![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
We are all Autistic
01 Aug 2004
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - David Fickling Books 2003
* * * * *
With the exception of the Booker, this book has won just about every literary award going, so I came to it with high expectations. Fortunately, with one minor exception, I was not disappointed.
The book is told entirely through the eyes of Christopher, a fourteen year old with Asperger's Syndrome (a form of autism). He discovers his neighbour's dog, dead, with a garden fork stuck through it, and decides to investigate. What he discovers shakes his ordered world to its foundations.
There have been a number of lies told about this book. For a start it's not really for children, at least not children below the age of ten. There is some very bad language (the adults around Christopher swear a lot and he duly reports it verbatim) and religious parents may decide that Christopher's disturbingly logical atheism is not for impressionable minds. Having said that, it's not really an adult novel either. Christopher frequently veers off into wonderfully clear explanations of sophisticated mathematical, scientific and philosophical ideas such as the Monty Hall problem, predator-prey relationships and the illusion of consciousness. How many recent adult novels have explained and explored such fascinating and meaty ideas? Normally you have to go to a Tom Stoppard play for that kind of intellectual stimulation.
It's also claimed to be a comedy, but apart from one laugh-out-loud joke near the start, I didn't find it particularly funny. Christopher himself, of course, shows no sense of humour and neither do any of the people he encounters. I think you're supposed to laugh at the utterly logical but utterly inappropriate way that Christopher interprets the world around him, but I found myself understanding and sympathising with him too much to see it as anything other than tragic (the other reaction for which Haddon was clearly aiming).
Haddon claims that he did no research into Asperger's syndrome before writing the book. This is clearly untrue. He knows all the symptoms and even refers to the theory that autistic behaviour is caused by an inability to shut out unimportant information. Perhaps he didn't do any special research, but he clearly had a good working knowledge of the subject before he started. I would be interested to know whether anyone with Asperger's syndrome has read the book, and if so whether they identified with Christopher.
Seen through his own eyes, Christopher's world make total sense. It may seem strange to us to dislike yellow or brown things or to decide that seeing five red cars in a row makes it a super good day, but as Christopher points out you have to have a framework so that you can make decisions, even if it's a little silly. And why are these examples any more strange than believing that the positions of planets when you are born influences your love life, or that Friday the thirteenth is unlucky?
Christopher misunderstands the people around him because he can't feel their emotions and so can't understand when they are driven to actions which are utterly illogical. But I was struck by how little the people around Christopher (with the exception of his sympathetic teacher Siobhan) understand him. Even his own father keeps assuming that Christopher can read emotions and cope with irrational behaviour, when fourteen years of experience should have told him otherwise. And this raises the interesting question - just who is autistic? Are people like Christopher disabled because they can't understand us, or are we disabled because we can't understand them?
Oh yes, and my one disappointment. Well, the title and the opening imply that this will be a murder mystery, with Christopher using his powers of logic and deduction to unmask the murderer at the end. This is indeed how it starts, but the mystery sputters out disappointingly about halfway through and the book's genre changes to domestic drama. But even there I realised that I had been misled by not looking closely enough. Why did Haddon not use the more alliterative title "The curious case of the dog in the night-time"? Because the dog's death isn't a mystery, a case to be solved - it's just an incident, an event that causes other events. An excellent example of the precise use of words. Christopher would approve.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - David Fickling Books 2003
* * * * *
With the exception of the Booker, this book has won just about every literary award going, so I came to it with high expectations. Fortunately, with one minor exception, I was not disappointed.
The book is told entirely through the eyes of Christopher, a fourteen year old with Asperger's Syndrome (a form of autism). He discovers his neighbour's dog, dead, with a garden fork stuck through it, and decides to investigate. What he discovers shakes his ordered world to its foundations.
There have been a number of lies told about this book. For a start it's not really for children, at least not children below the age of ten. There is some very bad language (the adults around Christopher swear a lot and he duly reports it verbatim) and religious parents may decide that Christopher's disturbingly logical atheism is not for impressionable minds. Having said that, it's not really an adult novel either. Christopher frequently veers off into wonderfully clear explanations of sophisticated mathematical, scientific and philosophical ideas such as the Monty Hall problem, predator-prey relationships and the illusion of consciousness. How many recent adult novels have explained and explored such fascinating and meaty ideas? Normally you have to go to a Tom Stoppard play for that kind of intellectual stimulation.
It's also claimed to be a comedy, but apart from one laugh-out-loud joke near the start, I didn't find it particularly funny. Christopher himself, of course, shows no sense of humour and neither do any of the people he encounters. I think you're supposed to laugh at the utterly logical but utterly inappropriate way that Christopher interprets the world around him, but I found myself understanding and sympathising with him too much to see it as anything other than tragic (the other reaction for which Haddon was clearly aiming).
Haddon claims that he did no research into Asperger's syndrome before writing the book. This is clearly untrue. He knows all the symptoms and even refers to the theory that autistic behaviour is caused by an inability to shut out unimportant information. Perhaps he didn't do any special research, but he clearly had a good working knowledge of the subject before he started. I would be interested to know whether anyone with Asperger's syndrome has read the book, and if so whether they identified with Christopher.
Seen through his own eyes, Christopher's world make total sense. It may seem strange to us to dislike yellow or brown things or to decide that seeing five red cars in a row makes it a super good day, but as Christopher points out you have to have a framework so that you can make decisions, even if it's a little silly. And why are these examples any more strange than believing that the positions of planets when you are born influences your love life, or that Friday the thirteenth is unlucky?
Christopher misunderstands the people around him because he can't feel their emotions and so can't understand when they are driven to actions which are utterly illogical. But I was struck by how little the people around Christopher (with the exception of his sympathetic teacher Siobhan) understand him. Even his own father keeps assuming that Christopher can read emotions and cope with irrational behaviour, when fourteen years of experience should have told him otherwise. And this raises the interesting question - just who is autistic? Are people like Christopher disabled because they can't understand us, or are we disabled because we can't understand them?
Oh yes, and my one disappointment. Well, the title and the opening imply that this will be a murder mystery, with Christopher using his powers of logic and deduction to unmask the murderer at the end. This is indeed how it starts, but the mystery sputters out disappointingly about halfway through and the book's genre changes to domestic drama. But even there I realised that I had been misled by not looking closely enough. Why did Haddon not use the more alliterative title "The curious case of the dog in the night-time"? Because the dog's death isn't a mystery, a case to be solved - it's just an incident, an event that causes other events. An excellent example of the precise use of words. Christopher would approve.