rather than individuals I could empathise with. Only eight-year-old Benjy actually appealed to me (Haddon’s ability to capture a child’s-eye view of the world was part of the charm his first book), and this was not enough to maintain my interest.

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/novels-create-feeling-reader-voyeur