 Book Reviews
with Robin Osborne
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
By Mark Haddon
David Fickling Books $29.95
 Mark Haddon's highly inventive novel won Britain's Whitbread Book of the Year for adult fiction as well as several children's book awards, controversially because of the swear words dropped by some characters.
Haddon said this was how grownups talked and went back to enjoying the fame generated by his narrator Christopher Boone, a 15 year old with Asperger Syndrome, a form of autism, who discovers the body of a neighbour's poodle, named Wellington, lying motionless on the lawn in the middle of the night.
'Its eyes were closed. It looked as if it were running on its side, the way dogs run when they think they are chasing a cat in a dream,' he recalls.
'But the dog was not running or asleep. The dog was dead. There was a garden fork sticking out of the dog... I decided the dog was probably killed with the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer for example, or a road accident.'
Christopher sets out to solve the mystery and to write a book - this book - about his endeavours, with advice from Siobhan, a teacher at his special-needs school.
People with Asperger's have difficulty understanding others' feelings; they interpret things literally and follow self-set routines rigidly. To block out the world, Christopher hides in a cupboard or tunes his radio between stations and turns up the 'white noise'.
He avoids certain colours and foods, and has only one friend, his pet rat, Toby.
Logic, rather than intuition, determines the progress of Christopher's investigation, and in the process of solving the mystery and locating his missing mother he regales us with an astounding set of facts about his various passions, notably mathematics.
Chapter numbers are not chronological, until he reveals that they are prime numbers, not cardinal ones: 'Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away,' he observes.
'I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your life thinking about them.'
Having no choice, Christopher leaves his cocoon and travels alone by train to distant London, finding his mum, reconciling with his separated dad, and sitting his upper-level maths exam.
In so doing, he takes the reader into a world experienced in varying degrees by as many as 1 in 150 of the population.
- Thanks to Book Warehouse, Keen Street, Lismore for supporting this column.
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