booktastic

Well, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time didn’t work very well to fill up the time between now and whenever The Beekeeper’s Apprentice shows up… because I read the entire thing yesterday.

The book is funny, and sad, and scary, and interesting - and insightful. The author seems to have a very good grasp of the sort of things that fascinate (and fail to fascinate) an autistic person. Obviously, I found this book quite enjoyable and very fast to read.

The Amazon website describes it thusly: “Mark Haddon’s bitterly funny debut novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is a murder mystery of sorts–one told by an autistic version of Adrian Mole . …Late one night, Christopher comes across his neighbor’s poodle, Wellington, impaled on a garden fork. Wellington’s owner finds him cradling her dead dog in his arms, and has him arrested. After spending a night in jail, Christopher resolves–against the objection of his father and neighbors–to discover just who has murdered Wellington.”

Yes, it is a sort of mystery, and I’m interested in mysteries at the moment… but that ceases to be the focus about half way through and after that is totally character-driven. I was interested in the book mostly because the book is told by the autistic main character, Christopher. He makes you understand something about why autistic people act the way they do; he describes things he does and his motivation - how being hugged by his parents makes him panic, and how he doesn’t understand people’s facial expressions, or humor.

That said - I did find myself scowling over several sections of the book. The character spent several pages (on several different occasions) discussing why he doesn’t believe in the existence of God. I thought perhaps this might be the author’s way of truthfully depicting this character - perhaps, due to the formation of his mind, he simply could not fathom the concept of something that exists outside the realm of matter. However, the character had no problem dealing with something as abstract as the concept of time: “…And this means that time is a mystery, and not even a thing, and no one has ever solved the puzzle of what time is, exactly” (p.158). If he could apply a concept like this to time, I see no reason why he couldn’t apply the exact same concept to God: like time, something that we can feel the effects of, but not quantify. Instead, the character goes on several rants about how believing in God is more or less just a stupid comfort for people who don’t want to die. I don’t know enough about autistic people to be able to say whether they commonly feel this way, or whether this is characterization, or whether it’s just the author projecting his own feelings. It did lend to characterization, so I can’t say it was just gratuitous religion-bashing… But there is a known spiritual malaise in modern Britain, so who knows? I’d be interested to hear the author’s thoughts on the matter.

By the by: many of the modern British works of fiction I’ve read seem to feature the main character’s parents getting divorced or committing adultery (or both). What does this mean? I mean, so many works of modern British fiction I’ve read seems to revolve around it: this, Adrian Mole, Bridget Jones … okay, not Harry Potter, but he doesn’t count - his parents are dead.  I don’t know what the answer is to this question, but it’s food for thought. (A side note: this book is similar in some ways to Adrian Mole, but I prefer this, actually.)

Anyway, I have always found books like this, about people whose minds work different from the norm, very interesting. I don’t know why this fascinates me so much; I hesitate to say that I find myself empathizing with them (although I do) because it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense… Let’s just say that, inexplicably, stories like this hold a tremendous attraction for me. That’s why I read Oliver Sacks’s books.

So I read this book in one day, and immediately needed something else. This morning, while relaxing and waiting to head out to an interview for a temp job, I started reading another book from my TBR pile: The Jane Austen Book Club . I like Jane Austen, hence the fact that I have two books with “Jane Austen” in the title in my TBR pile. I’m about two chapter into it at this point. It seems to be in the style of The Joy Luck Club: a group of women get together and have discussions which contrast and reflect in ways the intensely horrible events of their prior lives. I don’t think this book’s group of women is going to have as intensely horrible backgrounds as the women of the Joy Luck Club, but we shall see. I think it’s going to be more of a “women’s book” (you know, they drink tea and cry and support each other, while all the men go around being macho and stupid until they learn to cry and respect women) whereas The Joy Luck Club was more of a cultural book. I hope The Jane Austen Book Club isn’t too much of a women’s book, because I can only take so much of that “women are smart, men are dumb” stuff before I start crying foul. (I kind of hope it’s not too much like The Joy Luck Club either… I seem to recall getting queasy at times while reading that book, although I might be exaggerating). I just wanted a cute book about people who like to read Jane Austen! Oh well. We shall see. — Mrs. Hall

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