The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

I suppose The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon was so popular and won so many awards when it was published in 2003 that many readers would already have read this book. I’m not sure why I hadn’t come across this already, perhaps I disregarded it because it was marketed to Young Adult readers, but better late than never, as the saying goes. I certainly enjoyed the book more than twenty years after it was published.

The story was narrated by Christopher, a fifteen-year old who lived with his father in the UK after his mother’s death. It began with Christopher wandering around his neighbourhood at night and finding Wellington, neighbour’s dog, dead in a yard with a garden fork sticking out of it.

The neighbour found Christopher cradling her dead dog and called the police. Christopher was able to answer their questions but when a police officer tried to touch him, he hit the officer and was arrested. Later, Christopher explained that he did not like to be touched.

The story continued as a murder-mystery, with Christopher investigating who had killed Wellington and why, however the more he probed, the stranger the actions of the adults around him seemed to become, with other mysteries arising and being solved, and relationships being tested.

Christopher was extremely analytical and so completely literal that he was unable to relate to his father or any of the other people around him unless they spoke to him without using jokes or metaphors or anything that was not completely truthful and exact. In an early chapter of the book he included drawings of faces on the page then explained what the expressions meant. Christopher recognised the depitctions of happy and sad, but went on to say that he was unable to understand what other, more complicated facial expressions meant.

The chapter numbers also leaped around in a way that made no sense to me until I recognised them as prime numbers, after reading Christopher’s explanation of these. If I’m being completely honest, I wouldn’t have known what a prime number was without the explanation!

The level of detail of the world around him that Christopher observed and described was overwhelming to me as a reader, and even more overwhelming to him. I believe Christopher had Aspergers Syndrome, however this was not confirmed.

I liked Christopher and his story, and think that even though The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is YA, it also has a lot to offer adult readers.