The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon

Author: Mark Haddon

Length: 268 pages

Release Date: June 17 2003

Publisher: Vintage Publishing

Blurb

Fifteen year old Christopher has a photographic memory. He understands maths. He understands science. What he can’t understand are other human beings.

When he finds his neighbour’s dog lying dead on the lawn, he decides to rack down the killer and write a murder mystery about it. But what other mysteries will he end up uncovering?

Review

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was a recommendation from my English teacher and so I had high hopes for this novel. Sadly these hopes were never realised; in defence of the book it did what it set out to do, to tell the story of an autistic boy searching for the killer of his neighbour’s dog, but sadly Christopher’s observations, no matter how necessary, did not make for terribly interesting reading.

Haddon’s book started well enough, and Wellington’s slaying did sound truly horrendous, but the narrative took a down hill slide from there. The writing came across as bald, the story seemed to have nowhere to go and although it was of the purposes of a realistic novel, wading through list after list of Christopher’s superfluous observations slowly saw my brain disconnecting. I don’t know, perhaps I wasn’t looking at this book in the right perspective, but reading this book became a chore in parts, where the plot seemed to come to a solid stand still and I found no interest in Christopher’s investigation of Wellington’s death.

Christopher himself was a sweet character, his disability resulting in an infantile persona that I found quite endearing. No, I had no problem with the main character; it was quite often the characters around Christopher that I found quite annoying. His father and neighbours were callous and selfish, tactless and presumptuous. They seemed to only serve the purpose of making Christopher’s life even harder than it was already, though a few of the tender moments Christopher shared with his father were actually quite touching. There is another character I could mention, but that would involve major plot spoilers, but they were similar to Christopher’s other relations, forever moaning about how hard coping with Christopher’s disability was and yeah, I am sure it is difficult, but they never seemed to care about what Christopher was feeling, so really I felt no sympathy for the secondary characters of this novel.

There is one twist in this book that I found quite interesting, but it was strung out and easily guessed, and so ultimately failed to win The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time any favours. Each page seemed to drag on forever and even though it is quite a slim volume, it is often the smaller books that the reader does not like that takes longer than the six hundred page tome; so was the case with this book. The blurb to this novel sounded really interesting, and with a star recommendation how could I not give it a try? Do I regret reading this book? Never, it just showed me that what other people think is a good book does not mean that it is good for me.

Overall, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time proved to be a little bit of a disappointment. With a plot that seemed disjointed and wooden, this novel felt like a long slog with very little pay off at the end of it all. Other people my get a lot of enjoyment out of the book, but at the end of the day not every recommendation will lead you to your next favourite read, and although it was decent enough, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time isn’t brushing my top fifty.