Primed up

The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Night-time
By Mark Haddon, Definitions, £6.99

This is a sad book. But a book that ends in hope. The novel is written from the point of view of Christopher, an autistic 15-year-old boy. There are no authorial interventions. The world is seen through the eyes of Christopher.

Christopher is remarkably gifted. For one thing, he has a photographic memory. “My memory is like a film. That is why I am really good at remembering things…And when people ask me to remember something I can simply press Rewind and Fast Forward and Pause.” He is remarkably good at maths and physics. He is also a boy who does not tell lies. He hates the colour yellow and finds it very difficult to relate to strangers. He also does not understand metaphors. He thinks metaphors should be called lies: “a pig is not like a day and people do not have skeletons in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because imagining an apple in someone’s eye doesn’t have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.”

Christopher has a thing about prime numbers and his chapters are numbered by prime numbers, thus, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and so on. His comment on prime numbers is profound, “Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.”

Christopher’s mind is logical. He goes to a special school. He lives at home with his father and he has been told that his mother, whom he remembers vividly, died suddenly of a heart attack. In school, he has a teacher, Siobhan, who is his friend and encourages him in everything he does.

Christopher discovers one night that his neighbour’s poodle, Wellington, has been killed with a garden fork. He decides that he is going to find out who killed Wellington by following the methods used by Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles, which happens to be Christopher’s favourite book.

This inquiry leads to the discovery of more than Wellington’s killer. Christopher unearths some of the mysteries concerning his family, especially his mother. The enquiry also lands him in trouble with his father. Christopher runs away from home. In the process of fleeing, he goes away from his familiar environment and is forced on his own terms to deal with everyday problems which had earlier seemed daunting.

The experiencing is traumatic but it does not prevent Christopher from getting an “A” in A-level Maths. He also realizes that he is not entirely helpless in facing the world. “I will get a First Class Honours Degree and I will become a scientist. And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery of Who Killed Wellington...and I was brave and I a wrote book and that means I can do anything.”

This is a coming of age novel with a difference. It is written in short staccato sentences as one would expect from a gifted but aut- istic boy. It is a moving book and one that warns against the sin of despair.