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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Mark Haddon. Doubleday: 2003 (hardcover). ISBN: 0385509456. 240 pages.
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Eerily, ominously, and unbelievably good--if this unnerving little masterpiece of a novel doesn't knock your socks off, we'll eat them for you with good grace. No matter how many times you've encountered fifteen-year-old autistic genius narrators over the past few years in your reading, we think you'll find Christopher John Francis Boone a deliciously readable storyteller of a most distinctive cut.
He knows all the prime numbers up to 7,057, enjoys solving quadratic equations with larger coefficients (to make them a bit harder) in his head, can explain some of the finer points of Occam's Razor in Latin, but refuses to have anything to do with the colors yellow or brown, and tends to scream maniacally but methodically when anyone touches him. The curious incident that inspires Christopher to begin writing his book is the discovery of his neighbor's dog--a large poodle named Wellington--dead in the yard, apparently murdered by garden fork. A devoted fan of Sherlock Holmes' detached observational logic, Christopher determines to solve the mystery of Wellington's demise, an investigation that is doomed to shred the rigidly controlled order of his world into increasingly chaotic tatters. It's no easy matter for any teenager to confront the raw emotions of family secrets hidden in the closet, but how much harder is it for a teenager who has no immediate experience of most human emotion? It's a safe bet that Mark Haddon himself, a children's book author, screenwriter, and creative writing teacher, is not, in fact, an autistic mathematical genius, but his brilliance in giving us access to the mind of one such as Christopher represents an unprecedented leap into literary quantum physics.
As seen on Ellen on Seven.
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