The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

by Mark Haddon

This novel is written from the point of view of a 15 year old boy with Asperger’s Syndrome, called Christopher Boone. Christopher is a genius when it comes to solving mathematical problems or science questions. But when it comes to communicating with people or understanding them, he utterly fails. He absolutely can’t stand being touched, he can hardly distinguish between a smiling face and a crying one, he’s not able to understand jokes and when he can’t handle the incoming information anymore, he crouches on the floor and groans. Thus his life’s not a normal one; he attends a special school, has nearly no friends, follows a strict timetable for each day, lives alone with his father because his mother has died and so spends a lot of time watching TV or playing video games.

But his life starts changing when he discovers the dead body of the neighbour’s dog, killed with a garden fork. Because he likes dogs, he decides to investigate and to seek out the murderer and to write a book about the whole affair. The result is this novel.

But there are complications: At first, he gets into trouble with the police, because he (accidentally) hits a police officer, then his father tells him to keep his nose out of other people’s business. But he keeps going and goes about asking every neighbour about that dog. And what he reveals is a lot more than just the murder of a dog. He gets to know Mrs. Alexander, who tells him unintentionally that his mother, before her death, had an affair with Mr. Shears, the ex-husband of Mrs. Shears, the owner of the dog. When his father secretly reads Christopher’s book and finds out that he is still investigating, he loses his temper and the argument ends in a fight. Besides, he takes the book and hides it. A few days later, Christopher starts to look for his book, and what he finds is not just his book, but also a lot of letters from his mother, addressed to him and posted after her alleged death. By reading them, he becomes aware of the fact that his mother never died but has just left him and his father to live with Mr. Shears in London and that his father has been lying to him for two years. When his father comes home, he meets a completely shocked boy who has lost all confidence and who’s lying in his own vomit.

His father tries to explain the situation and tells the whole truth: That it was him who had killed the dog, in a rage after he had a row with Mrs. Shears, with whom he had wanted to start a relationship. But Christopher is not able to forgive, and as soon as his father has fallen asleep he takes his rat Toby and hides in the garden. The next morning, after his father has gone to look for him, he comes to the conclusion that the only place he can go to is his mother’s home in London. So he sets out for London and the journey becomes the biggest adventure and experience of his life, because everything is new, and this nearly overwhelms him, he often can’t handle all incoming information. He needs to concentrate very hard and make mental exercises or just groan for a while, until he has the situation under control again and can go on. But he copes with every situation: Buying a train ticket, going onto the train, escaping from the police, who are already looking for him, obtaining a map of London, taking the Underground, finding the right station and finally finding his mother’s house.

When he bumps into her life, not only her life changes completely, but the life of everyone involved in the story. His mother and Mr. Shears split up, and his parents have terrible rows. Because Christopher doesn’t want to live with his father any more, they move to Swindon (his home town) again, and into a small flat. Their lives are absolutely chaotic and they all go through a very bad time. But Christopher doesn’t seem to notice, all he wants is to take his A levels in maths. At the end of the story, he passes them with grade A, and his father gets his confidence back step by step. But the wounds never disappear and he never forgives him completely.

Comment:

“Exceptional by any standards…!” declares the Sunday Telegraph. And I must confess that I like this novel, too. But what makes it so remarkable? It can’t be the style of writing; Mark Haddon is definitively no modern Shakespeare, his language is very simple and repetitive. And also the content of the story isn’t what makes it a masterpiece. Because if you keep it in perspective, no world-shaking action is presented in this book.

No, it is our little hero (actually, not so little anymore), Christopher Boone, that makes the story interesting: The way he lives, sees and masters life with his disease ‘Asperger’s Syndrome’. We see him describing his life, what he does, why and how, we get to know his mind with all its logical, ridiculous and brilliant thoughts, ideas and opinions. And we start to sympathise and want to know how it goes on, how his world changes and how the story ends. The author has achieved that, step by step, we as readers become aware of how an autistic person must feel and how difficult and stressful such a life must be – not only for the patient himself, but also for the whole environment. It’s impressive and hard to understand that the reader understands more of the situation than the narrator does. For example in the scene where Christopher is almost hit by a train: We see the danger, but Christopher remains completely unaware of the situation.

