Found the style of writing the author chose for this novel irritating. I just couldn't get on with any of the characters either.
This is a novel which will date or need footnotes to explain the references to current affairs of the 2010s. ( )

Really loved it! I liked Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and A Spot of Bother very much so I was looking forward to this. My initial feeling was that it was confusing and hard to read but I got to really enjoy it as I continued to read it. It's a strange format for a novel but I thought it really worked. ( )

A contemporary novel that focuses on sister and brother, Angela and Richard who meet for a holiday with their families in a rented farmhouse for an extended period together for the first time in twenty years. There are tensions between the two with Angela harbouring resentment that she was left to care for their mother after their father’s early death and also of Richard’s successful career. These tensions are exacerbated by internal conflicts within Angela’s and Richard’s marriages and with their children. Haddon revealingly captures these difficulties between the two and those between the parents and their children, as the latter in their teens, seek to carve out their own independent lives, yet are still reliant to some extent on their parents. This leads to a tortuous week together where a greater understanding of each other is somewhat overshadowed by other secrets that are kept hidden.

Mark Haddon's latest book the Red House is a stream of consciousness novel about two contemporary family of Brits spending a week of vacation together in a house in the English Countryside. At the center is Richard, a doctor and his sister Angela who have some unfinished business at the recent passing of their mother. Each brings to the house their respective spouses and children--three of the four being teens. Put them all together under one roof, each with their own secrets, have them interact and see what happens. Haddon is most famous for his last book--the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a book written from the point of view of an autistic boy who solves a mystery. That book I loved--this one was a bit of a chore. I started it last June but put it down for several months because it requires a more slow read. I had a hard time tracking the characters and who was speaking or thinking at any time. This is that dang stream of consciousness which I've never been a big fan of--apologies to Virginia Woolf fans. There are times when his prose is brilliant and poetic. He can take you from that contemporary setting back across years in one descriptive paragraph such as this one describing the house: "The Red House, a Romano-British farmstead abandoned, ruined, plundered for stone, built over, burnt and rebuilt. Tenant farmers, underlings of Marcher lords, a pregnant daughter hidden in the hills, a man who put a musket in his mouth in front of his wife and sprayed half his head across the kitchen wall, a drunken priest who lost the house in a bet over a horse race, or so they said, though they are long gone. Two brass spoons under the floorboards. a 20,000-reichsmark banknote. Letters from Florence cross-written to save paper, now brown and frail and crumpled to pack a wall. Brother, my Lungs are not Goode...." That paragraph made me pick up the book again and hang in there. There are more passages like that and they made the book worth reading when they surfaced. ( )

Where to start? No use of quotation marks and constantly changing point of view make this book so much more trouble than it was worth. Throw in the annoying and obscure streams of consciousness and lack of symapthy for a single character, and that makes for a shit read. Fortunately this book is saved by its total lack of plot. Hard to believe his first was so brilliant. ( )