Review: "The Curious Incident of the Dog In the Nightti

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It rang true to me. If it doesn't ring true for everybody, well, our problem is that we can't really get into other peoples heads. It affected me, if I was the sort of person that cried then I would.

The character was similar to me when young, although I can certainly pass for normal now. Mathematics was very easy for me. I did not have the characters violent streak, and did have problems with co-ordination. I went to a normal school (and university), but was isolated at school.

I just finished "Curious Incident" two days ago. It was a quick, interesting read -- I enjoyed it quite a bit, and I laughed out loud constantly as I could COMPLETELY identify with certain aspects of the narrator (such as taking careful note of the fabric patterns on train seats and reading every sign or billboard he encounters).

I do not think this was a perfect book, though. I agree with the person who said that Christopher exhibits ALL the signs of autism to varying degrees, which is unrealistic in and of itself. I think that the author could have created a more realistic character if he had avoided trying to pack EVERY autistic trait ever discussed into a single character. The over-assignment of characteristic traits made Christopher seem less believable as a real person.

I was also somewhat annoyed by the "letters" Christopher received from his mother. I noticed that a lot of words were misspelled; what was this supposed to imply? I found it annoying and kept wanting to run spell check. Also, what sort of mother writes long narratives to her teenage son about his character traits and various behavior "episodes"? I get the impression that the author was using the letters to tell us, the readers, about more of Christopher's behavioral traits, as if to say, "See? Look how autistic he is!"

Nevertheless, I definitely think this book was more "good" than "bad". The flaws I noted can certainly be understood from a marketing standpoint: a lot of the behavioral descriptions are familiar to Aspies and others who have researched heavily into the science and characteristics of the autistic spectrum, but they are NOT likely to be familiar to the majority of the reading populace.

It was a great story, really great plot, but..was he really AS? He's a lot more low functioning than me or any aspie I've ever met.
My fear is that the general public will read the book, hoping to find out about AS, and then they'll just think "what a ret*d" and think we're all as helpless as the protagonist is.

The general public sucks.

spose so

It is a problem.

I was talking to a friend from another forum on AIM last week, and I brought up the topic of "theory of mind" and autism. Then he said he had read "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime," but that he didn't understand or relate to the narrator at all, and couldn't accept his behavior. My friend admitted his ignorance of the disorder, so I tried to explain to him why Christopher acts in certain ways, and he utterly exploded at me, saying "That's just #$*#($ up," and "I just can't believe that."

This is not something I would have expected from him, because he is normally a very intelligent and accepting type of person. It was like he put up a wall between us, so nothing I said seemed to change his mind, and he eventually just changed the topic of conversation.

Not the reaction I would want a book about autism to recieve .

I am rereading the story, and I find my friend's accusations toward Christopher to be mainly unfounded. But I suppose that an NT person with no knowledge of autism may just not understand.

I guess for NT's, unless you've been around it for a long time, there's just no way they could understand it since the behavior of people like christopher goes against everything NT's are use to seeing and expecting.

I bought it yesterday and have been digestin
it's content slowly to examine for character
traits and compare them to things I read about
the topic. Hmmm? So far I am intrigued!



Ghosthunter

Someone I know, who doesn't know I believe I had AS when young, reacted like that when we discussed the book. He thought Christopher was just utterly selfish, even evil. This surprised me, as my friend is generally a very caring, understanding person. This shows you should be careful about telling someone you have AS. They may not react as you expect.

It's odd -- I had the same problem with something about his traits being a bit "off" in terms of how they were connected, despite liking the book a lot. But it wasn't because they bridged the (IMO mostly inaccurate) categories of AS, HFA, and LFA. That was one of the features I liked about the book, probably because my life tends to bridge similar categories.

One of my favorite things was that the book showed overload and shutdown accurately, in the subway station.



That's again one of the reasons I liked the book. Here was a bright kid who couldn't figure out the basics. That's a lot like me. So is the fact that, when pushed, I can do something that is normally beyond my abilities, but then I'm unable to do it.

I just took some kind of questionnaire, or rather my support staff did, that rated my abilities in various tasks. They were supposedly arranged from easy to hard, but the way she rated me was all over the place. That's part of autism for me, is finding some "easy" things hard and some "hard" things easy in patterns that surprise people, and also having abilities that fluctuate a good deal so that even things I normally find easy, I can't always do, and many things are abilities that go in and out of existence a lot.

