March 11, 2005
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Amazon.com synopsis:
Mark Haddon's bitterly funny debut novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is a murder mystery of sorts--one told by an autistic version of Adrian Mole. Fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone is mathematically gifted and socially hopeless, raised in a working-class home by parents who can barely cope with their child's quirks. He takes everything that he sees (or is told) at face value, and is unable to sort out the strange behavior of his elders and peers.
Late one night, Christopher comes across his neighbor's poodle, Wellington, impaled on a garden fork. Wellington's owner finds him cradling her dead dog in his arms, and has him arrested. After spending a night in jail, Christopher resolves--against the objection of his father and neighbors--to discover just who has murdered Wellington. He is encouraged by Siobhan, a social worker at his school, to write a book about his investigations, and the result--quirkily illustrated, with each chapter given its own prime number--is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
This is a book that seems very simplistic at first read, but then you start to realize that there's something deeper.
Because the narrator is a person who doesn't lie and expresses little to no emotion, the tone and prose seem almost a little too mechanical and very straightforward. But as the character's journey starts to take him away from his comfort zone, the tone changes as well and becomes a bit more confusing and chaotic. By the end, you're not sure who you like and don't like and, while you can see all points of view, you find yourself siding more with one character over others.
This is a very fast read; faster if you did what I did and skimmed past all the math (or maths, as it's referred to in the book) because math confuses me and reading about math confuses me even more. But don't go too fast or you'll miss all the nuances that make this a great book.
Posted by xinh at March 11, 2005 01:09 AM