The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon is certainly a strange book worth reading. The cover features all lowercase text with a poodle pictured upside-down, the chapters are labeled with prime numbers because the author does not like any other number, there are often interludes where the main character will go off on a tangent to explain some obscure math concept (though this is most likely because he either has Asperser’s Syndrome or Autism) or go into detail about something that has nothing to do with the story, and is writing a book about an investigation of the murder of the next door neighbor’s dog. Yeah… it’s exactly what it says on the tin.
It is also through these tangents, or slips of genius, in which the main character, whose name is Christopher John Francis Boone, makes predictions that can solve the case he is investigating. For instance, he goes into a brief rant about how the author of Sherlock Holmes joined a spiritual society, and how some small children took pictures of some paper fairies in their backyard and everyone believed they were real. He ties this together by giving a quote: “Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. Which is Latin and it means No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary. Which means that a murder victim is usually killed by someone known to them and fairies are made out of paper and you can’t talk to someone who is dead.”
Boone has a lot of character development in the book, namely because he is either Autistic or has Asperser’s Syndrome and has to learn to grow socially while adjusting to the strange ups and downs of society. He has strange habits such as hiding in small places to feel more comfortable (evidently, he is not claustrophobic) and counting colored cars to see what kind of a day he will have. He knows all the countries of the world and their capitals and every prime number up to 7,057. He relates well to animals but has no understanding of human emotions. He cannot stand to be touched. And he detests the color yellow. Over the course of the story he has to adjust to the ways that people and society function; at the start of the book, it is mentioned that he would carry around a piece of paper with faces on it to try to identify what kind of emotions people were feeling, but someone helped him realize that this was a bad thing to do because it would make them feel uncomfortable (illustrated with a face). So Boone tore up the paper and didn’t use it anymore so people wouldn’t feel that way. He has to adjust to the way that people feel, even though he doesn’t understand those things, and the book illustrates his struggles to adjust to society as he tries to solve the mystery of the murder of the dog.
Boone travels from his hometown to London and back again, in an effort to try and figure out who murdered the neighbor’s dog, and ends up finding out about sexual relationships that his parents are having without the other. It is written in first person, which means we get to explore the interesting perks of Boone without seeing it from a third person omniscient view that knows everything before it happens, and thus we get to go through the process of solving the murder of the dog next door with Boone. It turns out his father murdered the dog, in an attempt to get the neighbor’s, who he was having an affair with’s, attention because she would only talk about that stupid dog.
Mark Haddon is a brilliant writer in the sense that he takes a character not many people could relate to and gives him such life and such personality that even if you have nothing in common with him you can’t help but feel what he feels as he goes through trying to discover just what is going on in his family and in his life. From when he is awake at 3 or 4 in the morning and goes outside on walks so he can feel like he is all alone in the world to taking a test to be placed in an advanced class because he really is a smart boy and points out facts that ordinary people just don’t seem to notice. Whether you love the writing or you hate the writing, you can’t help but fall in love with the story about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
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