Which is not something I often see in autism literature despite it being a common trait for us. I can write a complicated essay but I may not be able to read it at the time or write anything at all later. And I cannot safely take public transportation, cook, remember/recognize "obvious" signs of danger, or do other "basic" things, despite being considered quite intelligent if someone reads my writing. I liked seeing a character that portrayed that kind of discrepancy even if he was very different from me in some other ways.

There were ways I didn't think his abilities quite fit together, but it was different than that. It was something about the patterns not totally fitting anything I've ever seen. Not that he was great at some things and terrible at others, though. That's common in autistic people and in people who were, like him, oversheltered to the point of never experiencing certain normal things. (I'm reminded of a movie I saw about a couple of people with intellectual disabilities leaving an institution, and one of them is afraid of the bus. Another one says, "Normal people aren't born riding the bus you know, they learn it like everything else when they live in a normal home.")

I bought the book just last week, and finished it within a couple of days. Mark Haddon done a magnificent job of bringing Christopher Boone to life, and to construct the complex tapestry of this 15-year-old's mind.

I would agree that Christopher thought patterns and interpretation of the world around him is shared and understood by most of us registered on this site; however, I'd like to note that some of the behaviour that he displays seems a bit... well, delayed. He quotes seem to make him younger than he actually is; his language would be similar to how mine was at 9-12.

But then again, I cannot criticise Mark Haddon for this. I'm definitely less affected than Christopher.

I agree to a digree with anachronism and Jetson - Christopher's behaviour sort of oscillates between someone with Asperger's Syndrome and someone with Medium-functioning Kanner's Syndrome ('classical' autism).

But that's what confuses me: There's no behavior that's necessarily different between what's considered "Asperger's" and "Kanner's", except for early speech development and a few cognitive skills. "Asperger's" is not necessarily "higher functioning" than "Kanner's" except in those areas. So... how was his behavior inconsistent with "Asperger's"?

anbuend wrote:




This is just like me!

I have not read the book yet, but I am very curious. I havent read any books yet on the subject actually.

I agree with you Anbuend. According to DSM-IV, the only difference between "Kanner's" and "Asperger's" is that "Asperger's" does not have a "significant" delay in cognitive and speech development.

Having said that, I do beleive that Christopher (and I don't want to discredit the character here) may have mild, but "significant" cognitive delays. Even when we consider the overprotection of Christopher's parents, he at times seems to act in a way that is "delayed" for an equivelant 15-year-old Aspie.

If I'm wrong about this, I apologise ;the very thought of offending anyone (even fictional characters) is detestible to me.[/i]

I Have read it and I thought it was interesting onlydue to my beliefs, I didn't like it where he said that there was no God.And personally I thought that they said the F-word too much...not that there's anything wrong with that! But I liked how the charries were portrayed.Except there was something about the main that just didn't seem quite right...about his traits and characteristics I mean...

Yeah, I just read it yesterday and I thought it was sort of a good book. I usually cry when I read books, but I don’t see how this book could make me cry. I laughed out loud a couple of times, and I also rooted for him when he went to see his mom.

But what I don’t get it why his mom continued to write to him for 2 years when he wasn’t writing him back? Couldn’t she just have gone back to see how he was doing? Maybe calling wasn’t such a good idea, since he wouldn’t pick up the phone… what a mother, leaves her own son, and doesn’t seem to care at all.

I think that he is portrayed too much like a 5 year old child at times, or as if though his mental age is 5… And that makes him not represent me in a way, which I hate, cause without all the stupidity of his actions in the book, I could almost have just handed people the book if they wanted to know about AS. But sorry, he just seemed to stupid or something.

Things that made me curious…:

Was the book written in 2003, and set in 1998? (I’m so confused by this.)

Does it take only half an hour to talk with the policeman at the police station, then drive home, the play at the computer? Only half an hour? (It annoys me when books aren’t accurate, especially books that are meant to be for aspies…)

“So I took lots of deep breaths like Siobhan says I have to do if someone hits me at school, and I counted 50 breaths and I concentrated very hard on the numbers and did their cubes as I said them” (What are cubes in this sentence?)