Mark Haddon, A Spot of Bother

An upcoming wedding forms the scaffolding of Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother. Katie and Ray are the newlyweds-to-be—unless they break up for good before the wedding. Jamie, Katie's brother, is likewise on shaky ground with his boyfriend, Tony. And George and Jean are the parents of the bride, now in their sixties, retired, and having health and marital problems. There's a lot of arguing and drinking, doctors' visits and drama, but it's all rather light in tone—three different love stories hung on that wedding backdrop. My only complaint has to do with the number of names tossed around in the book—so many first names that, fifty pages in, I resorted to drawing a family tree on my bookmark. (It helped, but there were a lot of names of minor characters mentioned too, too many to write down, so I finally gave up caring who they were.) Apart from the name issue, the story was fine, though I don't expect I'll remember much about the book in a year's time.