The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night Time

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon is about Christopher Boone, an autistic fifteen-year old, whose one-to-one teacher gives him the challenge of writing a book as a project. Christopher decides that he will write a book about the events of his street, where Mrs Shear’s dog is found dead.

The book offers an interesting portrayal of Asperger’s Syndrome and the sufferer’s point of view. It shows how things which would be regarded as quite normal, such as three yellow cars in a row, or being touched by a stranger, can be perceived as a major thing in the day.

In one scene, Christopher is nearly killed by an oncoming train, when he went onto the tracks to fetch his rat, Toby. I liked the way Haddon portrayed Christopher as knowing exactly what he was doing, and how I, as a reader, could see the scene unfold before my eyes, but Christopher remains seemingly unaware of how dangerous it actually was, and how close of a shave it was.

Christopher is a maths genius, and when situations become stressful, he is likely to retreat into his head to do arithmetic. The appendix of the book consists of an answered and annotated A-level maths question from the exam he sat during the coarse of the plot.

The book is in chapters, as you would expect, but the chapter numbers are not consecutive. They are all Prime numbers, which means that the number will divide by nothing except 1 and itself. 1, 2, 3, 5, and 7, are all examples. Christopher also makes the interesting analogy that Prime numbers are like life – they are both very logical if you think about them, but no one can ever work out a formula to work out what will come next.

I enjoyed this book, not just because of it striking a personal chord, (my little brother suffers with Asperger’s), but also because it really is honest and inspirational. It makes you think about the world from the same point of view as someone with Asperger’s. I think this book is also helpful, as it raises awareness of Autism in a fun, different way that will reach out to more people.

The book won the 2003 Whitbread Book of the Year, the West Australian Young Readers Book award in 2005 and the 2004 Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book.

For more information about Asperger’s Syndrome, go to nas.org.uk or Wikipedia.