The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, a novel by Mark Haddon

Mark Haddon's captivating book is narrated by Christopher Boone, a 20ish boy in Swindon, Wiltshire, with a syndrome of autistic and savant characteristics. A math whiz and budding scientist, Christopher is unable to distinguish among more than two or three human emotions. When he's stressed, he computes the first fifty cubes in his head: 1, 8, 27, 64, 125, 216, 343, 512, 729, ... Just as Christopher turns the rules of novel-making on their heads, his Sherlock Holmes-inspired murder mystery becomes something else entirely.

Haddon finds ways to introduce figurative language into the vocabulary of his singularly literal-minded narrator. Christopher doesn't use metaphors, because to him a metaphor is a lie, but he will use a simile from time to time, like the time that he sees a police inspector who looked as if two mice were hiding in his nostrils. Haddon achieves a quiet, rhythmic tension out of mundanity. Here, Christopher and his father have just had a row, and Christopher has vomited:

After Father had given me a bath and cleaned the sick off me and dried me off with a towel, he took me to my bedroom and put some clean clothes on.

Then he said, "Have you had anything to eat this evening?"

But I didn't say anything.

Then he said, "Can I get you something to eat, Christopher?"

But I still didn't say anything.

So he said, "OK. Look. I'm going to go and put your clothes and the bedsheets into the washing machine and then I'll come back, OK?"

I sat on the bed and looked at my knees.

At the novel's core is Christopher's genuinely innocent, all-encompassing view of the world.

And Siobhan [Chris's teacher] says that people go on holidays to see new things and relax, but it wouldn't make me relaxed and you can see new things by looking at the earth under a microscope or drawing the shape of the solid made when 3 circular rods of equal thickness intersect at right angles. And I think that there are so many things just in one house that it would take years to think about all of them properly. And also, a thing is interesting because of thinking about it and not because of being new.

It is Mark Haddon's accomplishment to give a voice to Chris, a legitimate ventriloquism.

posted: 9:29:07 AM