By Mark Haddon
Vintage, 226 pages
Available at National Book Stores and Powerbooks
The first person is the best narrative approach for conveying mental states. Its immediacy brings us directly into the minds of characters as diverse as Holden Caulfield (The Catcher in the Rye), Ishmael (Moby Dick), even Tyler Durden (Fight Club). Sometimes, it brings us closer to a subject than we’d prefer to be.
Take the case of Christopher John Francis Boone, the narrator of Mark Haddon’s touching and provocative debut novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. To convey the thought processes of a 15-year-old autistic child is challenging enough; to craft an engaging murder mystery (albeit one involving a dead poodle) out of such a narrative is a literary feat.
But Haddon is no stunt writer. A creative writing professor at Oxford, he’s written and illustrated kids’ books and worked with autistic children in the past. He knows the territory, and it shows. What starts out as a quiet peek into the mind of an autistic boy whose coping skills revolve around math, logic and predictable outcomes quickly develops into a treatise on modern life, on the struggle between solitude and community, and on the emotional difficulties of raising special-needs children.
But it’s also instantly, memorably entertaining. Christopher is a math genius who sees the world through patterns and numbers. His parents separated, he lives with a father who can barely cope with working while raising a special-needs student. The mother is out of the picture. As in Catcher in the Rye, no adult is without flaws in this world, though some (like the teacher Siobhan) are more attuned to Christopher’s needs.
The story begins one morning as Christopher discovers the neighbor’s poodle pinned to the lawn with a gardening fork. Fancying himself a budding Sherlock Holmes (whose logical gifts he emulates, though his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, he exposes as a rank spiritualist), he announces his intention to solve the crime. But, like many semi-dysfunctional detectives in fiction, Christopher finds his neurological disorder gets in the way of crime solving, as in this encounter with an investigating policeman.
He was asking too many questions and he was asking them too quickly. The policeman said, "I am going to ask you once again…"
I rolled back onto the lawn and pressed my forehead to the ground again and made the noise that Father calls groaning. I make this noise when there is too much information coming into my head from the outside world. It is like when you are upset and you hold the radio against your ear and you tune it halfway between two stations so that all you get is white noise and then you turn the volume right up so that this is all you can hear then you know you are safe because you cannot hear anything else.
The policeman took hold of my arm and lifted me onto my feet.
I didn’t like him touching me like this.
And this is when I hit him.
In many ways, Christopher is a model human being. Incapable of deception or lying, supremely logical, he evaluates people by their adherence to his own coping mechanisms. He knows the names of all the countries in the world and their capitals, as well as every prime number up to 7,057. But he’s often confused by human behavior, and by language. Facial expressions baffle him, as do literary devices like metaphors ("He was the apple of her eye"). Still, his condition makes him a remarkable observer of modern life, randomly picking out bits of pop culture and reporting them in the course of his narrative (like the T-shirt worn by one of his interviewees that reads: "BEER: Helping Ugly People Have Sex for 2,000 Years").
Through the course of his investigation, Christopher proves to be a bit spooky and a somewhat menacing narrator. Afraid of human contact, he carries around an open Swiss Army knife in his pocket, the saw blade of which, he assures us, "can cut through bone." Later in the book, he shares a recurring dream in which every person on earth who is capable of making eye contact catches a deadly virus from watching TV; they all die, leaving behind those who thrive on solitude and shun physical contact to roam the planet, free of anxiety. This is miles from the Hollywood depiction of autism shown in films like Rain Man. It’s a disturbing glimpse at what someone of Christopher’s mental makeup might actually wish for the most.
Thus, our narrator in The Curious Incident of the Dog at Night-Time turns out to be a very flawed character indeed. Fiercely rational, he debunks God, fairies and the naming of constellations as illogical and therefore stupid. He has a habit of erupting into non-stop groaning or screaming fits if approached by strangers. Steadfast about routines and schedules, he will repeat simple wishes over and over again, lacking the simple qualities of compromise that develop in early childhood. In short, Christopher is the most unlikely detective hero you’ll ever encounter in fiction. And yet these peculiarities – like Holden’s fixed world view in Salinger’s classic – are what makes him such a fascinating character and, ultimately, what makes The Curious Incident of the Dog at Night-Time a deeply touching portrait of a soul trapped in a broken machine, which is a condition that in some ways describes all of mankind.