The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Late one night, Christopher comes across his neighbor’s poodle, Wellington, impaled on a garden fork.. Wellington’s owner finds him cradling her dead dog in his arms, and has him arrested. He takes everything that he sees gat face value, and is unable to sort out the strange behavior of his elders and peers. In the hands of first-time novelist Haddon, Christopher is a fascinating case study and, above all, a sympathetic boy: not closed off, as the stereotype would have it, but too open-overwhelmed by sensations, bereft of the filters through which normal people screen their surroundings. Mark Haddon’s bitterly funny debut novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is a murder mystery of sorts—one told by an autistic version of Adrian Mole. Strange as he may seem, other people are far more of a conundrum to him, for he lacks the intuitive “theory of mind” by which most of us sense what’s going on in other people’s heads. He is encouraged by Siobhan, a social worker at his school, to write a book about his investigations, and the result—quirkily illustrated, with each chapter given its own prime number—is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. This is the sort of book that could turn condescending, or exploitative, or overly sentimental, or grossly tasteless very easily, but Haddon navigates those dangers with a sureness of touch that is extremely rare among first-time novelists. As the mystery leads him to the secrets of his parents’ broken marriage and then into an odyssey to find his place in the world, he must fall back on deductive logic to navigate the emotional complexities of a social world that remains a closed book to him. Haddon’s novel is a startling performance. The result is an eye-opening work in a unique and compelling literary voice.. When his neighbor’s poodle is killed and Christopher is falsely accused of the crime, he decides that he will take a page from Sherlock Holmes gand track down the killer. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is original, clever, and genuinely moving: this one is a must-read. —Jack Illingworth, Amazon.caChristopher Boone, the autistic 15-year-old narrator of this revelatory novel, relaxes by groaning and doing math problems in his head, eats red-but not yellow or brown-foods and screams when he is touched. His literal-minded observations make for a kind of poetic sensibility and a poignant evocation of character. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them,” the novel brims with touching, ironic humor. Though Christopher insists, “This will not be a funny book. After spending a night in jail, Christopher resolves—against the objection of his father and neighbors—to discover just who has murdered Wellington.
