topics: |  fiction | uk | juvenile

Ultimately, fiction is about the universality of experience. The more intimately one can relate to the characters of the story, the stronger it moves us.

In this book, Mark Haddon has entered the mind of an autistic teenager like little else in recent fiction. It is an alien mind, but with a little empathy, one that we can relate to.

Somewhat like Catcher in the Rye, or Camus' Outsider, perhaps. But even in ordinary fiction, it is the ability to get into the mind of the character that counts.

Relating to the different mind

As an aside, let me offer an episode from Joseph Krumgold's ... and now Miguel, where the 13 year old Miguel is trying to get some "respect" from his father; he just wants his own work in the farm to be acknowledged.

[His dad has the smaller kids run small errands during peak periods at the farm. Miguel feels the adults don't notice the kids enough.]

      I brought him the bags. When he took them from me, I said, "Here are
   the bags." My father said nothing. He rubbed the lamb and wrapped it up.
     "All right?" I said, "Okay?"
     My father felt the neck of the lamb. "He'll be all right. It'll live".
     "No," I shook my head. "I ask about the bags."
     "What about the bags?"
     "Are they all right?"
     "What can be wrong about the bags?"

---
What is striking about this exchange (which goes on for a good while longer)
is how Miguel is completely different from us, yet how strongly we relate to
him, to the child's desire for an identity, for standing up and being
counted.

In strange incident, we encounter a profoundly different mind.  Literally.
Christopher Boone is far and away "the oddest and most original narrator to
appear in years",  says The independent. An autistic child,
he finds a neighbour's dog dead, and unravelling the murder leads him into
life-changing adventures.

But what really makes the book click is the unusual narrator, and his
simple language and engrossing digressions.  In fact, such is his
unusualness that we can almost relate to it - we don't need Oliver Sacks to
certify that "Haddon shows great insight into the autistic mind".

In fact, every other chapter is an aside on some thoughts that Christopher
wants to share with us, and these provide a lot of fun as you follow him
around trying to decipher leads.

To encounter such a character, and in such luminously innovative prose is a
sheer pleasure.  Read it now, before it becomes a movie!

[The title is from the story "Silver Blaze", where Colonel Ross asks him:
  "Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"
  "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
  "The dog did nothing in the night-time."
  "That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes.

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 7,057.

[He can't read faces - who is angry, who is sad.  So he carries around
cartoon pics of faces which tell what moods these faces are in, so he can
tell when he meets people]

 
But it was very difficult to decide which of the diagrams was most like the
face they were making because people's faces move very quickly.

[He is very quantitative]
    I had been hugging the dog for 4 minutes when I heard screaming. ...
    "Let go of the dog," she shouted. "Let go of the fucking dog for
Christ's sake."
    I put the dog down on the lawn and moved back 2 meters.

"How old are you?" [the policeman] asked.
I replied, "I am 15 years and 3 months and 2 days."

[likes prime numbers]
Chapters in books are usually given the cardinal numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and
so on.  But I have decided to give my chapters prime numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11,
13 and so on because I like prime numbers.

[he's observant:]
Mr.  Jeavons smells of soap and wears brown shoes that have approximately 60
n% tiny circular holes in each of them.

[the book has some errors, e.g. this description of the eratosthenes' sieve:

    This is how you work out what prime numbers are.  First you write down
    all the positive whole numbers in the world.  Then you take away all
    the numbers that are multiples of 2. Then you take away all the numbers
    that are multiples of 3. Then you take away all the numbers that are
    multiples of 4 and 5 and 6 and 7 and so on. The numbers that are left
    are the prime numbers.

[well, not an error, really, but an inefficiency. you don't need to worry
about multiples of 4,6 and other composites.  you just take away all
multiples for the numbers that remain in the list. ]

Prime numbers are useful for writing codes and in America they are classed
as Military Material and if you find one over 100 digits long you have to
tell the CIA and they buy it off you for $10,000. But it would not be a
very good way of making a living.  [because it would take years to find
one] p.15

Being clever [...is] if you see someone's name and you give each letter a
value from 1 to 26 (a = 1, b = 2, etc.) and you add the numbers up in your
head and you find that it makes a prime number, like Jesus Christ (151), or
Scooby–Doo (113), or Sherlock Holmes (163), or Doctor Watson (167).

