THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME
REVIEWS
The Remains of the Dog By JAY MCINERNY
THE CURIOUS INCIDENT
OF THE DOG
IN THE NIGHT-TIME
The difference between literature and its imitations might be defined in any number of ways, but let's be reckless, even elitist, and propose that a literary novel requires new reading skills and teaches them within its pages, while a conventional novel -- whether it is about lawyers or professors or smart single girls -- depends on our ingrained habits of reading and perception, and ultimately confirms them as adequate to our understanding of the world around us. Mark Haddon's stark, funny and original first novel, ''The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,'' is presented as a detective story. But it eschews most of the furnishings of high-literary enterprise as well as the conventions of genre, disorienting and reorienting the reader to devastating effect.
Fifteen-year-old Christopher Boone of Swindon, England, seems, at first glance, an unpromising narrator for a novel -- a curious hybrid of reliable and unreliable. By his own admission he doesn't like fiction. He is incapable of lying, of understanding metaphor or jokes. He's also incapable of reading any but the most basic of human facial expressions. ''Usually people look at you when they're talking to you. I know that they're working out what I'm thinking, but I can't tell what they're thinking. It is like being in a room with a one-way mirror in a spy film.'' His own range of emotional response is so limited he makes the repressed butler in Kazuo Ishiguro's ''Remains of the Day'' -- a novel that this one resembles in its elegant economy of means -- seem like Zorba the Greek.
The book's jacket copy identifies him as an autistic savant, but Christopher tells us all we need to know about his condition without reference to medical terminology -- just as well, since the term ''autism'' encompasses a variety of symptoms and behavioural problems that are still baffling behavioural scientists. The American Psychiatric Association definition includes ''problems with social interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication and a restrictive repertoire of activities and interests.'' The problems of autism are related to how the brain processes, organizes and retrieves information; Christopher compares his own brain to a computer that is easily overloaded by multitasking. He has a photographic memory and is capable of working out complicated factoring problems in his head but is so overwhelmed by unfamiliar visual or verbal stimuli that sometimes he shuts down, holding his hands over his eyes or his ears while he groans or screams. He abhors physical contact, new environments and the colours yellow and brown.
Haddon manages to bring us deep inside Christopher's mind and situates us comfortably within his limited, severely logical point of view, to the extent that we begin to question the common sense and the erratic emotionalism of the normal citizens who surround him, as well as our own intuitions and habits of perception.
Christopher's mind is logical and literal in the extreme; early on he suggests that metaphor is a form of lying, pointing out that very few people actually have skeletons in their closets or apples in their eyes. ''When I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining an apple in someone's eye doesn't have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.'' Christopher's inability to tell lies is one of the many reasons he has difficulty engaging in, or understanding, normal social intercourse. And his distaste for falsehood is one reason he doesn't like novels, except for murder mysteries, which are essentially puzzles, Sherlock Holmes being his literary hero -- though he has problems with Arthur Conan Doyle, Holmes's creator, who became involved with spiritualism later in life. Christopher's mind is purely scientific.
One of the subtle ironies of the book, given the evolution of the murder mystery detective toward the tough guys of Hammett and Chandler, is that young Christopher is ultimately far more hard-boiled than any gumshoe in previous detective fiction; unlike Sam Spade or Nick Charles, he has no sentimental streak, no underground reservoir of emotional identification with other human beings -- although he is fond of dogs.
When Christopher discovers his neighbour's poodle dead, skewered on a pitchfork, he sets out to solve the mystery and to write a true account of his detective work. In so doing he inadvertently stumbles upon the messy, illogical, emotionally complicated secrets of his parents and their neighbours. And even as he is finally forced to come to some limited accommodation of this knowledge, he makes a kind of plausible case for his own, ostensibly crippled worldview. Perhaps the greatest mystery here is whether Christopher is capable of change -- a question that goes to the heart of certain deeply held convictions about character.
If all this sounds somewhat grim and clinical, it's not. Christopher's skewed perspective and fierce logic make him a superb straight man, if not necessarily a stellar detective. In the course of interrogating one of his neighbours, while waiting impatiently for her to cut the chitchat, he observes: ''Mrs. Alexander was doing what is called chatting, where people say things to each other which aren't questions and answers and aren't connected. . . . I tried to do chatting by saying, 'My age is 15 years and 3 months and 3 days.' '' His inability to interpret basic social cues results in great moments of deadpan comedy, with strangers as well as with his patient, long-suffering father.
