The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon (19 November)

Okay, people, why weren't all of you telling me to read this book before?? I remember seeing this all over the place a while back (probably, say, six years ago, based on the publication date!), but apparently I never even stopped to read the jacket flap, because if I had I would totally have read this book already!

Said flap (or, at least, the back cover of the paperback): "Christopher John Francis Boone knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow.

This improbable story of Christopher's quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog makes for one of the most captivating, unusual, and widely heralded novels in recent years."

You know I'm a sucker for a prime number.

But I shouldn't make too much of the flap copy, because the book isn't really about the fact that Christopher knows a lot of things. Or really about the dog. But the dog is important.

The book opens with Christopher finding the dog, his neighbor's poodle, in his neighbor's front yard. The dog is not just dead, it's murdered, as it has a garden fork sticking straight through it into the ground. When the neighbor comes out of her house and finds Christopher cradling her dead dog, she calls the cops, and a misunderstanding between the cop (trying to pry the boy away) and Christopher (an autistic boy who doesn't like to be touched) leads to the latter spending a little time in a jail cell. Christopher decides that he is going to be a detective like his favorite, Sherlock Holmes, and solve the mystery of the dead poodle, even though his dad doesn't like him poking into other people's business (a phrase that Christopher doesn't even understand), but soon enough more mysteries turn up and Christopher is left to sort them all out.

I really loved Christopher; he is a fairly high-functioning autistic who is prone to some violent outbursts, which is bad, but who has some really insightful takes on humans and their silly emotions, like so: "All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I'm not meant to call them stupid, even though that is what they are. I'm meant to say that they have learning difficulties or that they have special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult and also everyone has special needs, like Father, who has to carry around a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him from getting fat, or Mrs. Peters, who wears a beige-colored hearing aid, or Siobahn, who has glasses so thick that they give you a headache if you borrow them, and none of these people are Special Needs, even if they hae special needs."

He may like his run-on sentences, but they are so good I will forgive them! There are also footnotes. And diagrams. And an appendix. It is a good time.

The story is really about how Christopher can reconcile the truths he knows with the lies that everyone else tells. Christopher doesn't lie — well, he has perfected the fine art of omission, but he doesn't outright lie — and even metaphors and novels leave him incredibly confused. So when certain truths pop up that contradict truths he thought he knew, well, that's no good. Time to count to fifty or groan or hit something.

I thought the autism aspect was really interesting; Haddon has apparently worked with autistic kids, so I'm going to assume that he's got a bit of an "in" to the autistic mind. And Christopher's thoughts aren't really different from the ones I might have, except that they aren't as fine-tuned to other people's emotions or to the dance of politeness that we tend to play. I could totally empathize with his confusion about what was going on in his world, and at the same time I could totally empathize with his father and the other people in his life who simply could not understand why he couldn't understand.

Such a great book. I'm glad I finally got around to reading it!

Rating: 10/10
(Back to School Challenge, Countdown Challenge: 2003)

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