Metaphors (29)

The word metaphor means carrying something from one place to another, and
it comes from the Greek words _μετα [meta]_ (which means from one place to
another) and _φερειν [ferein]_ (which means to carry), and it is when
you describe something by using a word for something that it isn't. This
means that the word metaphor is a metaphor.

	They had a skeleton in the cupboard.
	We had a real pig of a day.

I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people
do not have skeletons in their cupboards.

   [Personally, I agree with Christopher.  If there is something called
   "meaning" then metaphors are lies.  But often, metaphors are
   conventional so that "meaning" may include it.  Thus we can't have
   "bones in the cupboard" - so part of the meaning of "skeleton" is its
   use in "skeleton in the cupboard".
   On another view, all creative work, which tries to evoke one concept by
   using some other, is a form of lying. ]

[when I hear a metaphor I] make a picture of the phrase in my head it just
confuses me because imagining an apple in someone's eye doesn't have anything
to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was
talking about.

Death, God, and electromagnetic waves

  Mrs. Peters's husband is a vicar called the Reverend Peters, and he comes
  to our school sometime to talk to us, and I asked him where heaven was, and
  he said, "It's not in our universe. It's a different kind of place
  altogether." The Reverend Peters makes a funny ticking noise sometimes with
  his tongue when he is thinking. And he smokes cigarettes and you can smell
  them on his breath and I don't like this.

  I said that there wasn't anything outside the universe and there wasn't
  another kind of place altogether. Except that there might be if you went
  through a black hole, but a black hole is what is called a singularity,
  which means it is impossible to find out what is on the other side because
  the gravity of a black hole is so big that even electromagnetic waves like
  light can't get out of it, and electromagnetic waves are how we get
  information about things that are far away. And if heaven was on the other
  side of a black hole, people would have to be fired into space on rockets
  to get there and they aren't or people would notice.

  I think people believe in heaven because they don't like the idea of dying,
  because they won't to carry on living and don't like the idea that other
  people will move into their house and put their things into the rubbish."


When people die they are sometimes put into coffins, which means that they
don't mix with the earth for a very long time until the wood of the coffin
rots.

But Mother was cremated. This means that she was put into a coffin and burned
and ground up and turned into ash and smoke. I do not know what happens to
the ash and I couldn't ask at the crematorium because I didn't go to the
funeral. But the smoke goes out of the chimney and into the air and sometimes
I look up into the sky and I think that there are molecules of Mother up
there, or in clouds over Africa or the Antarctic, or coming down as rain in
the rain forests in Brazil, or in snow somewhere.

links

 * booklounge.ca : Extended excerpts - first twelve chapters (prime numbers upto 37) 
 *national post : Banned in Florida (2015)

	In 2015, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time was pulled
	from a high school summer readings list in Florida for being
	unsuitable for teens.  [...] 

	According to the Tallahassee Democrat, the main issues were the books
	content and language. The first person novel follows a 15-year-old
	genius with behavioural difficulties suggesting he is on the Autism
	spectrum. He investigates the murder of his neighbour’s dog. The book
	features a colourful array of swear words, including the f-bomb 28
	times as well as references to atheism. One parent who’s seemingly
	clueless to how teens speak stated in an email that, “as a Christian,
	and as a female” she was offended by the book.

	Upon finding out about the banning, in an email to The Guardian
	author Mark Haddon stated he was “puzzled and fascinated”. He also
	stated the decision was ironic because the book’s protagonist is
	unaware that swearing is offensive due to his behavioural
	problems. The banning seems to be just another very typically
	Floridian occurrence. According to Banned Books Week, Florida is one
	of the top states for banning books under the guise of “Christian
	values”.