The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
Looking back twenty years, it’s difficult now to remember the first time I read Mark Haddon’s book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (I’ll call it The Curious Incident from now on). It threw out a challenge to readers: do you understand what you are reading? It is a story about Christopher, a fifteen-year-old boy who might have Asperger’s Syndrome, a severe form of autism. He has a photographic memory, he’s a whiz at science, he just can’t understand other human beings. Like many people, I had read some articles on Asperger’s, but this was different, this wasn’t a story aboutChristopher, this was a story being told by Christopher. Six years after it was published, Mark Haddon explained “The Curious Incident is not a book about Asperger’s…if anything it’s a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way. The book is not specifically about any specific disorder”. He explained he wasn’t an expert on the autism spectrum or Asperger’s syndrome. Perhaps not, but his perspective was exciting.
The Curious Incident is a mystery novel. Its title refers to an observation made by Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective Sherlock Holmes in The Adventure of Silver Blaze. In that book a Scotland Yard detective, Gregory, is talking to Sherlock Holmes:
Gregory: Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?
Holmes: To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.
Gregory: The dog did nothing in the night-time.
Holmes: That was the curious incident.
The Curious Incident was unusual from the start. It was published simultaneously as a childrens book and an adult book, in two separate editions. Perhaps as a reflection of that, it won awards both as an adult book (The Whitbread awards for Best Novel and Book of the Year; and the Commonwealth Writer’s prize for Best First Book), and as a children’s book (the Guardian Children’s Writers Prize). Oh, and one more thing, the book uses prime numbers to number the chapters rather than conventional successive numbers (so the chapters are 2, 3, 5, 7 and so on). It has been translated into 36 languages from the original English.
Is it important to know the underlying plot? Basically, Christopher lives in Swindon, England, with his widowed father, Ed. He’s been told his mother, Judy, died from a heart attack two years earlier. One night, Christopher discovers that his neighbour Mrs. Shears’ dog, Wellington, has been killed with a garden fork. As he mourns over Wellington’s body, Mrs. Shears calls the police. When a policeman grabs Christopher’s arm, he panics and hits him, and as a result is arrested for assaulting a police officer. He’s taken to a police watchhouse, put in a cell, but after more is learnt, he is released with a police caution. He decides to investigate the dog’s death, keeping detailed information in a notebook.
A neighbour tells Christopher that his mother had an affair with Mr. Shears. After finding letters from his mother dated after her supposed death, he becomes distressed and goes into a catatonic state. This leads to his father confessing he had killed the dog, and admitting Christopher’s mother is living in London with Mr. Shears. Ed also reveals that he’d killed Wellington in anger, following an argument with Mrs. Shears. Christopher decides to run away and live with his mother. After a long, event-filled journey, evading policemen and feeling ill from the trains and crowds around him, he finally finds his way to the home of his mother and Mr. Shears. His mother decides to leave Mr Shears and returns with Christopher to Swindon. She agrees to let Ed see Christopher for brief daily visits, who gives him a puppy, promising that he will gradually rebuild trust with his son.
If that was all there was to The Curious Incident, it would never have achieved the prominence it did. The story is fine, both exciting and emotional at times, but so are thousands of others. However, it is much more than that. Where to begin?
The story of The Curious Incident is told by Christopher, and the account of the inner life of an autistic 15-year-old boy is astonishing. I don’t mean Mark Haddon researched how autistic children think and behave, nor am I suggesting this was based on detailed research. Indeed, he has made it clear, this was not the case. Rather it is a careful and compelling exercise in constructing the world view of a boy who is different. You’re aware of how different things seem right from the beginning of Chapter 2 (the first chapter of the book).
It’s just after midnight, and Christopher sees a dog, lying on its side, clearly dead with a garden fork sticking out of it. It had been driven in hard, Christopher decides, because the fork hasn’t fallen over. The dog’s body was still warm. This first short chapter is followed by an introduction to fact that Christopher has an amazing brain, an amazing memory, but that his focus is on the physical world, not the world of people. After this brief background, we are back to Christopher and the dog in Chapter 5 (the third chapter, of course). He pulls out the fork and hugs the dog’s dead body. Mrs Shears comes outside, screams at Christopher and tells him to put the dog down. He does, but she keeps screaming and he curls up into a ball. Incidentally, that chapter was a page long.
