A Spot of Bother by Mark HaddonMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
George, the aging main character, is in a spot of bother--very aptly titled as his life is fairly privileged and seemingly going well, but that's exactly why I'm attracted to his suffering. Suffering is not explainable; it's not an equation as some would like it to be. Instead suffering can arise out of beauty when contrasted with life, can hit us the hardest when our lives are supposed to be good, can utterly bring us to our knees as the injustices of the world pull us down.
Haddon does not shy away from the dark forces of suffering. Early on from George's point of view we get this:
"He fell violently ill. Sweat was pouring from beneath his hair and from the backs of his hands.
He was going to die...
With blinding clarity he realized that everyone was folicking ina summer meadow surrounded by a dark impenetrable forest, waiting for that grim day on which they were dragged into the dark beyond the trees and individually butchered.
How in God's name had he not noticed this before? And how did others not notice it? How did they saunter through their days unaware of this indigestible fact? And how, once the truth dawned, was it possible to forget?" (66).
Ah, a suffering I can understand. While some, maybe many as witnessed in several of the Goodreads reviews I read, will see this as mere whining--buck up!, we have it good! etc!--I believe they utterly miss the point. The point is that we are all here to suffer because our existence is unsparingly brief, fraught with aching loneliness even when loved ones surround, riddled with unknowns and risk and pain and contradictions.
I understand that to survive we create fictions which soften this truth; but nevertheless it is the truth. And, thus, I embraced Haddon's honest exploration through George's near spiral into complete insanity. George cannot handle the pain and works gloriously to avoid it. Something about this honest journey of out-of-proportion suffering brings me peace. Maybe this is my fiction of choice to distance myself for a moment, counterintuitively, from my own suffering and pain.
View all my reviews
3 comments:
Beautifully said, CI.
I think the bigger issue is not that life is full of suffering, but that we suffer for no reason. As Victor Frankl put it, "we can bear any 'how' if we have a 'why'" (or something like that). The problem is that there really isn't a 'why'. Suffering is meaningless.
There is, however, a positive side (I believe). I've been reading the Greek Tragedies of late (teaching a Humanities class this semester) and thinking about Nietzsche's idea of Apollonian and Dionysian--how the Greeks, according to Nietzsche, attempted to escape the Dionysian reality of meaningless suffering and unity with the Apollonian solution--an escape into art and individuation, only to realize that the escape is worse than the truth they were escaping--that the Apollonian is a realm of alienation and dismemberment. So, in the end, because of their flight, they were able to look back upon the Dionysian horror as a positive; they were able to affirm life, that is, in all its fullness and without lying about it.
Post a Comment