Mark Haddon wrote and illustrated children’s books before venturing into the adult market with this book. The title, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is a line from an exchange Sherlock Holmes has with a village policeman in one of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, where Holmes points out that the dog did nothing, that is, didn’t bark, and therefore the bad guy must have been known to him. In this case the dog did nothing in the night-time because it was dead, and fifteen-year-old Christopher Boone, who lives next door, sets out to find the dog’s killer. So far so good; even if you’ve not actually read any Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys mysteries, you know about the teen-aged detectives in those stories, so there’s nothing unusual in that. But this is not a children’s book, and Christopher Boone, its detective, is autistic.
Christopher’s autism takes the form of letting him function fairly normally as long as he is in a routine, when things are familiar. But if he gets out of his routine, then his mind suffers a sensory overload and he retreats into himself, curling up on the floor and groaning. The problem is, he says, that he sees everything: where a normal person would register a selection of things from the environment, Christopher has no filter. His disability makes all the more remarkable what he manages to do in the course of the book. Finding the dog’s killer means for Christopher turning outward to the things he finds most frightening. He has to interview strangers, for example. The greatest difficulty he faces is finding his own way from the small town where he lives with his father to his mother’s apartment in London. Haddon makes it into an epic journey in which the ordinary experiences of English urban life, the railway ticket counters, the trains and subways, and the crowds, become monstrous adversaries, dragons and giants, that the hero confronts and defeats, mostly by his surprising levelheadedness, but occasionally by sheer luck.
Haddon tells the story from Christopher’s point of view, a surprising choice, but finally one that works, because his narrator not only tells us everything he sees and hears, but he does so without emotional coloring, and he is incapable of lying.
Christopher discovers who killed the dog a little more than halfway through The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and we realize that the real mystery is closer to home than the neighbor’s dog. And unlike the usual mystery, this one does not have a neat and completely satisfactory ending, though it does have several triumphs for its unusual detective.
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