The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
July 6th 2006 07:40
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time' is a very good book that happened to win the Whitbread award in 2003 (see Mortal Engines for more details on the Whitbread award). It can be found in either the literature or children's section of your local bookstore (the Whitbread award is a children's book award but the author wrote the book intending it for adults - his publishers surprised him by marketing it as both a children's and adult's novel).
The curious incident that the title refers to is that of a dog dying. The book's narrator (who writes as if he is the author of the book) is a 15 year old boy named Christopher who sets about investigating what happened to the dog and writing a book about it. Christopher goes to a special school and, although we are never told what it is that afflicts him, it's to be assumed that he suffers from a mild form of autism (or Asperger's Syndrome)... it says as much in the blurb on the back of the book.
The author, Mark Haddon, spent some of his younger years working with autistic children so I guess he was more than qualified to write about them in this, his first adult novel. To write from the perspective of someone with no or little comprehension of emotions and more than a few problems in the way of perception would seem almost impossible to pull off, that Haddon seems to do it so effortlessly and empathically is proof to his abilities as a writer. His Whitbread award was surely deserved.
I guess you could call this book a coming-of-age novel. Christopher's novel follows his tracing of a single small incident with a logical precision that leads to some very big changes for him. His ability, or inability, to cope with certain things in light of his condition makes for unpredictable reading. How he reacts to things we take for granted and the way he understands problems and works through them also keeps it all rolling along at high speed. It's a realistic and unromanticised view of a condition that the general public (or at any rate, I) know very little about (the movie 'Rain Man' being the previous extent of my knowledge on autism), and as I said before - Haddon is to be congratulated on his achievements in writing this in the first person.
So if you're looking for a really good book that's also a good read, and is also educational without forcing you to learn against your will, I think this is one to pick up. It's brilliant, like Christopher.
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Comment by Bunbury
What's great is that although it's from Christopher's point of view, you really feel for the people around him too, especially his Dad....
And the appendix was pretty funny too, I swear that was one of the 3U maths questions from the HSC.