Bjorn Sorensen's Reviews > The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

I haven’t read a fictional account this heartbreakingly realistic in a long time. Kapitoil was close, but The Curious Incident paints a more complete picture.

The book is from the viewpoint of an teen boy with Asperger's syndrome named Christopher - his mom has recently died and he discovers a dead dog in one of his neighbor’s yards. The short list: he doesn’t read people’s emotions very well (like the android “Data” from Star Trek next Generation, if you will), he hates the colors yellow and brown, excels at math, hates to be touched (enter the fist: he breaks out a pretty nasty uppercut when it happens) and often loses his memory when he gets upset. Like many teenage boys, he dreams of long periods of alone time.

Since he doesn’t care much about other people’s emotions, he goes around knocking on doors in his neighborhood to ask who killed the dog. So he has your attention right away. He’s a big fan of Sherlock Holmes, who he perceives as the master of objective details that others overlook. Except that no one wants to tell him anything about the dog except the kindly, lonely old Mrs. Alexander, who finally breaks it to the boy that his mom was cheating on his dad. Then a lot more rains down.

The dad comes across as calm, especially to a young kid, yet is passive-aggressive person who doesn’t always realize how much clarity his son needs. When he tells Christopher to “drop all this investigation nonsense”, the son considers what he finds out from Mrs. Alexander as “small talk” and not what his dad forbade - “snooping around” the neighborhood asking about a dead mutt.

In fact, the father’s passive-aggressiveness and the son’s determination and objectivity make for heartbreaking tension. The crux of the story isn’t about the dog, it’s what the dad keeps from Christopher “until he gets old enough to understand”. Even though he’s autistic, we find out that Christopher is old enough to know anything - and will go way out of his way to find the truth.

This is a book that doesn’t end neatly and nicely because life usually doesn’t turn out that way. It just sort of ends. We learn a lot about autism, it’s very defined characteristics and why it’s so difficult for ‘normal’ people to be around. There is no one in the story who treats Christopher the way he wants to be treated except a counselor at school.

This is a good story in which we learn a lot about this condition. If the story needs to stall because the narrator is stuck on telling all the facts of a particular situation, then that’s what happens. You don’t necessarily comprehend why everything is written the way it’s written, but it somehow all feels important by the end. I raced through everything regardless.

And the boy’s objectivity lends a prophetic feel to some of the things he says. He wonders why people think they’re superior to animals, for example. His thinking is that in a couple of centuries the human race might evolve to where the human beings of today end up on display in a zoo. And if we all kill each other through war or wearing out the planet, then insects could end up being the most superior creatures on earth. He has interesting theories on the constellations, the Big Bang theory, major religions, etc.

Sure, a general comparison could be made to the movie “Rainman”, except that this book gives complete attention to the afflicted character, Christopher. It breaks down one of society’s more recent creations - the mental institution, one of the big barriers between “us” and “them”. You discover there’s a ton of humanity and things to consider and learn from someone you may have previously been too nervous to be around.