The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

DNF @ 80%

This book was required reading for school and initially I was quite excited to read it, as it’s such a popular book about autism and I am autistic myself.

HOWEVER!!! This book ended up being way too triggering to me, making me highly uncomfortable and the bad autism representation bubbled up a lot of trauma. I had an absolute awful time reading this and it was really clear this book was not written to represent and/or celebrate autistic people, but rather affirm parents who deem themselves and their lives tragic and hard just because their kid is autistic, which is a harmful and dangerous thing to do.

I wanted to stop reading a lot sooner than I did, but I had to make a test about this title and some others, so stopping meant risking my grade. I explained the situation to my teacher who urged me to keep reading, which I did for the sake of my grade up until 80% where I could physically not bring myself to read one more page. I had to read a summary online to know how it ended for the sake of my grade and honestly, I really wish I didn’t know how this book ended.

As an autistic person, may I recommend you A Kind of Spark by Elle McNicoll instead if you want to read/recommend/gift a book about a young autistic kid? In contrast to this book where the autistic kid is only seen as a defect and a burden, A Kind of Spark actually celebrates the qualities of autistim and autistic people, and actually explains things about autism for the reader to understand, whether they are the target audience for MG (8-12yo) or adult. Thank you.

Haddon’s story is told from the perspective of a teenage autistic boy. The narrator, Christopher John Francis Boone, is very good at math and physics and has an eidetic memory, he is comfortable with animals, he does not understand or empathize with people, he does not like crowds or being touched and he does not like the color yellow. Confusion or anxiety can make him physically ill. Seeing the world, especially the lives of his parents through his eyes is captivating. I read the book in one long gulp. This is a family in crisis story but told in a fresh, totally original way. 4.5 stars.

Mark Haddon is a British novelist and poet, although his best known novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was published in 2003 when it won the “Whitbread Book of the Year Award”, I only discovered it last month when my friend Aileen lent it to me. We had been discussing autism and I admitted that it is a condition I struggle to understand. She lent me Mark Haddon’s book.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is a book which is written from the perspective of a boy with Aspergers syndrome. Haddon’s knowledge of Aspergers syndrome, a type of autism, comes from his work with autistic people as a young man.

The hero of his book is Christopher Boone aged 15. Christopher has Asperger’s syndrome, though this is never specified. Haddon’s study of the condition is superbly realised, but this is not simply a novel about disability. Haddon uses his narrator’s innocence as a means of commenting on the emotional and moral confusion in the lives of the adults around him. He lives in Swindon with his father and Toby, his pet rat. He abhors all yellow and brown things, thinks he would make a good astronaut, and has never been further than the end of the road on his own until his discovery of the “murder” of his neighbour’s dog turns him into an amateur detective. He decides to investigate the “murder” but finds his father is most resistant to this. His teacher, Siobhan, however, encourages him to write his book. “This will not be a funny book,” says Christopher. “I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them.” But it is a funny book, as well as a sad one. Christopher’s compulsive noting of mundane facts provides comedy, especially in his dealings with the police and his special-needs classmates. Haddon includes diagrams, timetables, maps, even maths problems, thus extending the normal scope of novel-writing. He also demonstrates the rich idiosyncrasies of the autistic brain.

Mark HaddonChristopher sees everything, remembers everything, but cannot prioritise – cannot sift out what most of us regard as important. On the day he is told his mother is dead, he records his Scrabble score, and notes that supper was spaghetti with tomato sauce. However, he isn’t callous or indifferent. He can cope with facts, with concrete detail; but emotions confuse and alarm him. The part of the book when he reads his mother’s letters is one of the most emotional things I have ever read.

Of course, autistic people are not easy subjects for novelists. Their interests are prescribed, their experiences static, their interaction with others limited. Detective fiction is the only fiction that makes sense to Christopher. As he collects facts relating to the death of the dog, he unwittingly pieces together a jigsaw that reveals to the reader the lies, grief and evasions of his parents’ lives. The pathos of Christopher’s condition is that he can never understand the havoc his very existence has wreaked in the lives of those around him, however many facts he uncovers.

Christopher’s innocence makes him vulnerable, but it protects him too. At the end of the novel we see that he is a touchstone for adult behaviour and those concerned with him have to learn to temper their emotional needs round his autistic inability to compromise. I think this book is simply brilliant and I highly recommend it.

As the mother of a child on the spectrum, I seek out books told my neurodiverse characters. Reading this story from Christopher’s perspective helped me understand my son a little better and really see the world through his eyes.

This book moved me deeply two times. That’s because I was so invested in the main characters quest. The book is quirky, funny and heartbreaking. All the characters are complex in a satisfying way.

Mark Haddon takes you into the perspective of Autism. This novel is not only beautifully told, but one of the most informative pieces of fiction I have read in a long time.

This story – and I call it a story rather than a novel – is not about plot or characters or the description of the events. It is about trying to understand what it’s like to be inside the head of a teenage boy, Christopher, who is brilliantly intelligent and also autistic. The story is written as Christopher’s own journal where he chronicles the events during a pivotal month of his life, and we read in his first-person narrative about what he sees, feels, and thinks within his world, which is confined by the suffocating limitations of his autism. But, Christopher does not perceive those limitations – they are just part of his life and for him they are normal. This is a fascinating and eye-opening peek into Christopher’s world.

