‘This will not be a funny book,’ says Christopher. In the end, when everything returns back to normal, we find that the people around Christopher soon learn to cope with the way he is, and those concerned with his welfare have to learn to temper their emotional needs round his autistic inability to compromise. The book deals with a great amount of grief and sorrow as well as joyful moments. I don’t want to give the story away, but the scene in which he reads his mother’s letters is one of the most affecting things I’ve read in years. The pathos of Christopher’s condition is that he can never understand the havoc his very existence has wreaked in the lives of those around him, however many facts he uncovers. But The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is no out-of-Eden fable. There is, of course, a great novelistic tradition of children as observers of the darker side of adult behaviour, e.g. As the narrator unwillingly gets involved in the murder case, he starts collecting facts relating to the death of the dog and he unwittingly pieces together a jigsaw revealing some of the darkest lies and evasions of his parents’ lives. The math puzzles do bore the reader, especially me, but the story has many twist and turns to grasp the reader. He also includes his dream where everybody dies except people like him. Haddon ingeniously uses facts throughout the book, using math puzzles which Christopher solves and his thought about God. People who are disabled are never easy subjects for authors. He does not seem callous, but while he can cope with facts and great detail, emotions confuse and alarm him. On the day of his mother’s death, he record his scrabble score and the fact that the supper was spaghetti and tomato sauce. Christopher sees everything, and remembers even more, but he cannot prioritise things. The writer used Christopher’s innocence to describe the lives of the people around him and how he affects them.
The author’s study of the condition is easily but superbly realised, and yet the book speaks of much more than just a disability. Mark Haddon resolves to tell the tale using the innocent thoughts of his narrator, who suffers from Asperger’s syndrome. He intends to become an astronaut, but is not very fond of the idea of meeting strange people, until the day he finds himself involved in the case of his neighbour’s ‘murdered dog.’ He is the first kid to do a maths a level in his school and he abhors the colours yellow and brown.
Christopher Boone, a teenager with a rather extraordinary talent for academic studies (especially maths), lives in Swindon with his father and a pet rat, Toby.
0 kommentar(er)
