The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Mark Haddon, Doubleday, 2003

Mark Haddon's strikingly simple first novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is remarkably unambitious in what it tries to be - the story of an autistic young man and his troubled family, as viewed through the boy's distorted vision - and it succeeds in that goal. However, it accomplishes very little beyond its slighty interesting concept, and while Haddon manages to elicit a little sympathy for his put-upon characters, the whole exercise ends up feeling just a tad cold.

Christopher Boone is a 15-year-old boy living in bland suburban England and suffering from an autistic spectrum disorder, sort of a severe case of Asperger's Syndrome. As the book opens, he has discovered his neighbor's dog, dead and impaled by a garden fork. Thanks to his disorder, Christopher is not emotionally moved by the dog's death, but he is intrigued; he resolves to track down the dog's murderer and write a book about the mystery, in the style of his fictional idol, Sherlock Holmes. His detective work leads him not only to find the culprit but to discover some significant facts about his own family, facts which were previously hidden from him behind the iron curtain of his autism.

The appeal of the story hinges on the conceit that it is told to us by an autistic boy who is unable to engage emotionally with the world around him. Christopher's narration is direct and necessarily unadorned. He refuses to use metaphors, although he's memorized a few of them, because he considers a metaphor to be a lie - "It is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn't." He, in fact, finds metaphors deeply troubling: "When I try to make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining an apple in someone's eye doesn't have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about." Similes are all right, however, because they are simply comparisons and not, therefore, lies. Christopher is uncomfortable with description but is willing to provide a descriptive fact or two about people and places in his book because his therapist has told him that that is how books are written.

Christopher is the flip-side of the unreliable narrator. Not only is he incapable of misleading us or giving us any information that isn't strictly correct, he's unable to tell us anything but the entire truth as he sees it. His limited scope - his inability to make inferences that would reveal the subtleties of what lies before him - makes him somewhat unreliable; in order to fill the gaps in the narrative, the reader is forced to make the logical leaps that Christopher can't. This is the clever hook of Haddon's novel, but that cleverness is also a major liability. For Christopher to be at all intelligible within the limits of his intellectual abilities, he must know precisely what those limits are, and he must tell us all about them. Since there is no third-person narrator to explain Christopher to us, he must do it himself. He is required to be extremely self-aware and self-analytical, and that awareness is irritatingly unconvincing. Christopher knows what he's afraid of, how he will react to almost every situation, how his behavior differs from that of non-autistic individuals and how most other people perceive him. The exposition of Christopher's personality is carried out through his own deductions about himself and his recitation of what others have told him, and it is difficult to imagine that an autistic child could be so cognizant of his own condition. The result is a character who seems more like a textbook description of Asperger's Syndrome than a believable human being.

Another significant weakness of the novel is its willingness to throw out its basic premise early in the game. We discover the answer to the mystery - the identity of the dog murderer - midway through the book, and we're left with a narrative that essentially grinds to a halt with half a novel yet to go. It is perhaps inevitable that we should find the killer in short order, since only someone with tunnel vision like Christopher's could avoid figuring it out for very long. The trouble is that with no potential surprises hanging in front of us - and there are no real surprises in the second half of the book - all we have to sustain our interest is the, by now, old conceit of an autistic kid stumbling through English surburbia while we watch from his distorted perspective.

We are, presumably, asked to feel sorry for Christopher because of his innocent lack of awareness of the situations that affect his life so profoundly. However, one has to wonder if he is really better off once he's forced into a more complete understanding of his world, or if his insular world had been an acceptable sanctuary. Was his life really so bad before the novel started, at least as far as he knew? Also, the robotic, callous way in which Christopher relates to the story's other characters, although unintentional and beyond his control, makes it challenging for the reader to be unreservedly sympathetic toward him. These structural limitations make Christopher a less-than-rich character, and the novel's other characters are even less interesting. As a whole, the book plays out like a treacly British comedy starring Hugh Grant as Christopher's father-which, if the film adaptation rumours are true, it just may become.

Copyright 2003 Ad Media Inc.