Book Review -
The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The
Night-Time
"Mark Haddon's portrayal of an emotionally dissociated mind is a superb achievement. He is a wise and bleakly funny writer with rare gifts of empathy."
- Ian McEwan
A book for young adults, crossing over into becoming a literary novel,
The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time, is written from
the perspective of a 15-year old autistic boy living with his father
in Swindon. Though the author, Mark Haddon, does not, at any point
in time, mention that the boy is autistic, it is up to the readers
to fathom, during the process of reading the book, that boy is unlike
other kids his age and goes to a Special School.
The book takes you on an emotional roller coaster ride, beginning
with the curious incident of the dog in the night-time, "7 minutes
after midnight" to be precise. And by Jove, the flow and plot of the
novel does keep you curious, well past the mystery of the dog is solved.
This is because the book is not about the curious incident of the
dog. The curious incident of the dog is only a strategy used by the
writer, to help his protagonist, Christopher Boone, solve the mystery
of his mother's death.
The gripping plot of the novel keeps the reader guessing about what
will be unravelled next, while at the same time, keeping the reader
very much 'in the moment' in a way that he empathises with each of
the characters who are so well-rounded and have the kind of depth
to them that makes them seem real.
While reading the novel, one gets the sense of reading about someone who is for real rather than reading about the character. This is not particularly with regard to the protagonist, but every character in the plot. It feels like the story of each and every one of them and not just the story of Christopher Boone.
As the author would like to describe it, the book is, "not just a book about disability. Obviously, on some level it is, but on another level. it's a book about books, about what you can do with words and what it means to communicate with someone in a book. Here's a character whom if you met him in real life you'd never, ever get inside his head. Yet something magical happens when you write a novel about him. You slip inside his head, and it seems like the most natural thing in the world."
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