The voice in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is unmistakable. It is the voice of someone with Special Needs, as psychology and social labels would tell one. It is the voice of Christopher who, in his yawning impotence in the face of complicated human emotions, finds refuge in mathematics and the sciences. It is the voice of a young man who refuses to be touched, disdains metaphors and the color yellow, and spreads out his fingers in a fan to express love for his father and mother.
Christopher, who likes prime numbers and solves quadratic equations in his head out of boredom or panic, discovers the murder of Wellington, a dog in the neighborhood. He embarks on a detective work largely patterned after Sherlock Holmes’s; he interviewed strangers, picked out a Red Herring and a prime suspect, and adopted a chain of reasoning. He puts to good use his photographic memory.
The investigation leads Christopher to a discovery of a kept truth in his life, and he is now the unwilling main character in his self-devised mystery narrative. In his confusion, fear, and hurt, he draws strength from the irrevocability of logic and intelligent thinking. During a difficult moment, he even exhibits a certain self-consciousness and imagines a deadly virus on earth, where “there is no one left in the world except people who don’t look at other people’s faces and who don’t know what these pictures (emoticons) mean and these people are all special people like me.”
There are plenty of heartbreaking bits in this novel, and author Mark Haddon, who has worked with autistic individuals as a young man, knows how to excavate an emotional site with the use of seemingly detached pronouncements: “I couldn’t hear people talking so I felt much calmer and it was nice,” or “..or I will get a lady to marry me and be my wife and she can look after me so I can have company and not be on my own.” With a matter-of-fact tone – a seemingly neutral treatment of the tale by the narrator himself - readers realize that Christopher’s world are not at all different from theirs, and they are let in on the many different secrets in surviving pain, bewilderment, and too many noises in the head.