Next, we read that Christopher plans to write about the murder of the dog, and we discover he is a student in a special school for children with various kinds of handicap. By the next chapter, Chapter 11 (are you keeping up with the numbering?), we are back to the dog, and Christopher confronts the policeman who has been called to the scene. The policeman is hurried in his questioning, Christopher wants to hide from all the noise, and when the policeman touches his arm, frightened he punches him on the nose! This is when he was taken to a nearby police station.
From Christopher’s perspective, the unfolding scene is making little sense. Indeed, for the next few pages we read about his knowledge of the Milky Way and prime numbers. His description of his arrival at the police station is compelling. He hands over what is in his pockets – the list includes a Swiss Army Knife with 13 attachments, a piece of string, part of a wooden puzzle, 3 pellets of rat food for his pet rat Toby, £1.47 (a £1 coin, a 20p coin, two 10p coins, a 5p coin and a 2p coin), a red paperclip, and his front door key. He’s escorted to a cell, “a perfect cube, 2 metres long by 2 metres wide by 2 metres high. It contained approximately 8 cubic metres of air”. Not knowing what will happen next, he mulls over some (rather extraordinary) escape scenarios.
The next chapter takes us on another detour, in this case into why Christopher finds people confusing: some of the time they communicate by non-literal expressions, which he can’t understand, including metaphors. He knows what ‘metaphors’ means, but he thinks expressions like ‘I laughed my socks off’ or ‘He was the apple of her eye’, are clearly not true in the way they are used, because rather than conveying a picture, these phrases sound like lies. He takes words literally, and clearly, from that perspective, imagining someone has an apple in one of her eyes doesn’t have anything to do with her liking another person!
I hope these brief snippets convey something of the flavour of the book, as the reader moves between learning how Christopher sees unfolding events, and his thoughts and questions about a variety of topics, often unrelated to the events of the moment. Twenty-five pages in, we learn Christopher cannot tell lies, and that he is going to write a journal about everything that happens when he decides to look into the dog’s death. He is going to be a detective.
As we become increasingly familiar with Christopher, we begin to understand two aspects of how he sees the world. Yes, as I mentioned a moment ago, he is very literal in what he sees and how he understands what he hears. At the same time, his brain works at high speed: one moment he is observing an event, and the next minute he is thinking through a mathematical puzzle, or reviewing some knowledge he has acquired. It’s fascinating, because we realise he can’t forget anything, and at the same time, he makes sense of things using scientific or mathematical principles. Too much information, however, will overwhelm him, creating painful interference in his head, especially so when he is interacting with other people. Like a magician, Mark Haddon takes us into Christopher’s world, and, surprisingly quickly, we both understand and feel comfortable as we live inside it.
However, there is another issue we need to understand. Christopher is physically unable to deal with people. Those he knows well, his mother and his father, he can talk to, but he avoids touching them, and will scream if they touch him. As for strangers, they are people to whom he gives a very wide berth. Any attempted contact, as when the policeman touched his arm, leads to a violent reaction. He can navigate the world around him, he likes animals (one at a time), but the only people with whom he can interact are those he has learnt to accept. These include his parents, teachers at his school, and, as his adventure develops, some of his neighbours. Every interaction is shielded, however, as Christopher takes care to be ready to deal with what he sees as the unpredictable and threatening nature of other people.
Haddon’s achievement is subtle. After a few pages and almost without noticing, you are absorbed. Christopher isn’t odd or weird. Just the opposite, You feel quite comfortable seeing the world as he does. In part this is achieved by the frequent swapping between the events of the story and Christopher’s ruminations on various mathematical, cosmological and physical problems. It isn’t just a matter of balance, though the shifts are carefully alternated. Rather it is that this structure offers another way in which you begin to slip increasingly easily into how Christopher’s mind works.
