Book Review: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

This is definitely one of the more original books I have ever read. It is told from the point of view of a 15-year-old autistic boy (the author used to work with autistic individuals). Christopher is very bright. He is a genius in math (he knows all his prime numbers up to 7057). He has a great memory and knows all of the countries of the world and their capitals. But like many other autistic individuals, he cannot understand human emotions and cannot stand to be touched. He hates the color yellow and won't eat yellow food. The sight of a few yellow cars in a row on the street will ruin his whole day.

Christopher is trying to write a book for school. He wants it to be a murder mystery, so he writes about a neighbor's dog he found murdered. His teacher points out that murder mysteries are usually about people who are murdered, but Christopher says he has difficulty imagining things that didn't happen to him (also typical of people with autism) and that some dogs are more interesting and clever than some people. Even though I'm a cat person, I can see his point. Christopher canvasses the neighborhood, asking neighbors if they saw or heard anything unusual that night. This upsets his father quite a bit, disproportionately it seems, until more information is revealed. In the process of his investigation, Christopher learns quite a bit about his father and his deceased mother, things his father didn't want him to find out. This leads Christopher to go to London by himself (he lives in a small town in England). Traveling by himself is not an easy task for him, but he manages. In the end, he is quite proud of himself for this and for solving the mystery of who killed the dog.

This is a really fun book to read. It is just so interesting to see how Christopher thinks. He says in the beginning that it will not be a funny book, since he doesn't understand jokes, but he is often unintentionally funny. The author's empathy and ability to tell a story in the first person from an autistic person's point of view is really amazing.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was originally published in hardcover in 2003. The paperback version was published by Vintage Books, a division of Random House.