A murder mystery novel which kills our ignorance
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time is the story of Christopher, a fifteen year old boy having Asperger’s syndrome who sets out to find who killed his neighbour’s dog. In the process he ends up finding certain surprising things about his family history.
Asperger’s syndrome is a kind of autism. Autism, in itself, is not a single condition. It is, rather, a spectrum of conditions, of which Asperger’s is a mild form.
People with Asperger’s have difficulty understanding societal conventions, principally because they are unable to imagine that other people are also thinking beings having their own thoughts. In a classic experiment, a variation of which is also mentioned in the book, a kid with Asperger’s is shown a box having a certain label but containing something different. The kid tells what he sees on the label and is shown to be wrong by taking the actual product out of box. So far so good.
If the kid is now asked what a third person will answer when asked what was in the box, the kid replies what was actually there in the box, and not what the label says.
It is because the kid equates his own knowledge with that of other people around him.
Such is Christopher. He follows a strict daily routine and prefers uniformity in surroundings and in his daily interactions with people, leading to discomfiture and unpleasant feelings when this structure is disturbed. Christopher is very observant and says he “sees everything” – not just the number of cows in a field, but the marks on their body, the direction in which they are standing, the gradient of the field, and so on. As a result, his brain easily overloads with information when he is in a new place.
People with autism are known to sometimes cover their ears and groan, and only now have I realised why they do so. They are simply trying to ward off the extra information their brain has suddenly been overburdened with.
We are able to actually step into the shoes of Christopher and understand his thoughts and Haddon must be commended for what he has done. At a few places, Christopher’s thoughts are completely opposed to what we would have thought in that situation, but these thoughts bring out even more clearly his logical thought process.
Through Christopher’s father, this book has also managed to express the internal conflict of those who live with people having an autism spectral condition, in so far as this was possible when narrating through Christopher’s eyes.
Christopher’s father loves him a lot and tries to keep Christopher’s routine as close to what he is comfortable with as possible, but he is only human and terribly fails at a few places, not necessarily in his role as a father. But these actions have a profound effect on Christopher, and his resulting actions serve more as a testing ground of his father’s temperament than of his own. In the process, these few scenes beautifully bring out the father’s internal struggle.
This book claims to be a murder mystery novel. It is, but only incidentally. In a far greater scope though than one would have imagined, it is a mystery novel which manages to solve the mystery by the time we reach the last page.
Now, the actions of someone suffering from an autism spectral condition do not seem mysterious to me; I know what they feel and think like. And this is more than what I had expected from this book.
Nice review!