A Boy Who Sees Everything: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

The 15-year-old narrator of Mark Haddon's novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time sometimes daydreams of a global pandemic. He is Christopher Boone, 15 years old, aware that he does not read feelings from facial expressions, understand figures of speech, and laugh at jokes as others do. His dream illness spreads like a computer virus with code transmitted by words or facial expressions, even through TV. Soon, the world is left only to people like Christopher, and he's happy to have the streets and candy shops to himself, no one to touch him or to confuse him with emotional demands.

Christopher tells us his dream in one of the chapters that take him away from his own story at moments when he has feelings too strong to handle. Charming, funny, informative, these intersticial chapters concern his interests in math, language, science, and what he has learned about his own mind from his teacher at a school for kids with special needs. Christopher also digresses to tell us about Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes matters because this is Christopher's own detective story. It begins with Christopher's discovery of the neighbor's dog stabbed to death with a pitchfork. The apt title alludes to a famous line of Holmes from The Hound of the Baskervilles. Christopher shares with Holmes "the power of detaching his mind at will"(73).

Christopher emphatically does not admire Holmes's creator Arthur Conan Doyle because the author, yearning to contact his dead son, swallowed the lies of spiritualism (88). Christopher himself rejects afterlife as something made up by people who can't handle death -- although he likes to think of molecules in smoke from his mother's cremation now float in clouds over Africa or Antarctica (33). When Christopher's investigation uncovers lies he has been told, the detective story morphs into an odyssey through the underworld of the London Underground -- a harrowing journey except for a delightful moment when, seeing an escalator for the first time, he laughs.

Christopher shares another trait with Holmes: "I see everything" (140). But this putative super-power is also a liability, the reason why Christopher can't bear new places. He explains

If I am in a place I know, like home, at school, or the bus, or the shop, or the street, I have seen almost everything in it beforehand and all I have to do is to look at the things that have changed or moved. [For example, one day] someone had graffitied CROW APTOK to lamppost 437 in our street, which is the one outside number 35.

But most people are lazy. They never look at everything. They do what is called glancing, which is the same word for bouncing off something and carrying on almost the same direction, e.g., when a snooker ball glances off another snooker ball.

In this passage, we see direct declarative sentences, schoolboy-perfect punctuation, and precise recollection of numbers, elements of the voice that Mark Haddon has created for his narrator.

Haddon's narrative voice is the glory of this novel, for Christopher's emotional detachment is funny and heart-breaking. While the boy cannot always identify his own feelings, we feel for him. He's so vulnerable, sometimes groaning to muffle his own overwhelming perceptions or gripping the Swiss army knife in his pocket when he feels Stranger Danger. Like his hapless father, we want to hold the boy safe. When Christopher's father arrives at the police station to take the boy home, Christopher describes how his father

held up his right hand and spread his fingers out in a fan. I held up my left hand and spread my fingers out in a fan and we made our fingers and thumbs touch each other. We do this because sometimes Father wants to give me a hug, but I do not like hugging people so we do this instead, and it means he loves me. (16)

The boy can work complex math problems in his head, and he can recall everything he sees, but he's clueless in ways that he doesn't understand. We want to shield him from neighbors, cops, and shopkeepers who presume that he's mocking them.

But he's also wise. Seeing an ad urging tourism to "see new things," Christopher opines, "You can see new things by looking at earth under a microscope or drawing the shape of a solid made when 3 circular rods of equal thickness intersect at right angles." He could think years about the things in just one house, he tells us. "And also, a thing is interesting because of thinking about it and not because of being new" (178).

Mark Haddon's book, making us think about our world through Christopher's mind, makes us see the world as new. According to Wikipedia, Haddon is "a hard-line atheist." But to an Episcopalian like me, his story draws attention to the wonder of creation, the insidious consequences of sin (of which the death of a dog is just the first sign), the aching need for redemption, and a tearful joy when redemption comes.

[The image is my collage of photos and designs from various productions of the dramatization by Simon Stephens, first produced at England's National Theatre in 2012. They all share the motif of a three-dimensional matrix, an image of Christopher's mind.]