By Gordon Jenkins
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is
fun, very fun, and really, a good novel needs to be
fun. But this novel is only fun. Yes, of course, reading
is worthless if not pleasurable—but there are many
pleasures to reading. And this novel is only fun.

Perhaps that is too harsh, too simple, a
verdict. Curious Incident is fun, and also audacious.
Mark Haddon, the author, who is British and
famous for his work writing children’s TV shows,
illustrating children’s books, and even writing a
children’s book of his own (Gilbert’s Gobstopper,
Hamish Hamilton: 1987), has here attempted a
monumental feat of literature: to write the autistic
novel. Christopher Boone, the story’s first-person
protagonist, has Asberger’s Syndrome. His mind
is quite unlike anyone else’s. He thinks perfectly
logically, realistically, and exactly to such an
extent that it severely limits his social and personal
capabilities. His world demands order, restrictions,
and mathematics, and if things become even a
slight bit chaotic—which they inevitably do—he
crumbles. He drops to the floor and screams. Such
is Asberger’s Syndrome, a disorder Haddon has
become familiar with through his work with autistic
individuals as a young man. And such is Haddon’s
narrator, whose disparate, almost frightening,
worldview is the impressively dominating force in
the novel.

An autistic narrator tells a very unique
story. When Christopher is told that his mother
has died, he becomes merely “surprised,” and then
launches into a lengthy discussion of the biological
basis of heart attacks. He has no emotion, or
rather, no conscious emotion, no emotion he
understands. He carries cards in his pockets
with pictures of facial expressions, and draws
them out, for comparison, whenever someone
makes a face he does not understand. Feelings,
beauty, friendship, human interaction—all of
this evades him. But the rational objects of the
world, the mathematical and the scientific— this
is his domain. Christopher Boone is always
analytical and always curious. He loves to
figure things out, to have reality make sense.
As a result, his narrative often digresses
to explain the world’s underlying scientific
mechanisms, and his descriptions are blankly
perceptive and literal. Christopher hates
metaphors, since he considers them “lies,”
and therefore unscientific and irrational. He
cannot understand jokes. He is a simple, childlike
narrator—he is only fifteen—who seems,
as a child, to be more robot than human.

And this is what makes Curious Incident
impressive. The narrator, for one, is like
no one else in literature—except Benjy,
perhaps, from The Sound and the Fury. But
Christopher, unlike Benjy, tells a coherent,
compelling story—and a very fun story, at
that. From the very beginning, in which
Christopher discovers that his neighbor’s dog,
Wellington, has been brutally stabbed with a
garden fork—at which point Christopher assumes
the role of detective and endeavors to solve a
murder mystery that leads him, eventually, into
the secrets of his parents’ broken relationship—the
disparity between Christopher’s world and our
own, and the unceasingly straightforward nature
of his observations, create some purely hilarious
moments. His uneasy conversations with strangers,
his impartial descriptions of people’s absurdities,
and his own list of Behavioral Problems, which
include “H. Not liking yellow things or brown things,”
and “P. Hating France,” are consistently amusing.
Moreover, Christopher often breaks his narrative
to include drawings, charts, and other images that
complement his descriptions; at times, he even
presents math games, like The Monty Hall Problem,
and invites the reader to play along. Curious
Incident makes a serious, and successful, effort to be
fun.

Fun, moreover, is a very noble cause. One would
assume that a novel with an autistic narrator would
naturally become resolutely thoughtful, and focus
mostly on acquainting the reader with an awareness
of, and sympathy for, autistic individuals—but this is
not the case. Curious Incident does not romanticize
autism. While the novel ends in harmony, and implies
that its narrator has accomplished something, it does
not conclude, grandly, with a positive message
about autism (since I assume the last line, “…I can do
anything,” is not to be taken literally). Writing about
autism is not Haddon’s purpose. Curious Incident
is an exercise in writing style. It is the creation of
a unique narrative voice. It is a game: Haddon
is playing and we, the readers, are an amused
audience. Curious Incident is much more than just
autism.

But there, alas, is where it partially fails. A novel
should never be only serious; but nor should it be
only fun. Haddon has such a profound opportunity
for rich philosophical musings—about the nature
of the human mind, about human relationships,
about what constitutes the Self, about perception,
about consciousness, about everything—yet he
does not engage them. Maybe he tiptoes on the
issues, but he never settles down; the reader feels
a need to force them onto the text, out of a dire
thirst for philosophical dialogue. Nor, in the text, is
there much of what we call literary merit, since its
content, its form, its plot and themes and symbols,
do not lend themselves heavily to analysis. Curious
Incident (ironically) is not a puzzle to be solved. It
is a story—a good story—but it is little more than a
story.

That is not to say that it’s worthless, or bad, or
even not good. It reads quickly and hilariously, and
the narrator is endlessly interesting. But a really
good book, a full book, should induce both the
pleasure of fantasy and the pleasure of analysis. In
the end, I would recommend that nearly everyone
read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime,
if only for its unique accomplishment, if only for
a secondhand understanding of autism, and if only
to laugh. But I would not recommend that anyone
study it. Read it with an open mind, and read it
lightly, but do not read it for rigid philosophical insight
on society, the self, and the autistic individual.
6/10

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