The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
by Mark Haddon
(Vintage)
Christopher John Francis Boone is a mildly autistic 15-year-old with a strong set of quirks. He dislikes yellow (bananas, yellow fever) and brown (gravy, wood and a girl called Melissa Brown), but gravitates towards red (especially cars); cannot stand to be touched; and is obsessed with time (as in “it was now 1.39pm”) and numbers. When life becomes too much, he does mathematical problems in his head, unless he can make the world go away by groaning, which often works.
He is neither Holden Caulfield nor Adrian Mole, but like these literary predecessors, he sees things with exceptional clarity. And he always tells the truth — not because he’s a good child but because “There is only ever one thing which happened at a particular time and a particular place. And there are an infinite number of things which didn’t happen at that time and that place. And if I think about something which didn’t happen I start thinking about all the other things which didn’t happen.” And for a child with Asperger’s Syndrome who requires order above all else, this is not bearable.
He is looking out the window one night (exactly seven minutes after midnight) when he sees his neighbour’s poodle lying oddly. When he goes out to check he finds the dog has been stabbed dead with a garden fork. He decides to find out who killed the dog.
Mark Haddon’s acclaimed novel (now in paperback) is an extraordinary piece of work. It shows great insight into the human condition, autistic or not. Like the rest of us, Christopher looks for logic in the way the world is structured, some way to predict the unpredictable. His reactions are often normal ones, writ large. Yet he’s a mathematical genius who gives his chapters prime numbers — and offers the reader the occasional mathematical puzzle, in case the world becomes too much for us, as well.