Mark Haddon : The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time :...
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Bibliography / Book Marks / Author Info /
Mark Haddon
"The Curious Incident of the Dog in
the Night-Time"
Author's Bibliography
Book Marks
About the Author
(Reviewed by Mary Whipple AUG 03, 2003)
"My 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."
Writing his first novel from the
point of view of an autistic
15-year-old, Mark Haddon takes the reader 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, at fifteen, 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 tenuous 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 devious or even
facetious. "I find it hard to imagine things which did not happen to
me," he says. He can understand similes ("[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
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Mark Haddon : The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time :...
http://www.mostlyfiction.com/contemp/haddon.htm
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Mark Haddon : The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time :...
http://www.mostlyfiction.com/contemp/haddon.htm
Brink (1959)
Adolph Gottlieb
Buy This Art Print At
AllPosters.com
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Mark Haddon : The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time :...
http://www.mostlyfiction.com/contemp/haddon.htm
simply make statements, which, he feels, are not true. As he explains,
"When I try…[to imagine] an apple in someone's eye, [it] doesn't
have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget
what the person was talking about."
When Wellington, the pet poodle who lives across the street, is
stabbed with a pitchfork and killed, Christopher decides to solve the
mystery and write a book about it. Using his favorite novel, The
Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as his model,
he investigates the crime, uncovering many secrets involving his own
family in the process. 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 a much more mature 15-year-old than he was when he
started.
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 (four
red cars in a row mean a wonderful day, while four yellow cars mean a
bad day, in which case he does not eat lunch and will not speak), we
see how desperate he is to find some pattern which will enable him to
make sense of his world. He hopes that by writing his book about the
death of Wellington, he will be able to emulate his idol, Sherlock
Holmes, about whom Watson says, "His mind…was busy in
endeavoring to frame some scheme into which all these strange and
apparently disconnected episodes could be fitted."
Investigating Wellington's death requires Christopher to venture forth
from the safe world of familiar people and places, and this venturing
forth is fraught with problems. Strange places are particularly
traumatic. 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 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.
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Mark Haddon : The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time :...
http://www.mostlyfiction.com/contemp/haddon.htm
As Christopher investigates Wellington's death, he makes some
remarkably brave decisions and when he eventually faces his fears and
moves beyond his immediate neighborhood, the magnitude of his
challenge and the joy in his achievement are overwhelming. 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.
Amazon readers rating:
from 1199 reviews
Read a chapter excerpt from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the
Night-Time at MostlyFiction.com
(back to top)
Bibliography: (with links to Amazon.com)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (June 2003)
The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea (October 2005)
Children's Books:
Gilbert's Gobstopper (1987)
Toni and the Tomato Soup (1989)
The Sea of Tranquility (1996)
Ocean Star Express (2001)
(back to top)
Book Marks:
Newsday.com interview with Mark Haddon
Powell's com interview with Mark Haddon
Reading Guide for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Guardian Unlimited review of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
The Advertiser review of The Curious Incident
Seminary Co-Op Bookstore review of The Curious Incident
Salon.com review of The Curious Incident
The Boston Globe review of the The Curious Incident
ReviewOfBooks.com collection of reviews for The Curious Incident of the Dog in
the Night-Time
Look for the quote about the Curious Incident in the Night-time in this story
(back to top)
About the Author:
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Mark Haddon : The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time :...
http://www.mostlyfiction.com/contemp/haddon.htm
Mark Haddon is a writer and illustrator of several
award-winning children's books and television
screenplays. As a young man, Haddon worked with
autistic individuals. He teaches creative writing for the
Arvon Foundation and at Oxford University.
Haddon's novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in
the Night-time, won both the Whitbread Novel of the
Year and the overall winner in 2004.
He lives in Oxford, England, with his wife and son.
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