The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

As the summer months were beginning to assert themselves, Sasha had received an invitation to interview with a somewhat prestigious school for a position instructing eighth and ninth graders in the nuances of their own language and literature.  She was to live a part of her happy life as a single stone tossed earnestly into the pond of English literacy.  Her interview went very well and her presentation was innovative.  I was proud of her.  Yet, there were little clues that something was wrong and a bit imbalanced on the more polished end of the negotiating table.

Some weeks later, I picked up a copy of an award winning book I had heard a lot about and which settled nicely, as I thought, into my recent diversion down the path of fiction.  It was on sale and a quick read and promised to hold a few nuggets of insight into elements I thought I might include in my own book.  So I picked up The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time — it even sported a great title taken from the Sherlock Holmes mystery, Silver Blaze — and I coursed through it in a couple of days.

The main character, Christopher, is strikingly autistic and a savant with exceptional mathematical abilities.  He tells the story from the point of view of his own curious and indiscriminate perspective on life, which I found somewhat intriguing though, ultimately, rather sad and misguided, even if it was clear that the author (Mark Haddon) apparently wished his readers to appreciate the “logic” of Christopher’s life.  However, he handled the story clumsily, abusing a tragic and sympathetic character to lend a child’s voice to a transparent effort to convince other children to adopt a rather ill-conceived atheism.  There was even a chapter devoted to explaining the reason that it is so very silly to believe in GOD in which an inept attempt at addressing the so-called anthropic cosmological principle was played out to its embarrassing conclusion.

But, if that didn’t work, the author was determined at least to make use of the naïvete of his main character to numb his youthful audience to the random depravity and awkwardly sexualized and detachedly self-centered environment of a depiction of life in Swindon, Wiltshire, which is a small town situated in southern England.  The fifteen year old Christopher has a rather self-absorbed mother who doesn’t seem capable of loving anyone inconvenient to her “happiness” and an inept father who seems to cherish his difficult son, albeit fumblingly, but continues to suffer the effects of the choices he makes out of a frustrated philosophy of life.  In the end, the father goes unwanted and unloved yet he remains determined to hang on to whatever place he has in his son’s life while Christopher’s (somewhat excusable) egocentrism makes it hard to see him as very likeable.  Vulgar expressions and descriptions pop up on occasion in the book without warning and without reason.  I shall say no more than this.

Like the proverbial serpent, the story bit down too hard and offered much too little in return.  What saddened me most of all, however, was that Sasha told me afterward that the school I mentioned before had recently decided to introduce this book as a prize selection for the teenaged “Honors English II” students in their care… nestled among other such works as A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Antigone and The Hobbit.  One wonders why while at the same time sensing that the chilling answer is all too obvious.