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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Vintage Contemporaries)
 | The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Vintage Contemporaries) Mark Haddon Date: 18 May, 2004 — $9.00 — Book Rating: |
The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night Time is narrated by Christopher Boone, the main character. He is a teenager who has Asperger's Syndrome.
He lives with his father, because his mother is dead.
When he finds a neighbor's dog speared through with a gardening fork, he resolves to solve the mystery of who murdered Wellington.
Christopher takes his detective work very seriously, conducts interviews with neighbors, even those he has been forbidden to speak to, and those who he isn't comfortable talking to. It is with these baby steps that Christopher tests the waters. so to speak. The initial feelings of discomfort with doing things he doesn't normally do that later on gives him the courage to take greater strides.
The book is all about Christopher's investigation of the murder and in the course of the investigation, he discovers more than he bargained for. Not only the truth about who murdered Wellington, but it is also a journey of self-discovery, taking chances and what really happened to his mother.
Christopher likes order in his life. He also has a clear idea about what he likes and doesn't like. He loves math and is good at it. He hates the colors brown and yellow. He doesn't want his food touching each other. Christopher is one of those people who see the world in black and white, and he prefers that everything in the world follow a certain order, even emotions. He concedes that sometimes his preferred order might seem illogical to other people, but that doesn't really matter to him.
Christopher is forced to look beyond the orderly black and white world that he has been living in for some time and consider that between black and white lies gray... and a lot of other colors.
He is forced out of his comfort zone to explore the complex world of adults, emotions, public transportation and intentions, well meant and otherwise.
What I was amazed at while reading this book is how completely Mark Haddon takes us into Christopher's world. The writing is solid, fluid, consistent. It is a funny book, but a heart-wrenching one, as well.
Personally, I found it humbling and inspiring to read about a kid who has been more sheltered than most, break through the boundaries he has set for himself and the rest of the world despite what others in his life see as his physical, social and psychological limitations.
But then again, while I was reading the book, I began to stop looking at Christopher's disability as a liability. Because what is it, really? The adults in his life were clearly more disabled than he was.