Summer Reading The Curious Incident

This past summer I read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austin and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon.
Five minutes or 7 pages into Mark Haddon‘s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time I felt a unique connection to Christopher (the narrator and main character in the novel). This connection and ability to relate to Christopher exceeded any emotional empathy even when reading a story. Christopher is an autistic teenager with an innate ability to process numbers, similar to that of a computer. Despite his borderline genius high school math abilities, he is unable to normally process the world’s many abstract ideas and social behaviors. Instead he sees everything in well defined black and white, right and wrong, good and bad, and truths or lies.
Mark Haddon paints a fictional picture of the world from the eyes and mind of an autistic teenage boy living in Swindon, England during the 1990’s. The book is “written” by Christopher as a school project. The book begins by thrusting the reader into the night that spurred the creation of the book, the night Christopher stumbles upon the murdered remains of a neighbor’s dog Mr. Wellington. Christopher’s black and white view of morality does not allow him to differentiate the severity of a murdered dog and a murdered human. Thus, the book originates a more or less as a journal, compiling the clues in his effort to solve the murder of Mr. Wellington. As the plot proceeds Christopher documents to the reader many random facts and daily events mixed with various flash backs to explain his past. Contrary to traditional adventure novel writing style, and more in line with that of a mystery, Christopher’s flashbacks are sporadic, sometimes pointless, and always uniquely encrypted by his unusual perspective of what is going on around him. Through this writing style Haddon allows the reader to deduce information unknown to Christopher without spelling it out allowing the reader to mingle a first and third person experience.
Furthermore, more the Christopher finds that his once thought to be deceased mother is in fact alive: his father had lied to him when she abandoned them. This realization jolts Christopher as his pillar of stability; his caring and patient father is transformed into a liar. In Christopher’s black and white mind his father has crossed the line from white to black. In an effort to regain Christopher’s trust, his father admits to killing Mr. Wellington which serves to further enflame the situation, casting his father as a liar and a murderer. This shock to Christopher drives him to face his fears and seek out his mother in a comical journey through the English train system filled with evading police (albeit by accident) and life threatening situation in his quest to his find his mother’s flat in London.
Christopher’s mind and view of the world instantly hooked me for two reasons. Firstly, my own learning disabilities allow me to relate to Christopher. We both resent the feeling by some others of our intellectual inferiority as a result of a lag time between seeing or hearing information and eventually receiving that information so that our minds can grasp it. Secondly, this summer in working with teenagers this summer who had social issues to those of Christopher, I found myself immediately empathetic. I can easily understand Christopher’s well documented awkward, brief and inadvertently rude human to human interactions.
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