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sharplittleteethThe Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
by Mark Haddon.
15 year old Christopher Boone finds his neighbour's dog murdered, impaled by a garden fork.
Upset by the dog's death, he sets out to find the killer. The problem is Christopher is autistic. He's brilliant at maths. He has a photographic memory. And he never tells a lie. But he cannot understand other people and their emotions.
Mark Haddon has pulled off a remarkable feat here, making a character so detached from normal human emotion into a fascinating narrator. And he finds an eerie poetry in Christopher's fantasies of being completely alone in a world where he doesn't have to deal with other humans.
Obviously, this is a book about the nature of truth. Or more accurately, the subtlety of truth. Christopher may collect all the facts, but he cannot solve the crime because he cannot understand the meaning behind them.
It's an enthralling read. Some might skip over Christopher's digressions where he analyses a mathematical problem, or draws detailed maps of his neighbourhood walks. And the nature of Christopher's condition means that the characterization of the other characters is limited to the narrow slits that Christopher sees them through.
But Haddon writes his narrator so well that Christopher's mind seems both familiar and fascinating. It was only towards the end of the book (when Christopher fantasises about every human in the world being killed by a virus transmitted by facial expressions) that I was reminded how utterly alien Christopher is.
Go read it. It’s good.
by Mark Haddon.
15 year old Christopher Boone finds his neighbour's dog murdered, impaled by a garden fork.
Upset by the dog's death, he sets out to find the killer. The problem is Christopher is autistic. He's brilliant at maths. He has a photographic memory. And he never tells a lie. But he cannot understand other people and their emotions.
Mark Haddon has pulled off a remarkable feat here, making a character so detached from normal human emotion into a fascinating narrator. And he finds an eerie poetry in Christopher's fantasies of being completely alone in a world where he doesn't have to deal with other humans.
Obviously, this is a book about the nature of truth. Or more accurately, the subtlety of truth. Christopher may collect all the facts, but he cannot solve the crime because he cannot understand the meaning behind them.
It's an enthralling read. Some might skip over Christopher's digressions where he analyses a mathematical problem, or draws detailed maps of his neighbourhood walks. And the nature of Christopher's condition means that the characterization of the other characters is limited to the narrow slits that Christopher sees them through.
But Haddon writes his narrator so well that Christopher's mind seems both familiar and fascinating. It was only towards the end of the book (when Christopher fantasises about every human in the world being killed by a virus transmitted by facial expressions) that I was reminded how utterly alien Christopher is.
Go read it. It’s good.
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Date: 2004-03-28 11:43 pm (UTC)