The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

A little long, but thats the title of Mark Haddon’s delightful debut novel that I am going write about ! It may sound like a cliché, but it IS difficult to believe that this is his first novel !!

The story is exactly what the title says it is about. Christopher, our 15 year old hero, wakes up one morning to find that his neighbour’s poodle has been murdered with a pitch-fork. He is unjustly arrested for the murder and then released the next day. He proceeds to investigate the murder, in the style of Sherlock Holmes, who is one of his favourite characters.

Doesn’t that sound even more childish than Enid Blyton’s Famous Five series or even Secret Seven ? Well the difference here is that Christopher is autistic. Remember Dustin Hoffman in ‘Rainman’ or our very own Kamalhasan in ‘Sippikkul Muthu’ (’Swati Muthyam’ in telugu and ‘Ishwar’ in Hindi)? He cannot bear to be touched and cannot understand complex emotions. He takes everything at face value and The whole novel is in the form of first person narrative of Christopher, who, on the suggestion of a social worker at his school, decides to write a book about his investigation.

The language is very simple, the plot is not. Christopher manages to solve the puzzle, without understanding the enormity of the secrets, he has brought out of the closet. The truth does not come out of the blue, but the reader unravels it along with Christopher, although we can understand better the nuances and internal workings of people’s minds.

Christopher can understand numbers better than people. His narration is interspersed with puzzles and mathematical problems, giving us an idea of how his mind works. He declares in the beginning that ‘he will not joke in the book, because he does not understand them’, but still manages to make us laugh.

The biggest plus of this novel is that at no point does it ever get overtly sentimental or mushy. Christopher’s disability is not treated like one. It is just used to give a different perspective to otherwise ordinary proceedings in life.

‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ has an important place in modern day classics. It is an awesome novel that you would never want to end !!