The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
by Mark Haddon
Right, we now can identify the major trends in early 21st-century novel writing:
- Gaming the narrator
- Swindon
The perfectly brilliant Middlesex gives an instance of the first; Jeffrey Eugenides creates an omniscient narrator who is also not one but two characters, concealing the real protagonist in the way a recessive gene is concealed. Jasper Fforde's "Thursday Next" novels feature a narrator who's in play part of the time, but Fforde's major contribution to literature at the start of our century may be the Swindon setting of his alternate-universe stories.
Well, Curious follows both trends. The narrator is Swindonian adolescent Christopher John Francis Boone, who knows every prime number up to 7,057. After explaining how a killing in his neighborhood led him to begin writing, Christopher announces:
This will not be a funny book. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them. Here is a joke, as an example. It is one of Father's.
His face was drawn but the curtains were real.
I know why this is meant to be funny. I asked. It is because drawn has three meanings, and they are (1) drawn with a pencil, (2) exhausted, and (3) pulled across a window, and meaning 1 refers to both the face and the curtains, meaning 2 refers only to the face, and meaning 3 refers only to the curtains.
If I try to say the joke to myself, making the word mean the three different things at the same time, it is like hearing three different pieces of music at the same time, which is uncomfortable and confusing and not nice like white noise. It is like three people trying to talk to you at the same time about different things.
And that is why there are no jokes in this book.
I can tell you noticed. Christopher doesn't put his sentences together the way you and I do, and he doesn't put his thoughts together our way either. In the entire text of Curious you'd be hard pressed to find one event to which he responds in an expected or routine way. There is nothing scattered or discomposed about his thinking: It's just different. Christopher is a good mathematician; in an appendix to the novel he states a proof in geometry that is clever and clear and, what's more, reads the way your proof or mine would, if we could do one. But when he feels his readers need to know why he hates brown, this is what he gives them:
1. Dirt
2. Gravy
3. Poo
4. Wood (because people used to make machines and vehicles out of wood, but they don't anymore because wood breaks and goes rotten and has worms in it sometimes, and now people make machines and vehicles out of metal and plastic, which are much better and more modern)
5. Melissa Brown (who is a girl at school, who is not actually brown like Anil or Mohammed, it's just her name, but she tore my big astronaut painting into two pieces and I threw it away even after Mrs. Peters sellotaped it together again because it looked broken)
What happens to the narrator-character is pretty straightforward; what happens to the reader is subtle. Because Christopher must understand the evidence before he can tell it to us, we have to try understanding him and the people around him as he recounts his investigation. Mark Haddon (who worked with autistic people in earlier years) has found a way --- a thousand science fiction authors wish they'd thought of it --- to induce the reader into what amounts to an alien system of logic and discourse. It's alien because it doesn't use categories and syllogisms that are familiar to us, but it's vitally comprehensible because Christopher is enacting the system and describing it in language we share with him.
While Christopher doesn't tell jokes, Curious is a comic novel and quite a good one. The narrator's surprise and bafflement at ordinary happenings and his calm in the face of shocking ones never wear thin. So we get two for the price of reading one: deepthink about cognition plus a (mostly) funny story. And in the end you may wonder, as I do: Instead of calling Christopher "special" because he is odd, why not call him special because he is a fine smart storyteller?
Oh, Swindon. It's a city in northeasternmost Wiltshire, with a bypass, a Victorian Turkish bath establishment, and countless other amenities. In the "Thursday Next" world it is the administrative center for the county of Wessex. Probably it's a nice enough place to live and no more mythic than Reading or Eastbourne. Please don't ask me to explain how it became the nexus of contemporary British fiction.
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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time