Simplicity made Engrossing (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon)

Member Name: triplecthegame

Product:	The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Date:	08/06/05 (1844 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Something different

Disadvantages: The mathematics chapters

It take’s a lot of guts and courage to release a product that’s a break from the norm - its so easy to stick with what you think the public’ll want to buy, luckily Mark Haddon’s not listened to that trail of thought and gone out to release something new and unique in ‘The Curious Incident’

The storyline follows the adventures of 15 year old Christopher who’s been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome which is a form of Autism - He enjoys mathematics (especially prime numbers hence every chapter is a prime number not 1,2,3,4,etc), detective stories and going out for walks in the early hours of the morning, he hates’ having food on his plate touching each other, being touched and the colours brown and yellow, when he was younger his mother died of a heart-attack and his father raises him with his ‘friend’ who’s also his female neighbour

On one of Christopher’s many night-time trips he finds Wellington his next door neighbours dog dead with a garden fork sticking out of his stomach. As Christopher enjoys detective story’s he decides that he’s going to find out what happened to Wellington and write a book about it - its this book that you’ll be reading if you give ‘The Curious Incident’ a go.

The first and obviously biggest obstacle was the fact that Christopher isn’t going to see the world today in the eyes of Joe Average on the street so of course the book is going to be different to that of a normal style, in choosing to go down this route Haddon was running the risk of writing what would be later considered a classic book or writing something that just doesn’t work at all - to be honest I’m happy to report that its the former as the uniqueness of the style of writing.

The innocence in everything that Christopher sees is what makes the book so endearing - a good example is when his Dad shouts at him for playing detective - instead of getting upset and running away like a lot of 15 year olds would do, he just agrees not to upset ‘Father’ and continues going about his normal routine, in a review this may sound like it’d make for a dull book but in actual fact it seems to liven it up even more, however a slight trait in one of the characters isn’t going to be enough to make a book a Whitbread Prize Winner (like this one was).

The storyline itself is extremely intricate and unravels itself piece by piece throughout the book leaving the reader interested and wanting to know what happens next, nothing that happens is ever of the ‘unbelievable factor’ but there are several times when I was reading it and was stunned at the revelation that the page I was reading had to offer, there’s a swerve half-way through the book which to be honest on reflection I’m glad happened as it set off a whole new arm of the story which took the story from average to good, but I’m digressing - the actual swerve was placed in so unexpectedly that it made you want to carry on with the story before you got on with anything else (which was hard for me because I was reading in my lunch breaks at work) and in any book that’s the factor that the author has to be looking at.

Another part that makes it so intricate a book to read is because of Christopher’s condition you actually get a full-blown description of almost every character you come across from the guard at the train station to his special needs school teacher - you’re given enough information that you can paint a mental picture of everyone involved in the tale as well as a lot of the surrounding scenery, which only makes for the book to be even more engrossing because you begin to feel that you know the characters being written about and want to get to know what happens to them next, yet again because its being told in the eyes of a youngster the story will fall off the plot a few times which although frustrating is actually integral for making the story even more readable.

However it has to be said that at times the parts where the plot gets left alone can get quite irritating - I can understand exactly why Haddon’s included them in the book - it goes to show what one aspect of asperger’s can be, however at times when the story gets to a point where you’re wanting to know what’s going to happen next it can be annoying to read a chapter where Christopher talks about one of his favourite mathematics problems, but then again its only a mild irritant and not enough to put you completely off the storyline just at times its a tad out of place.

All in all you’ll find this a great read for something to read either whilst on break’s at work or perhaps if you have a long journey ahead at you, its the kind of book that’s enough to keep you submerged enough that it takes your mind of anything else and grabs your whole attention and if you can endure the short rambles about mathematics problems and the fact that you don’t get your normal chapter numbers then you’re in for a good read.

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