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

Make no mistake. Autism is hot. In the past few years, it's been nearly impossible to avoid reading about it. Asperger's Syndrome, thought to be a mild form of autism, is getting most of the attention, appearing on the cover of Newsweek and the front page of the New York Times. It seems that we, as a culture, are officially interested in other ways of knowing and thinking, and people affected by autism are uniquely able to describe how they interact and perceive the world.

"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" has arrived in time to ride the current wave of interest. Mark Haddon's novel is a murder mystery written from the perspective of an autistic adolescent boy named Christopher Boone. His teacher encourages him to write the book when his neighbor's standard poodle is murdered with a garden pitchfork. Christopher agrees because he wants to find Wellington's murderer by using the skills he learned from "The Hound of the Baskervilles." His dualistic view of the book is a truthful, telling stroke: He admires Sherlock Holmes for his powers of deduction, but dislikes Conan Doyle for his association with mystical religious organizations.

Because this is a novel about autism, not murder, the killer is revealed midway through. The real subject is the boy's mind, and how he must get along in a world that confuses and frightens him. Haddon, having worked for years with autistic people, is painstakingly consistent in creating Christopher's voice. Early in the book, Christopher delineates his "Behavioral Problems" by lettering them A-R. They include "C. Not liking being touched" and "D. Screaming when I am angry or confused" and "P. Hating France." Haddon maintains each of these behavior problems so consistently that they dramatically increase the tension for the reader when Christopher finds himself in new and complicated places. At one point, he tries to take a train to London unaccompanied, and makes it through by barking at strangers, closing his eyes and groaning for five hours, and walking in an increasing spiral path spanning three miles until he finds the address of his mother's flat.

The book is full of features that might be considered gimmicks, if they weren't so illuminating. The chapters are all prime numbers, starting with 2 and going up to 233. Flipping through the book, the reader sees plenty of diagrams, illustrations and even an appendix explaining the solution to a complex mathematics problem. But Christopher's life is intensely visual; words and language are secondary forms of communication. Readers unaffected by autism will find that the plans of Christopher's street and Swindon's train station help create a sense of place in a book narrated by a character who does not understand metaphor. He likes similes but maintains metaphors are lies. Haddon gets around this by describing what Christopher is seeing, knowing that the average reader will understand what Christopher cannot.

It is no small accomplishment to create a sympathetic narrator who does not like to be touched, cannot understand or make jokes and obsesses about math. Haddon manages this partly by carefully crafting the responses of his father and teacher, but mostly by intricately mapping the life of this character, down to his best scores for all levels of Minesweeper. It is a rare treat to read such a full account of a fictional character's world.

If there is any part of this book that falls short, it's the ending. Haddon doesn't have the heart to harm Christopher, and so he scrapes together a modestly happy ending out of a squarely dire situation. He seals it up with the tired sentiment, "... and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything." After detailing the tension between Christopher and the rest of the world, even considering his successes, it is hard to imagine he will be unstoppable in the future.

But, to Haddon's credit, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time" sounds a clear note of optimism above the current din of clinical literature on autism. His faith in Christopher's ability is sure to resonate with the parents and loved ones of those with autism who are looking for more than descriptions of symptoms and anecdotes of behavioral problems. Haddon offers us a look inside the meticulously ordered world of Christopher's mind, and he hopes that we appreciate the strange beauty of what we see.

— Elizabeth Kmetz (eakmetz at uwalumni dot com)