Necessary Roughness

I picked up The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon because the story, written by a person with autism, is a fictional first-person narrative of an child with autism. The story is set in present-day England.

The main character, Christopher Boone, finds the neighbor’s dog slain with a pitchfork. His concern about the dog causes him to reach out into the community and interview people, trying to determine motive and opportunity. He lives with his dad, who does his best to take care of him but doesn’t understand him at times.

The book turns when Boone’s father confesses he is the dog’s killer. Boone’s mother had been conducting an affair with the dog’s owner, and they ran away together. The dog was stabbed in revenge. Horrified that his father could do such a thing, and convinced that he was next, Christopher steals his father’s ATM card and goes looking for his mother, who had written him letters that his father suppressed. Overcoming his fear of the unknown with his fear of his dad, he buys a map, gets help from several people, and boards a train for London. He finds his mother, but she lacks the emotional and financial resources to take care of him. The dad finds him and begins working to regain Christopher’s trust.

The plot is plausible with high points of humor and empathy. Boone’s lack of behavioral analysis, which the people he deals with might think is a lack of courtesy, brings with it some humor. He leaves a neighbor who is baking a cake for him; he’s got a job to do! The reader feels for his struggle and even his father’s struggle, when his father covers up the pain of adultery and abandonment with a story of his mother’s death in a hospital.

Each chapter is a new stream of consciousness replete with run-on sentences, with several chapters woven in detailing his math and memory skills. It is an interesting look into thought processes that seem perfectly logical to the character but strange to everyone else. Mark Haddon emphasizes the details he sees that normal people discard. The result is a writing style that one may find novel occasionally, but not one that would be tolerated in book after book.

The book is short, 226 pages in a 5″ x 8″ format. It reads pretty quickly once the reader adjusts to the style. Given the normal level of function that people on the autism spectrum usually have, the book is a nice achievement by Haddon. I recommend it for those who work with these kids, to give some hope to their work and to consider points of view not in the normal plane.