|
|
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Mark Haddon
David Fickling Books, 268 pp
This review first appeared in Third Way, October 2003.
So much about this novel could have gone horribly wrong that
it is all the more impressive to read something so charming
and compelling. The narrator of The Curious Incident of the
Dog in the Night-Time (and not, contrary to urban myth, the
author) is a teenager with Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form
of autism. And that's the book, really. There is an engaging
plot around his investigation of the murder of a neighbour's
dog and his heroic journey to London, a couple of nice
character sketches and a vivid insight into the struggles of
living with autism in the family, but the real challenge and
achievement of the book is to open a door into Christopher's
secret world, and this quite eclipses the rest.
The obstacles in this approach are formidable. On paper, so to speak, Christopher should be the worst possible narrator. He has no sense of humour. He cannot understand or use metaphor or figures of speech, so his writing is very plain and much of what he hears confuses him. He cannot see things from others' points of view or decode the non-verbal language of emotions. He does not always realise what is going on around him, or its significance, and he is more interested in maths than people. (On the plus side, he cannot lie and remembers everything.)
In fact, these very things make Christopher an unforgettably gifted narrator. The sparseness of his prose makes it not only readable but powerfully direct and immediate. It is a great illustration of the writing-class adage 'Show, don't tell', of the power of what is not said. Take this scene. On being found holding the dead dog, Wellington, he is arrested, then collected by his distraught father. They touch palms, because he cannot bear being hugged and this is his concession to those who want to do so. Once home, he finds his father watching snooker with tears coming out of his eyes.
I asked, "Are you sad about Wellington?"
He looked at me for a long time and sucked air in through his nose. Then he said, "Yes, Christopher, you could say that. You could very well say that.'
I decided to leave him alone because when I am sad I want to be left alone.
The grief of a father whose son will hug a dead dog ('I like dogs') but never let his father hug him, communicates itself all the more desparately for Christopher's obliviousness.
There is delightful humour in the narration too, again turning Christopher's limitations into strengths. Though we cannot laugh with him, we can laugh at the gap between his understanding of what he reports and our own, without precisely laughing at him - or at least not without affection. It is a hard balancing act, but one which Haddon pulls off effortlessly.
His boldness in embracing the humour of Christopher's interaction with the world reminds us again how hard his task is. Writing about autism invites one to become oily with pity, wearyingly didactic, or to be handicapped by a 'not disability but difference' placard. The gravitational forces of voyeurism, sentimentality and tastelessness are tremendous, but Haddon glides straight over them.
What he achieves is an utterly convincing insight into the mind of an autistic boy, fascinating, enlightening and profoundly personal. Christopher's angle on the world leaves one with a renewed vision of things that we take for granted, and above all with a sense of human dignity.
He is emphatically atheist, a position he argues for at length and persuasively. Yet it is a book for Christians to rejoice in. For one thing, I far prefer a book that engages intelligently with spiritual issues than one that dismisses or ignores them. More importantly, its affirmation of human life in all its forms is a delight.
As I write, an unrepentant church leader in Milwaukee is being held for homicide after the autistic eight-year-old Torrance Cantrell was killed in attempts exorcise him. It would be grotesque to suggest that this is typical of Christian attitudes to disability, and yet it is a shame - in every sense - that with these two voices on the dignity of human in the public ear, the more Christlike is, and not for the first time, not the church's. Stephen Tomkins
on paper, so to speak, Christopher should be the worst possible narrator