THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME

ENGLAND2003()

At the center of Mark Haddon’s marvelous first person mystery novel is a young 15-year old on the spectrum, Christopher John Francis Boone. When the novel begins Christopher is living in the small town of Swindon, England with his widowed father, and is investigating the murder of his neighbor’s dog, a large poodle named Wellington killed with a garden fork. Although Christopher chooses to make this investigation the primary subject of his detective novel, it soon leads him to explore the mystery of his missing mother.

The terms autism, asperger’s and autism spectrum disorder are never mentioned in the book. Thus, like good detectives, we readers have to infer that Christopher is on the spectrum, but he gives us plenty of clues. He tells us he is not like most other people: he attends a Special Education school for children who have “learning difficulties or special needs,” he lists his “Behavioral Problems” which include symptoms usually associated with those on spectrum, and he dreams of “a world with only special people like me.” Yet the distinctiveness of his voice (with its combination of simplicity and precision and its obsession with charts, lists and timetables) and his literary choices prove to be the best clues. Despite his oddness, his voice and literary choices also succeed in arousing our admiration and empathy.

Christopher’s choices of person and genre enable us to identify his literary predecessors. When we encounter the distinctive first-person voice of a perceptive young rebel discovering the hypocrisy of the adult world, most of us are reminded of Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Frequently called “the coming-of-age story against which all others are judged,” Holden’s first-person narrative rejects the traditional autobiographical novel (starting with birth and early childhood) with all of its David Copperfield kind of crap. Christopher also rejects these so-called “proper novels,” claiming: “I don’t like proper novels, because they are lies about things which didn’t happen and they make me feel shaky and scared.” Instead, both narrators plunge right into the middle of a crisis—getting kicked out of private school and fighting with his roommate in the case of Holden, and discovering the dead dog and hitting a policeman in the case of Christopher. Like Salinger, Haddon defines the uniqueness of his protagonist primarily through his conversational voice, which sounds as if he’s talking rather than trying to be “literary.” Both narrators demonstrate they are super-observant, hyper-sensitive and committed to telling the truth—qualities they demonstrate in their description of other characters. Although Christopher pursues this strategy for all of the characters he encounters, Holden’s finest example is his description of the way the young prostitute hangs her dress in the closet, an observation that prevents him from having sex with her. Whereas Holden’s alienation comes from his high moral standards and his refusal to compromise or grow up (a condition that may lead to a mental breakdown), Christopher’s derives from the unconventional wiring of his brain. Although both sources create a distance between these characters and most of their readers, their distinctive voices still lead us to embrace their points of view. We may not be like them, but we admire and root for them. And we especially admire their empathy with animals— Christopher’s loving care for his pet rat Toby and dogged concern for the death of Wellington, and Holden’s agonizing worries over where the ducks in Central Park go in winter (a question that even humanizes a killer like Tony Soprano).

Though one could claim Haddon’s book is a “coming of age story” (like The Catcher in the Rye) or even a family melodrama, Christopher insists it’s a murder mystery—a genre he compares to the puzzles he loves. From Oedipus Rex to the latest film noirs and pulp fiction, mysteries are always plot driven, yet they also can reveal character, especially when the mental state of the detective undergoes dramatic change and the story is told in first person, which is precisely the case in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.

The main reason why Christopher chooses this genre is that it links his work to his favorite book of all time, The Hound of the Baskervilles (where there are two dead dogs rather than one). More important, this choice of genre enables him to strengthen his identification with his favorite character, Sherlock Holmes.

I also like The Hound of the Baskervilles because I like Sherlock Holmes and I think that if I were a proper detective he is the kind of detective I would be. He is very intelligent and he solves the mystery and he says, “The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.” But he notices them, like I do. Also it says in the book, “Sherlock Homes had, in a very remarkable degree the power of detaching his mind at will.”

Unlike his identification with Holden Caulfield, which Haddon rather than Christopher perceives and controls, here the identification with Sherlock Holmes is very deliberate on both of their parts. Christopher makes it clear that he does not like or identify with the book’s author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, for then he would have to acknowledge its status as fiction. Yet, his identification with Holmes overrides this concern, probably because Sherlock’s combination of hyper-perceptiveness, logical power and anti-social behavior has led him to be retroactively diagnosed as an Aspie. This connection to autism helps explain why there are so many new versions of Sherlock Holmes currently on popular screens: the series of frenetic Hollywood movies starring Robert Downey Jr. who turns Holmes into an action hero; the British television series featuring Benedict Cumberbatch which is set in the present; and the American television series Elementary with British actor Jonny Lee Miller playing him as a recovering drug addict living in New York with a female Asian-American Dr. Watson. All of these new versions emphasize Sherlock’s manic eccentricities and anti-social behavior along with his super powers of observing concrete details—the special behaviors that link him to those on the spectrum like Christopher.

Haddon also uses structural associations to reveal Christopher’s subjectivity. For example, whenever Christopher encounters something that scares or upsets him, he quickly changes the subject to math or astronomy, subjects that make him feel safe and comfortable. Instead of treating these interests merely as literary digressions or another behavioral problem, Haddon works them into the plot, for Christopher is counting on them to secure his future. As the only student at his school to have ever taken the A level in Math, this test marks an important step on the path that may one day lead to the University or to a career as an astronomer or astronaut. He has new hope and confidence because this mystery novel and the brave deeds it dramatizes, clearly show that despite his position on the spectrum, he “can do anything.” It’s no wonder that Haddon’s novel became an international best-seller, and in 2013 was adapted for the stage by Simon Stephens.

Marsha Kinder