Loads of Learned Lumber

Saturday, April 21, 2018

Mark Haddon, _The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time_

I'M CONVALESCING FROM a surgery that involved (among other things) an incision in my abdomen, so I was looking for something brisk that would not make me laugh (or cough or sneeze, all of which hurt), and this fit the bill.

Our protagonist-narrator Christopher Boone lives in Swindon, England, and I think he is in his teens. In the first half of the book, he is trying to answer the question: who killed the neighbor's dog? Once he knows, he has a task to complete: how can I get to my mother's house in London?

Neither mission is extraordinarily difficult. The answer to the question about the dog turns out to lie near at hand, and since Christopher has a bankcard, a railroad timetable, and an address for his mother, finding her should be easy. But Christopher is autistic--he does not tell us so, but from his own description of his habits, circumstances, and turn of mind, we discern that he is--so he has  to accomplish his ends while subject to very particular and unique constraints about interacting with people, eating, and much else. Improvising in unfamiliar circumstances, difficult for anyone, is all the more so for him.

Nonetheless, he succeeds--and even gets back to Swindon in time to ace his maths A-levels. We do not get a full-blown happy ending, as his parents do not reconcile and his future is still one big question-mark, but he has discovered some of his own capabilities.

So we have a modernization of a traditional quest-tale, like "The Boy Who Went Forth to Learn Fear," but with a quester Myshkin-like in his unworldliness, Hawking-like in his ability to crack mathematical puzzles, and willing to wait in a Tube station for several hours so that he can board a relatively  unoccupied car. Christopher is memorable.

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