When I started reading the story, I thought that it might actually be what it presents as – the actual writing of an autistic teenager, or perhaps an adult remembering events from his earlier life. Mr. Haddon captures the thought process of the autistic boy, and the cadence of his life, remarkably well. Only when I started reading some secondary material about the author and the book did I learn that the author is neither autistic nor the father of an autistic child. It’s remarkable that he captured Christopher’s thoughts and emotions so well. I am the father of a child with a similar kind of learning disability and I can say that I felt I was reliving some of my son’s childhood while reading this story.

The book, therefore, accomplishes the goal of allowing (or forcing) the reader to live through Christopher’s eyes and to live his life and try to understand what and how he thinks. For that accomplishment, Mr. Haddon should be commended. Every teacher and every person who may have interaction with children who deal with these kinds of developmental issues should read this book. It will help with understanding and acceptance. It is a worth while book.

What it is not is a novel, or a story that, on its own has much merit (aside from the unique perspective it provides). The reader gets that perspective in the first fifty or so pages. The rest of the book is repetition (which is itself an insight into the autistic experience). The writing style becomes monotonous after a while, and although there is a brief glimpse of the relationship between Christopher’s mother and father (and how he contributed to their issues), the story is a one-trick pony. Life is difficult for Christopher, and he deals with it in his own unique way. Once that point is hammered home, the rest of the read is just a struggle to get to the end. This is not a fun read. It’s difficult. It’s uncomfortable. That’s the point, but that’s the only point. Take your medicine and be happy that you get better, while Christopher remains trapped inside his head. Even if Christopher can excel at math and may someday attend university and, as he hopes, become a scientist, he will always be confined to the box inside his head. We can escape back into our own lives with a slight appreciation of how good it is to be “normal.”

I’ll continue for those interested, but the above is all you really need to know.

The title of the book refers to the beginning of the story, when Christopher is wandering his neighborhood late at night and finds the dead body of a neighbor’s dog, impaled by a pitch fork. Christopher is then arrested and taken to the police station after he hits the cop who shows up and touches Christopher (Christopher does not like to be touched). You have to wonder what cop hauls off an obviously mentally disabled teenager from a suburban neighborhood without making any effort to find a parent. It makes no sense, but it is an easy way for us to learn about how Christopher handles the unusual circumstances. We also get to meet his father and then when he gets home Christopher decides that it is important for him to solve the mystery of who killed the dog. At the suggestion of a teacher, Christopher begins writing down the story of his detective work, which is the story we are reading.

Christopher is a fan of Sherlock Holmes, because Holmes, like him, sees every small detail in the world. Christopher has a photographic memory, which is hard for him because it results in sensory overload. He is not capable of just seeing the world, he has to see, catalogue, and remember every detail that he sees, and sometimes that is overwhelming for him.

So, Christopher interviews the neighbors as he tries to solve the mystery, which gives us some brief snippets of interaction with the neighbors, although not enough for us to really get to know those characters. His father is unhappy with him and tells him to stop getting into other people’s business, which Christopher doesn’t understand because he hears and processes only literal meanings of words and these people have no “business” that Christopher is “getting into.” (The father should know better by this time in his life.)

Eventually, Christopher learns things about his father and his mother that had been kept from him as a child, and he has an adventure when he runs away from home and has to navigate his way through what we (the readers) would view as everyday life, but to Christopher is like exploring an unknown and never explored universe. We find out that Christopher’s mum and dad have a hard time dealing with each other when Christopher is involved, and that life for the family is hard. Then the book is over. There is no “point” to the story aside from trying to understand Christopher’s world, and perhaps to appreciate a bit how hard he makes life on those around him.

The author gives us some wonderful writing, but mostly we’re just “listening” to Christopher’s thoughts. For example, Christopher recalls his parents: “That was because they had lots of arguments and sometimes they hated each other.” Yes, that’s the way this kid would think – if you say “I hate you” then you hate them. There is no ambiguity is Christopher’s world. When Christopher goes into meltdown mode, he describes it as: “I had no memories for a short while. I know it was a short while because I checked my watch afterward. It was like someone had switched me off and then switched me on again. And when they switched me on again I was sitting on the carpet with my back against the wall and there was blood on my right hand and the side of my head was hurting.”

When Christopher goes to live with his mom, but has no clothes packed, he describes a shopping trip as: “Then she said we had to go and buy some clothes for me to wear and some pajamas and a toothbrush and a flannel. So we went out of the flat and we walked to the main road, which was Hill Lane, which was the A4088, and it was really crowded and we caught a number 266 bus to Brent Cross Shopping Centre. Except there were too many people in John Lewis and I was frightened and I lay down on the floor next to the wristwatches and I screamed and Mother had to take me home in a taxi.” This is how he thinks of it – nothing dramatic – just something that happened in his world.

These are great insights, but they don’t really make a great story if you’re looking for action, plot, character development, etc. But that’s not what this book is about. Go read it, then go hug your child and give thanks that he or she gets into minor scuffles at school and yells at you about not wanting to wear their coat. Things could be way worse.