My name is Christopher John Francis Boone. I know all the countries of the world and their capital cities and every prime number up to 7,507My memory is like a film.And when people ask me to remember something I can simply press Rewind and Fast Forward and Pause like on a video recorder.If someone says to me, 'Christopher, tell me what your mother was like,' I can rewind to lots of different scenes and say what she was like in those scenes."
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a 2003 novel by British writer Mark Haddon that depicts a story about a fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone with his adventures as he embarks on a quest to solve a murder mystery. Along the way, he introduces the reader to his family, his teacher, his neighbors, his pet rat and many of the interesting and unusual facts and figures he keeps stored away in his mind. This book however, is no standard novel of adolescence; instead, Haddon brings together elements from the diverse genres of coming-of-age novel, autobiography with part social drama, part encyclopedia and above all, detective fiction in an unusual and engaging mix.
Writing his first novel from the point of view of an autistic 15-year-old, Mark Haddon takes us into the chaos of autism and creates a character of such empathy that many readers will begin to feel for the first time what it is like to live a life in which there are no filters to eliminate or order the millions of pieces of information that come to us through our senses every instant of the day. For the autistic person, most stimuli register with equal impact, and because these little pieces of information cannot usually be processed effectively, life becomes a very confusing mess of constantly competing signals.
Christopher has been attending a special school for most of his life, living at home with his father, a heating contractor who works long hours. A savant at math, he sometimes calms himself by listing prime numbers and squaring the number two in his head, and he tells us that his "record" is 2 to the 45th power. His teacher Siobhan has been showing him ways to deal with his environment more effectively, and at fifteen he is on the verge of gaining some vague control over the mass of stimuli which often sidetrack him. Innocent and honest, he sees things logically and interprets the spoken word literally; unable to recognize the clues which would tell him if someone is being dishonest or deceitful or even teasing. "I find it hard to imagine things which did not happen to me," he says, that is why he doesnt lie because he doesnt seem capable of it. He can understand similes like "The rain was falling so hard that it looked like white sparks." because he can see the similarities in appearance between the heavy rain and white sparks, but he cannot understand metaphors, which omit "like" and "as" and simply make statements, which, he feels, are not true. As he explains, "When I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining an apple in someones eye, it doesn't have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about."
Using the simple subject-verb-object sentence pattern in which Christopher tries to order and communicate with his world, Haddon tells his story with warmth and often humor, making us see and understand Christopher's problems at the same time that we experience everyone else's frustrations in dealing with him. All Christopher's conversations and the events he experiences are recalled from his own point of view, and the reader can easily see how difficult his world is, both for him and for those around him. As he seeks to order his day by the number of cars he sees of the same color, 4 red cars in a row made it a Good Day, and 3 red cars in a row made it a Quite Good Day, and 5 red cars in a row made it a Super Good Day, and 4 yellow cars in a row made it a Black Day, which is a day when I dont speak to anyone and sit on my own reading books and dont eat my lunch and take no risks. We see how desperate he is to find some pattern which will enable him to make sense of his world. He based this on colors that he likes and dislikes, he doesnt like yellow and brown but he likes red. He also doesnt like eating food if different sorts of food are touching each other but he says, but not the crumble because that was yellow, too, and I got Mrs. David to take the crumble bit off before she put it onto my plate because it doesnt matter if different sorts of food are touching before they are actually on your plate.
Strange places are particularly traumatic for Christopher. As he explains, "When I am in a new place, because I see everything, it is like when a computer is doing too many things at the same time and the central processor unit is blocked up and there isn't any space left to think about other things. And when I am in a new place and there are lots of people there it is even harder because people are not like cows and flowers and grass and they can talk to you and do things that you dont expect, so you have to notice everything that is in the placeAnd sometimes when I am in a new place and there are lots of people there it is like a computer crashing and I have to close my eyes and put my hands over my ears and groan, which is like pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL and shutting down programs and turning the computer off and rebooting so that I can remember what I am doing and where I am meant to be going."
Christopher's difficulties with his emotions are particularly poignant. "Feelings," he says, "are just having a picture on the screen in your head of what is going to happen tomorrow or next year, or what might have happened instead of what did happen, and if it is a happy picture they smile and if it is a sad picture they cry." Removed from his feelings, Christopher can only respond with logic, or with the anger which sometimes overwhelms him as result of fear or frustration, and the reader, responding to his difficulties as any loving caregiver would, cannot help aching for Christopher and empathizing with his family. He doesnt want to be touch, he screams and hit people when they grab him, but he makes exception with his father and mother, He held up his right hand and spread his fingers out in a fan. I held up my left hand and spread my fingers out in a fan and we made our fingers and thumbs touch each other. We do this because sometimes father wants to give me hug, but I do not like hugging people so we do this instead, and it means that he loves me.