So actually the story is quite sad and depressing. Apart from his disease, what happens to Christopher are the nightmares of every child – and all parents: Family rows, endless discussions, separated parents, a world full of chaos and lies, being on his own, not being able to trust anyone, being teased, just to mention a few. But all the same, we often can’t help bursting out laughing. Either because the situation is so comical, ironical or just absurd, or because his thoughts and memories are so strange and weird, that they are somehow funny again. These changes and the development of his life, thrilling and emotional, make the book a ‘page turner’. In the beginning we are expecting a detective story, but what we find is much more exciting than that: It reminds us that life writes the best (happiest or saddest) stories.

So I can recommend ‘The Curious Incident Of the Dog In the Night-time’ to anyone who is looking for an entertaining, funny but also thought-provoking and realistic book and who is willing to relate to an autistic boy and to concern himself with the basics of human life.

Language:

The language is, because written from the point of view of Christopher, very easy and comprehensible. Haddon (or his narrator Christopher) often uses the same words and builds long sentences, adding ‘and’, ‘then’, ‘because’, etc. An example: “And then it started to rain and I got wet and I started shivering because I was cold. And then it was 11:32 p.m. and I heard voices of people walking along the street. And a voice said, ‘I don’t care whether you thought it was funny or not,’ and it was a lady’s voice.” (p.232)

Another characteristic is that after each chapter (which, by the way, are counted in prime numbers) with action, where the story continues, a chapter follows full of memories, calculations, ideas, dreams. Sometimes these inputs are a bit boring or repetitive, but they show the way Christopher thinks. Maybe the calculations, pictures and graphic representations do not interest every reader so much.

So the language is not really challenging. But we must note that originally this book was written for children, but it turned out to be a bestseller – for adults – and it has won the ‘Whitbread book of the year’ prize.

I have chosen to write about the Asperger’s Syndrome because it is the main theme in the novel. The description and sight of an autistic boy is what makes this book interesting. After reading the book you have a clear idea of how such a person thinks and feels.

Asperger’s syndrome is a neurobiological disorder, named by a Hans Asperger, who described it at first in 1944. It is a form of autism, with some little differences.

The characteristics of Asperger’s Syndrome are:

- Deficits in social skills. Christopher’s difficulties in social interaction are obvious. He is unable to recognise different feelings and faces or express them, apart from very basic emotions like laughing or crying. He must (or tries to) learn them like we have to learn vocabulary. Thus his relationship to other people is rather difficult: His parents often despair because of the strange behaviour and the fact that Christopher doesn’t understand emotions. His teachers manage to get on and work with him (especially Siobhan), but they have problems too. Friends are nearly inexistent; no friend is ever really mentioned in the story. And strangers have great trouble when interacting with Christopher and most of them don’t understand him.

- Difficulties with changes: Christopher needs sameness and calmness. As soon as new things appear or too many, he can’t deal with them and needs to make a ‘restart/reorder’ in his mind. To live a life as normal and convenient as possible, he follows day schedules and day plans, e.g.:

p.192

- Special interest in particular subjects: Christopher is very interested in mathematics and everything that has to do with aerospace or astronomy. He wants to become an astronaut and imagines how it would be to be one.

- Preferences for certain foods, tastes, colours or sounds: Christopher has an aversion to the colours yellow and brown and only eats food of other colours. His reasons are:

p.105

- Exceptional skills or talent in a specific area: Christopher is very good at mathematics and everything that is logical and rational. He has also an extraordinary photographic memory. He often creates maps or other things in his mind, like this:

p.110

- Often exceptionally high intelligence: Christopher certainly has a very high IQ, e.g. he is able to double 2s up to 2⁴⁵. At the end of the book he passes his A levels in Mathematics, which is a great success, even for him.

- Behavioural problems: Christopher enumerates in one scene all his behavioural problems he knows of:

“A. Not talking to people for a long time.

