Curse My Persistance

As I hinted I might during last week's comic reviews, I did go back and give Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time another whirl, having initially failed to make it to page 40. I even managed to read it the whole way through. It wasn't easy. As late as the final ten pages I was arguing with myself whether to keep reading or just toss the book aside.

The story begins with 15 year, 3 month, and 2 day old Christopher Boone, who finds his neighbor's, a Mrs. Shears, dog dead in her yard, a gardening fork sticking out of it. After some confusion when Mrs. Shears comes outside and sees him holding the dog, and he strikes a policeman who grabbed him, Christopher decides he'll solve the mystery of who killed Wellington, and write it up as a story, which is what I was reading.

The mystery itself is solved halfway through the book, and not really through any detective work done by Christopher on the subject. He's actually investigating something else, and the guilty party simply confesses. The confession also solves another mystery that pops up in the book (why his father is reticent to discuss the absent Mr. Shears), and the remainder of the book is Christopher dealing with repercussions of that revelation. That's not true. Christopher makes a snap decision based on fear, and the rest of the book is everyone else dealing with the repercussions of his actions.

I believe Christopher may be autistic. He goes to a school for kids with learning disabilities, but he's highly intelligent, especially at math and science. He likes to map and plan things out, and gets aggravated when things deviate from the schedule he had. He likes red things, but hates yellow and orange, and doesn't like being touched (hence why he punched the cop, who grabbed his arm). He also dislikes fiction and metaphors, because they're lies, but he likes mysteries. he spends an entire chapter of the book describing The Hound of the Baskervilles to us, even though that was fiction. I'm not clear on why he draws a distinction. Haddon does a good job of making Christopher a fleshed out character, so that his actions later in the book make sense based on what we've learned about him earlier.

Beyond that, the characters don't have much depth. Christopher's parents are mostly aggrieved, then sorry. It's a pattern: Christopher does something that frustrates them, then they apologize to him for getting frustrated. This could be by design. Christopher admits that he can recongize when someone is visibly happy or sad, but he's not good at interpreting facial expressions or tone of voice. The depiction of the characters could be a reflection of Christopher not understanding people, so we only see what he can easily distinguish.

I am pleased the book wasn't simply about a teenage detective sniffing out clues and tricking a confession from someone. The problem is the book is largely about everyone else trying to accommodate Christopher, because he can't seem to perceive beyond what he wants, even more than an average teenager. The last bit of the book (and the part that had me contemplating giving up), all he cares about is his Level A-maths test. In the last 100 hundred pages he's learned SPOILER! SPOILER! SPOILER! Skip to the next paragraph if you don't want the second mystery I mentioned revealed. his father had been lying all those years saying his mother was dead, he's run away from home, traveled to London to live with his mother, thrown her life into chaos, and all he cares about is that he get to take his test when he's supposed to. He's turned her life upside down, his father's freaking out, and he's unconcerned with any of it. It irked me.

I suppose my major problem with the book is that Christopher is so awkward when it comes to dealing with other people that I end up feeling sorry for him. Even a little embarrassed for him. He's going to his neighbors, knocking on their doors, and straight up asking if they know who killed Wellington. Hell, he knocks on Mrs Shears' door to ask her, and when she says she'd rather not see him right now, he sneaks around to her tool shed to see if she's got a gardening fork, then sees no problem when she catches him at it. In his mind, it all makes perfect sense, but I keep waiting for it to really blow up in his face. Perhaps the fact the mystery is solved so abruptly averts that fate. Still, it's difficult for me to read the book while this well-meaning, if self-centered character keeps doing and saying things that have me wincing.