The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon response

Curious Incident is an awesome book. It’s not awesome in the typical way of “that was so awesome”, but awesome in the way of “that was so awesome!” What I’m trying to get at here is that it’s not your normal book that could fit into a specific genre, since it contains elements of so many!

 

Curious Incident follows the quest of the teenage Christopher Boone. The quest is a simple one, originally intending to find out who killed the dog next door. That isn’t the basis of the story though, for then it would probably fit into the mystery genre. Put simply, the book explains Christopher’s thought process. One second he’ll be explaining what people said when he was asking them questions about the dog, and the next he’ll be explaining a really interesting math problem.

 

I definitely gained some insight into the way an autistic person’s mind works. They appear to be very precise and literal. Christopher stresses how he can’t make up things, and how he always tells the truth for example. This kind of literal thinking is great for math.

 

One of the really awe-inspiring logic problems he explains is as follows. You have three doors and behind one of them is a car. Your first pick yields you a 33% chance of picking the right door. One door that doesn’t contain a car is opened. You’re now given the option to pick another door if you wish. Your logic tells you “why pick another door? I have a 50/50 chance of getting the right one and picking again won’t make a difference!” So if you pick again after the door has been taken away, you have a 66% chance of getting the right door. True to the problem, more often than not if you pick again you’ll get the car. (My friends and I have tried it.) It’s really weird!

 

That’s just one of the examples. I fondly remember reading this book at school and Christopher would mention something that’d get me thinking and wondering, like an amazing and inspiring fact about our universe. For example, he mentions how stars are nuclear explosions billions of miles away. That’s what this book does. It gets you wondering. It’s not so much of a story, as an interactive experience that simply reading won’t do the trick. It’s very diverse and doesn’t follow a set formula that other books follow. It’s really awesome!

 

The way it was written is pretty cool as well. I don’t know much about Mark Haddon, but I do know that he’s not an autistic person (he works with them though). My first reaction to that information was “whaaaat?!” It seems so weird that a non-autistic person wrote this since the book is written so seamlessly! It’s also his first novel, so that’s pretty surprising. I guess if you’re around something each day, you begin to understand how it operates, but still, it’s pretty amazing!

 

As in any good book, the character must transform. Not in a physical sense, like a frog to a hermit, but an internal transformation. The reader has to witness the transformation so he or she doesn’t think the book reading was a waste of time. Who wants to read something that from end to finish, nothing changes, there isn’t a sense of realization or anything. Christopher definitely changes during the book. He becomes a fuller person, a more open human being. Maybe not by a lot, but you can definitely see it. I think the transformation is a large part in this book, especially since he’s autistic. What I mean by that is not that we all aren’t trapped in our compulsions most of the time, but a person with autism would be more so, since they have this extra layer of compulsions that are built into them, that they’re hardly in control of. I’m thinking that would be harder to break out of and transform, making this transformation extra special.

 

The journey of finding out who killed the dog is what begins the transformation. During that journey, Christopher finds out many things, a lot of which are very uncomfortable for him. He gains a sort of independence by failing over and over again but his curious, loving and loyal nature always prevails. I’d say this book describes one of the most interesting character transformations in recent history. Like everything else in the book, it’s very well rounded and interestingly written that you really have to read to believe. Amazing shit!

 

If you haven’t read this book, I suggest you do so. You definitely won’t regret it and will probably be very happy that you did. I give it a rock solid 10 out of 10!