MIDWAY through the book, Christopher's quest for the dog's murderer becomes a search for his mother, who his father has told him is dead. His solo journey from Swindon to London is, for him, a terrifying leap into the unknown, as suspenseful and harrowing as anything in Conan Doyle. He literally sees everything around him and is unable to edit the onslaught of sensory data in a new environment. And he is afraid of strangers and ill equipped to ask for their help.
Christopher's book seemingly has a nice tidy ending, as he would have wished -- horrified as he is of indeterminacy. But this tidiness is an illusion, as the gulf between Christopher and his parents, between Christopher and the rest of us, remains immense and mysterious. And that gulf is ultimately the source of this novel's haunting impact. Christopher Boone is an unsolved mystery -- but he is certainly one of the strangest and most convincing characters in recent fiction.
|
Reviewed by Nani Power August 10, 2003
THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME
By Mark Haddon
It's midnight, and an autistic 15-year-old boy is sitting on the lawn, holding his neighbour's dead dog, covered with blood. The neighbour runs out screaming, police arrive, the boy hits a policeman and ends up in jail. Thus begins a jolting spiral of events in the life of one of this year's most memorable characters, Christopher John Francis Boone, the narrator of Mark Haddon's debut novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
A first-person narration can be a difficult leap for a novelist -- the depiction of an unknown mind -- but even more so when the point of view is further challenged by an unfamiliar disability. Recent successful examples come to mind, such as Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, with its protagonist suffering from Tourette's Syndrome, and Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, which explores hermaphroditism. Haddon has taken on a Herculean task: using the prism of autism, a condition in which, according to popular notion, a person cannot comprehend emotion. Yet through the smoke and mirrors of his character's oddly dispassionate view of the world around him, Haddon manages to rouse intense and devoted interest.
The murder of the neighbour's dog, Wellington, as well as the recent death of Christopher's mother, plunges the boy into a journey of self-discovery. He has been living with his father and his pet rat, Toby, leaving his street only to attend a centre for special needs a few hours a day. Now, spurred on by certain events, Christopher is compelled to venture out, in a quest to discover Wellington's killer.
"This is a murder mystery novel," declares Christopher. It is indeed that, and more. It is also, surprisingly, a novel of manners, vividly depicting a world we may be too numb to see. Immersing readers in the vortex of autism seems to promise a world of chaos, and yet Christopher's mind is surprisingly clear; in the absence of obscuring emotional brushstrokes, he relies on sharp images, which are taut and devoid of discoloration. Mrs. Shears, Christopher's neighbour and owner of the murdered dog, is described by Christopher as wearing "a T-shirt which had the words WINDSURF and CORFU and a picture of a windsurfer on it," and he goes on to mention phrases she uses frequently such as "Let's rustle up some tucker" and "It's brass monkeys out there." And thus, in elegant shorthand, Mrs. Shears comes stomping into our lives in her flappy sandals.
Christopher lives in a world of facts and figures, cool decipherings of the complex and baffling world around him. Subtle gradations of emotion confuse him; straightforward logistics soothes him. He adores prime numbers and often, when sent over the edge by stress, will find a snug little corner and recite them to lull himself into a quiet mood. "Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away," he says. "I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them."
Siobhan, his counsellor at the centre, gives him simple line drawings of facial expressions, and Christopher carries them around, pulling them out for reference in difficult situations where emotions are at work. The habit underlines one of the important subtexts in this book: Because emotions are subjective, who can presume to say whether someone else can feel one -- or even what an emotion is? In Christopher's view, "Feelings are just having a picture in the screen on your head of what is going to happen tomorrow or next year, or what might have happened instead of what did happen, and if it is a happy picture they smile and if it is a sad picture they cry." The irony is, as Christopher engages in such cool dissections, the reader repeatedly experiences emotional catharsis.
The essence of good writing is a sort of cataloguing, if you will, with the author supplying the details of the world he wants to evoke and the reader supplying the nuances of interpretation. Thanks to the brilliance of Haddon's prose, this back-and-forth works extremely well in The Curious Incident.
Although the book is character-driven, it also contains a rich plot. It is a murder mystery, a road atlas, a postmodern canvas of modern sensory overload, a coming-of-age journal and lastly a really affecting look at the grainy inconsistency of parental and romantic love and its failures. It is a cross-generational novel, very neatly walking the line between adult literary fiction and young adult.
THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME
By Mark Haddon
It's midnight, and an autistic 15-year-old boy is sitting on the lawn, holding his neighbour's dead dog, covered with blood. The neighbour runs out screaming, police arrive, the boy hits a policeman and ends up in jail. Thus begins a jolting spiral of events in the life of one of this year's most memorable characters, Christopher John Francis Boone, the narrator of Mark Haddon's debut novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
A first-person narration can be a difficult leap for a novelist -- the depiction of an unknown mind -- but even more so when the point of view is further challenged by an unfamiliar disability. Recent successful examples come to mind, such as Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn, with its protagonist suffering from Tourette's Syndrome, and Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, which explores hermaphroditism. Haddon has taken on a Herculean task: using the prism of autism, a condition in which, according to popular notion, a person cannot comprehend emotion. Yet through the smoke and mirrors of his character's oddly dispassionate view of the world around him, Haddon manages to rouse intense and devoted interest.
The murder of the neighbour's dog, Wellington, as well as the recent death of Christopher's mother, plunges the boy into a journey of self-discovery. He has been living with his father and his pet rat, Toby, leaving his street only to attend a centre for special needs a few hours a day. Now, spurred on by certain events, Christopher is compelled to venture out, in a quest to discover Wellington's killer.
"This is a murder mystery novel," declares Christopher. It is indeed that, and more. It is also, surprisingly, a novel of manners, vividly depicting a world we may be too numb to see. Immersing readers in the vortex of autism seems to promise a world of chaos, and yet Christopher's mind is surprisingly clear; in the absence of obscuring emotional brushstrokes, he relies on sharp images, which are taut and devoid of discoloration. Mrs. Shears, Christopher's neighbour and owner of the murdered dog, is described by Christopher as wearing "a T-shirt which had the words WINDSURF and CORFU and a picture of a windsurfer on it," and he goes on to mention phrases she uses frequently such as "Let's rustle up some tucker" and "It's brass monkeys out there." And thus, in elegant shorthand, Mrs. Shears comes stomping into our lives in her flappy sandals.
Christopher lives in a world of facts and figures, cool decipherings of the complex and baffling world around him. Subtle gradations of emotion confuse him; straightforward logistics soothes him. He adores prime numbers and often, when sent over the edge by stress, will find a snug little corner and recite them to lull himself into a quiet mood. "Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away," he says. "I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them."
Siobhan, his counsellor at the centre, gives him simple line drawings of facial expressions, and Christopher carries them around, pulling them out for reference in difficult situations where emotions are at work. The habit underlines one of the important subtexts in this book: Because emotions are subjective, who can presume to say whether someone else can feel one -- or even what an emotion is? In Christopher's view, "Feelings are just having a picture in the screen on your head of what is going to happen tomorrow or next year, or what might have happened instead of what did happen, and if it is a happy picture they smile and if it is a sad picture they cry." The irony is, as Christopher engages in such cool dissections, the reader repeatedly experiences emotional catharsis.
The essence of good writing is a sort of cataloguing, if you will, with the author supplying the details of the world he wants to evoke and the reader supplying the nuances of interpretation. Thanks to the brilliance of Haddon's prose, this back-and-forth works extremely well in The Curious Incident.
Although the book is character-driven, it also contains a rich plot. It is a murder mystery, a road atlas, a postmodern canvas of modern sensory overload, a coming-of-age journal and lastly a really affecting look at the grainy inconsistency of parental and romantic love and its failures. It is a cross-generational novel, very neatly walking the line between adult literary fiction and young adult.
LINKS
www.abc.net.au/tv/firsttuesday/s4081304.htm
www.sparknotes.com/lit/the-curious-incident-of-the-dog-in-the-night-time/
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/apr/11/booksforchildrenandteenagers.features3
https://cdn.spotcointeractive.com/websites/curiousincident/_downloads/CuriousIncident-StudyGuide.pdf
https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/class-clips-video/english-literature-gcse-the-curious-incident-of-the-dog-in-the-night-time/zk8dy9q
Related Texts/Films
HUMAN EXPERIENCES REFLECTED IN THIS TEXT
- Growing Up
- Autism
- Coming of age
- Fear
- Self-discovery
- Disabilities
- Touch
- Truth, Love, and Safety
- Logic vs. Emotion
- Perspective and the Absurdity of the World
- Trust
- Acceptance