Christopher's story begins with a precise, detached description of the dog of the title: "It was 7 minutes after midnight. The dog was lying on the grass in the middle of the lawn in front of Mrs. Shears' house. Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it was running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream. But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog." For Christopher, this is a murder mystery, the kind solved by his hero, Sherlock Holmes, but in tracking down the truth about Wellingtons untimely death, he discovers more than he bargained for. Though the story doesnt revolve entirely on who killed Wellington, but as it progresses, the truth behind it sends him on a truly valiant journey to London; though any other 15-year-old would have found the train trip manageable enough, for Christopher its nearly incapacitating gauntlet of terrifying sensations. As he applies the lessons which Siobhan has given him for dealing with his overwhelming outside world, he also embarks on a most unusual, if not unique, coming-of-age story, and ends the book as a much more mature 15-year-old than he was when he started.
The books autistic narrator is gifted and focused on mathematics: this is reflected by his inclusion of several famous puzzles of math and logic. The book's appendix is a reproduction of a question from Christopher's A-level examination, with annotated answers. Christopher's mathematical interests are reflected in his numbering his chapters strictly with prime numbers, ignoring composite numbers such as 4 and 6. So the first is Chapter 2, followed by 3, then 5, 7, 11, and so on. In addition, the contents in consecutive chapters alternate: Chapter 2 is about the unfolding story; Chapter 3 explores some aspects of the narrator's inner life not necessarily directly relevant to the immediate action; Chapter 5 returns to the narrative. This alternation continues throughout the book with the story often digressing into seemingly unconnected subjects such as Christopher's atheism and the Cottingley Fairies.
The story of Christopher is no ordinary story; it is about family, but no ordinary family as well. It is difficult for his parents to take care of him due to his condition. He never entirely understands whats going on around him, where everyone else is tuned to a frequency he cant receive. They cant touch him without Christopher hitting them trying to push them away. His mother cant take him to places that are crowded because he cant take all the information from what he sees all at the same time ending with him kneeling, screaming and groaning to the ground. Its hard for them to earn his trust because Christopher leads his life with logic reasoning. His difficulties in coping with everyday life were the subject of many arguments between his parents. Due to series of events, a time came when Christopher got really scared of his father that he wishes him to be imprisoned and not to see him anymore, though his fathers offense is explicable, for our young protagonist, it is not. So imagine his fathers feelings that his only son doesnt want to see him and doesnt want to be near him. Despite all these, no parent can bear to take no notice of their own child, his father promised he will rebuild trust with Christopher slowly, no matter how long it takes, in his daily brief sessions.
Connecting autism with detection turns out to be a brilliant device on which to hang a novel. In a way, Christopher's literal, just-the-facts approach to life is simply the hyper logical extension of the methods of crime fiction. The drive to keep reading the novel, however, springs more from our desire to learn more about Christopher and the inner workings of his mind than from the wish to find out who killed Wellington. Although the narrative does eventually reveal the secret of the dog's death, the opening murder turns out to be a red herring for a much bigger and more complicated mystery in Christopher's life: the fate of his mother.
As Christopher adds layers of detail to his narrative, he is nothing if not thorough in describing his surroundings, a rich and complete world emerges. We see the strong emotions of his father and other characters from a distance, through Christopher's puzzled eyes, and we learn about both Christopher's considerable gifts and the limits of his understanding through his often painfully honest reporting of his own actions and others' reactions to him. As befits Christopher's way of experiencing the world, the novel is studded with little illustrations and diagrams -- floor plans, patterns he likes, the maps he needs to get around because the visual field of new streets is too confusing.
The imaginative leap of writing a novel without overt emotion is a daring one, and Haddon pulls it off beautifully. Christopher's story is full of paradoxes: naive yet knowing, detached but emotional, often ironically funny despite his absolute humorlessness; Christopher confesses early on that he does not get jokes, though he is able to explain why others find them funny.
Perhaps the ultimate balancing act is the one that Haddon performs with the sympathy of readers. On the face of things, Christopher ought to be a deeply unappealing character, with his self-acknowledged behavioral difficulties; he throws food, hits people who touch him, and occasionally begins screaming in public, and his inability to experience or understand such emotions as anger and love. But without sentimentalizing Christopher or making him cuddly, Haddon gives his protagonist the dignity of a voice and enables readers to both understand and empathize with him. Haddon creates a fascinating main character and allows the reader to share in his world, experiencing his ups and downs and his trials and successes. In providing a vivid world in which the reader participates vicariously, Haddon fulfills the most important requirements of fiction, entertaining at the same time that he broadens the reader's perspective and allows him to gain knowledge. This fascinating book should attract legions of enthusiastic readers.
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