Book Review-- the curious incident of the dog in the night-time by Mark Haddon

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

the curious incident of the dog in the night-time (there are no caps in the title on the cover of the book) is a kind of murder-mystery told from the perspective of the narrator, one Christopher John Francis Boone, a teen who lives in a small British town with his father. Christopher discovers his neighbor's dog, Wellington, impaled on a pitchfork, and is assumed to be the dog's killer. Upon being released to his father's care, he determines that he will become a detective and solve the mystery of the dog's demise. In the process, he writes a book detailing the things he learns in the course of his investigation. Oh, one more thing, Christopher is autistic. Christopher learns way more than he bargained for, and the reader learns along with him.

Christopher is not only the narrator of this book, but is also something of a hero as he enters into a kind of epic journey and learns to deal with a whole new paradigm. We get the opportunity to see the world through Christopher's perspective and can acknowledge how insane many things about our world can be when viewed through a strictly logical lens. This can be amusing such as when Christopher points out the silliness of common metaphors:

I laughed my socks off.

He was the apple of her eye.

They had a skeleton in the cupboard.

We had a real pig of a day. (Never heard that one)

The dog was stone dead.

Christopher says, "I think a metaphor should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people do not have skeletons in their cupboards."

Of course, Christopher's world doesn't make perfect sense either. For example, he hates the color yellow, and evaluates his days categorizes his days as Good, Quite Good, Super Good, and Black. A Black Day is a day when he sees 4 yellow cars in a row on the way to school. On Black Days, Christopher refuses to work, eat, or speak.

There are other interesting visual, numerical, and linguistic problems and details included throughout the book that help not only develop the plot, but also help explain how Christopher deals with the world.

I found this book fascinating, and it is such a great device to have a narrator with this kind of unique voice allowing the reader to anticipate the things that Christopher doesn't see, to see things that the reader would never normally notice, and to have great empathy and compassion for Christopher and his parents.

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