B. Not eating or drinking anything for a long time.

C. Not liking being touched.

D. Screaming when I am angry or confused.

E. Not liking being in really small places with other people.

F. Smashing things when I am angry or confused.

G. Groaning.

H. Not liking yellow things or brown things and refusing to touch yellow things or brown things.

I. Refusing to use my toothbrush if anyone else has touched it.

J. Not eating food if different sorts of food are touching each other.

K. Not noticing that people are angry with me.

L. Not smiling.

M. Saying things that other people think are rude.

N. Doing stupid things.

O. Hitting other people.

P. Hating France.

Q. Driving Mother’s car.

R. Getting cross when someone has moved the furniture.” (p.59)

These examples show well how autistic people act and how the environment reacts to them. I could go on enumerating other characteristics, but I recommend to read the book, if you want to know more details. I must mention that people with Asperger’s Syndrome are capable of living relatively normal lives, if they have learnt how to and if the environment is convenient. Christopher for example wishes to get married, so that he can go to work and invent brilliant things. Of course this will not be easy, but it is possible.

About the author:

I have asked myself how Mark Haddon could know so much about this disease. The solution is that he worked many years with autistic individuals and thus has a lot of experience.

Mark Haddon was born in Northampton in 1962. He studied in Oxford and graduated in 1981. He lives in Oxford with his wife and son. Apart from working with handicapped children he made illustration work and cartoons and worked for television as a screenwriter. One day he started to write children’s books (the first one published in 1987). “The Curious Incident Of the Dog In the Night-time” was published in 2003 and became a bestseller. It won several prizes, including two BAFTAs and the ‘Whitbread Novel of the year’-prize.

In this extract Christopher is on the way to his mother. He has managed to come from Swindon to London by train and is now at the station and tries to take the Underground. I have chosen it because on one hand it shows the language and the descriptions and on the other hand Christopher’s thoughts, his view on the world, his problems and how he tries to solve them:

“And I thought I can do this because I was doing really well and I was in London and I would find my mother, And I had to think to myself the people are like cows in a field, and I just had to look in front of me all the time and make a red line along the floor in the picture of the big room in my head and follow it.

And I walked across the big room to the escalators. And I kept hold of my Swiss Army Knife in my pocket and I held onto Toby in my other pocket to make sure he didn’t escape.

And the escalators was a staircase but it was moving and people stepped onto it and it carried them down and up and it made me laugh because I hadn’t been on one before and it was like something in a science fiction film about the future. But I didn’t want to use it so I went down the stairs instead.

And then I saw in a smaller room underground and there were lots of people and there were pillars which had blue lights in the ground around the bottom of them and I liked these, but I didn’t like the people, so I saw a photobooth like one I went into on 25^th March 1994 to have my passport photo done, and I went into the photobooth because it was a cupboard and it felt safer and I could look out through the curtain.

And I did detecting by watching and I saw that people were putting tickets into grey gates and walking through. And some of the people were buying tickets at big black machines on the wall.

And I watched 47 people do this and I memorised what to do. Then I imagined a red line on the floor and I walked over to the wall where there was a poster which was a list of places to go and it was alphabetical and I saw Willesden Green and it said £2:20 and then I went to one of the machines and there was a little screen which said PRESS TICKET TYPE and I pressed the button that most people had pressed which was ADULT SINGLE and £2:20 and the screen said INSERT £2:20 and I put 3 £ 1 coins into the slot and there was a clinking noise and the screen said TAKE TICKET AND CHANGE and there was a ticket in a little hole at the bottom of the machine, and a 50p coin and a 20p coin and a 10p coin and I put the coins in my pocket and I went up to one of the grey gates and I put my ticket into the slot and it sucked it in and it came out on the other side of the gate. And someone said, ‘Get a move on,’ and I made the noise like a dog barking and I walked forward and the gate opened this time and I took my ticket like other people did and I liked the grey gate because that was like something in a science fiction film about the future, too.”

(p.212-213)

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