I’m not sure if I can convey how this happens. At one stage we are on a railway platform for five hours, as Christopher is building up the courage to get on a train, a decision slowly made easier as the activity at the station shifts from a typically busy rush hour pattern to having just a few travellers around. However, we join Christopher in slipping away from observing the changes on the platform to consider such matters as the variations in tadpole numbers year by year, or looking at stars and wondering why people choose to give constellations names, especially as there are so many images that could be fitted to the visible arrangement of stars in the night sky. It is as if Mark Haddon has taken us on some kind of magical travel, and we find ourselves living in a different world from our own yet doing so comfortably.
When Christopher was on his way to the Swindon Railway Station, for some of the time he was able to see the British Railways sign above the rooftops of town. However, as he got closer the sign disappeared, often hidden behind by the shops and houses around him. What to do? Normally, Christopher would have made a map in his head, but there was too much going on. He stood still outside a greengrocer’s shop, and worked out a plan:
“I knew the station was somewhere near. And if something is nearby, you can find it by moving in a spiral, walking clockwise and taking every right turn until you come back to a road you’ve already walked on, then taking the next left, then taking every right turn and so on …”
In case the reader can’t visualise this, Christopher offers the reader a map. However, as he points out, this is a hypothetical diagram, since he hadn’t memorised the actual map of Swindon, nor did he know exactly where he is. Instead, he concentrated on his rules, and built up a map of the centre of Swindon as walked. “that way it was easier to ignore all the people and all the noise around me”. He arrived at the station. If that sounds impossible or crazy, try it for yourself. It works.
The book works. Mark Haddon could have attempted to describe what autism or Asperger’s is like from the outside. “Asperger syndrome is distinguished by a pattern of symptoms rather than a single symptom. It is characterized by qualitative impairment in social interaction, by stereotyped and restricted patterns of behavior, activities, and interests, and by no clinically significant delay in cognitive development or general delay in language. Intense preoccupation with a narrow subject, one-sided verbosity, restricted prosody, physical clumsiness are typical of the condition.” (from Wikipedia). Clinically that might be useful, but it leaves someone like me at a complete loss as to how a person with Asperger’s experiences their daily life.
However, in saying the book ‘works’ I don’t want to imply this story should be read to help you understand Asperger’s. That wasn’t Haddon’s intent. As he said, “it’s a novel about difference, about being an outsider, about seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way.” I read novels because I enjoy ‘seeing the world in a surprising and revealing way’.
The novels that remain long after I read them do exactly that. In some cases it is because they tease out the small domestic misunderstandings and assumptions that underpin daily life. Thank you, Jane Austen. Others put a story into an unfamiliar context and challenge you to make sense of what is happening, not just as a puzzle (although I do enjoy murder mysteries), but because they illuminate behaviour and expectations in unexpected ways. Thank you, Becky Chambers. Yet others toss the trappings and systems of conventional behaviour out of the window and offer a very unexpected perspective on how we think and manage relationships. Thank you, William Golding.
One review put it well. “ Haddon does something audacious here, and he does it superbly. He shows us the way consciousness orders the world, even when the world doesn’t want to be ordered”, adding that “the great achievement of this novel is that it transcends its obvious cleverness. It’s more than an exercise in narrative ingenuity. Filled with humor and pain, it verges on profundity in its examination of those things—customs, habits, language, symbols, daily routines, etc.—that simultaneously unite and separate human beings”. This comment by Charles Matthews was in the article ‘Narrator is Autistic – Reasoning is Artistic’, (in the San Jose Mercury News back in June 2003. And, no, I don’t regularly read the San Jose Mercury News – this came from Wikipedia!).
The Curious Incident was published in 2003. To go back and read it again twenty years later is to find it remains compelling, touching, and even thrilling. It almost feels like a privilege to see the world as if you are doing so from inside Christopher’s mind. Mesmerised, you reach the end of the long final chapter, Chapter 233 – and it’s a shock: you want the story to continue. We don’t want to leave Christopher at this point. We want to know more about how his life unfolded. Come on Mark, do your duty man: where’s book two?
