Book Report: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

I had walked past this book by Mark Haddon several times, and every time it caught my eye.
So I bought it.

This novel starts with a simple plot: 15 year-old autistic Christopher Boone discovers his neighbor's dog, a standard poodle named Wellington, has been murdered. So he sets out to discover who did it.

Christopher quickly becomes one of the most unique and fascinating characters you will meet. Haddon writes him with a rawness and matter-of-factness that could only come from years of working with autistic children. Christopher is complex but views the world in black and white, does not pity himself and does not elicit sympathy from the audience, either. Christopher knows he's different from most people but that's just the way it is. He's developed coping mechanisms and had reached a point in his life where he can be pretty comfortable. But as the story progresses, bigger problems unfold. In fact, we learn who killed Wellington half-way through the story, but at that point, it is far from over.

Haddon lets Christopher drench the story with an extremely personal first person POV (the book reads as if it is Christopher's journal) and includes tons of visual clues. There are heaps of run on sentences, footnotes, and nearly every paragraph begins with 'And'. At one point, Christopher is having a conversation at the train station that stretches over two pages in length, and each line beings with alternating 'And I said:/And he said:'. This was a bold choice by Haddon, and a noticeable one, but it seemed to fit with Christopher's character and only lended to the rhythm. Several lines are laugh-out-loud funny:

"And another good thing was that I helped Mother paint her room White With A Hint Of Wheat, except I got paint in my hair and she wanted to wash it out by rubbing shampoo on my head when I was in the bath, but I wouldn't let her, so there was paint in my hair for 5 days and then I cut it out with a pair of scissors."

This book seems to break almost all the grammatical rules I know, but Haddon is not a new writer and the story seemed to call for it. Very well handled novel, especially once you realize how badly it could have gone.
Five out of five stars and a tip of the hat to Mark Haddon.