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

Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition

First published: 2003

Type of work: Novel

The Work

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time established Mark Haddon as a writer of adult fiction. It won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize, TheGuardian Children’s Fiction Prize, and the Booktrust award for teenage fiction. The novel’s main appeal is the character of its narrator, fifteen-year-old Christopher Boone, whose counselor in his special-needs school has suggested that he write a book, and so he does. Although the words “autism” and “Asperger’s syndrome” are never mentioned in the novel, it soon becomes clear that Christopher has a high functioning form of autism. Because of the particular way his brain is wired, fiction is unappealing to him; he cannot tell lies or understand most made-up stories. As he tells his narrative, the list of his quirks grows ever larger. He cannot eat things colored yellow or brown. He cannot be touched. Seeing three red cars in a row on the way to school means that it will be a good day.

Christopher, however, is a very bright child. In mathematics, his abilities are far beyond his age. He is intensely observant of the world around him, even though its human inhabitants are mostly a mystery to him. He loves puzzles and is very good at them, so it is no surprise that he likes the Sherlock Holmes mysteries of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; Holmes’s dispassionate analysis of clues is especially appealing to him. Thus he has decided to write a mystery to address his counselor’s assignment.

From the opening pages, Christopher’s special gifts, as well as his special limitations, are apparent. He numbers his chapters using only prime numbers (2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and so forth). He always knows the precise time, and he notices that one of his teachers wears brown shoes with approximately sixty small circular holes in them. When Christopher finds a dead poodle, he is sad; he likes dogs, whose moods are much less puzzling than human moods, and he resolves to discover its killer.

Christopher’s discovery of the dog leads to a skirmish with the dog’s owner, who calls the police. When the policeman asks too many questions too fast, Christopher employs his usual method of coping with overload—he lies down and begins groaning. When the policeman tries to force him to get up, he becomes frantic and hits the man because of his intolerance for being touched. When his father comes to get him out of jail, the two fan out their fingers and touch their hands together; this gesture, created by his father, means “I love you” and substitutes for the hug that Christopher cannot bear. Throughout the novel, Christopher’s father seems to be a man who is doing his best in a nearly impossible circumstance, raising his difficult son alone. However, here his father testily tells Christopher to give up the idea of investigating the poodle’s death.

Christopher does not stop the investigation, however. It is the subject of his book, and he begins interviewing some of the more approachable neighbors, but timidly, because he is fearful of strangers. When his father learns of the book, he throws it away, with the inevitable result that Christopher searches until he finds it in his father’s closet, along with a packet of letters his mother has written him every week since his father told him she died of a heart attack. Now he learns that she is alive, living in London with the husband of the neighbor who owned the dog. She confesses that she thinks Christopher is better off with his father, who has more patience than she did; nevertheless, she loves Christopher and is puzzled that he has never written her.

The letters occupy the exact center of the novel and form a turning point for what happens to Christopher, for when his father discovers him reading the letters, he tries to explain his terrible lie, talks about his liaison with the dog-owning neighbor after his wife’s departure, and finally confesses that he himself killed the dog in a bout of anger. Christopher is left with only one possible conclusion: His father is a dangerous man who may also try to kill him.

That conclusion leads Christopher to start his bold trip to London. He surmounts all the obstacles, although sometimes he does so awkwardly, hiding in a luggage compartment for most of the train trip, sitting terrified in the subway station for six hours, and risking his life among the subway rails to rescue his pet rat Toby. When at last he arrives at his mother’s apartment, he is met with the awkward fact that her partner is not at all glad to share the flat with someone whose needs are as complicated as Christopher’s. In the end, his mother moves back to Swindon with Christopher, although she does not return to his father. In the novel’s last chapters, it is clear that his father is willing to make a herculean effort to regain Christopher’s trust. He takes the first step by buying him a dog, to Christopher’s pleasure. Christopher passes his A-level mathematics exam with an “A,” adding to the novel’s hopeful conclusion.

Bibliography

“A Family with Failings.” The Bookseller, May 12, 2006, 32.

Haddon, Mark. “B Is for Bestseller.” The Guardian, April 11, 2004.

“Mind the Gap: Mark Haddon Brings Sense to the Crossover Debate.” The Bookseller 124, no. 5 (April 16, 2004): 20.

Muller, Vivienne. “Constituting Christopher: Disability Theory and Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.” Explorations into Children’s Literature 16, no. 12 (December, 2006): 118-126.

Weich, Dave. “The Curiously Irresistible Literary Debut of Mark Haddon.” http://www.powells.com/haddon.html.