Puzzling over Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

A small reference to Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time has got me thinking about the book’s use of prime numbers (to number the chapters), math problems, and other puzzles. Wrote Janet Masline in a review of education books, An Age of Tainted Admissions and Too Much Homework in last Friday’s New York Times:

A covert enjoyment of numbers, puzzles, cognitive tricks and pattern recognition fueled the vast popularity of the novel “The Curiois Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”–even though the author, Mark Haddon, has nt replicated this gambit in his new novel, “A Spot of Bother.”

Haddon’s use of such puzzles and “cognitive tricks” can be seen as an extended use of the puzzle metaphor of autism—the notion that autistic persons are “mysterious,” with their “bizarre” behaviors and Rainman-ish habits. That is, Haddon’s extended passages on, for instance, the Monty Hall problem can be understood as a way for the average, “neurotypical” reader to understand Christopher, the novel’s Asperger’s Syndrome protagonist: Christopher, who eats only red food from his special box in the kitchen, and thinks a policeman’s nostril hair looks like mice, is himself a puzzle, a cipher, a young man whose odd behaviors and thought processes need to be “solved” by a reader, to understand the novel. Christopher’s expressed fascination with puzzles and math programs is to be read as a sign of his own “puzzling” character.

My own interest in reading Haddon’s first novel was, of course, because my son has autism. And, to me, the central “puzzle” of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time was not Christopher, whose eccentricities (if I may call them that; whose neurological differences) reminded me time and again of things my own son Charlie does.

The central puzzle at the heart of Haddon’s novel for me—-an autism mother trying to write my own autism story—was not “who killed Wellington the dog?” or “why is Christopher autistic?”. The central puzzle of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time posed to me to solve was what was going on with Christopher’s mother.

As I wrote over a year ago in A Live Letter to Charlie (#41):

The full import of his mother’s being alive only occurs to Christopher when he reads several more of the letters; he becomes nauseous and is tenderly cared for by his father, only to run away from him after discovering that his father has killed Wellington, the neighbor’s dog. Christopher concludes, very logically, that he must “go to London to live with Mother,” thus precipitating the main action of the rest of the novel, his uni-directed journey via the London Underground to find her. It is at the end of this (successful) quest that another, deeper reversal occurs. Christopher tells his mother that his father had told him she was dead “and then she made a loud wailing noise like an animal on a nature program on television.” His mother’s response is non-linguistic and not human, the non-verbal noise of an animal; it is “the emotional climax of the novel…a moment of linguistic breakdown” as James Berger writes. In Christopher’s mother’s letters “we witness for the first time a voice, a mind, unmediated by Christopher’s consciousness, and the mother’s voice breaks the novel apart.” The letters represent a non-autistic, “neurotypical” voice that most readers are not only more familiar with, but perhaps feel some relief to encounter after inhabiting Christopher’s autistic perspective for almost 100 pages.

Being an autism mother, the novel’s plot changed entirely for me on learning that my character-counterpart was not dead and the author of letters that are, simultaneously, love letters to her son and live letters.

What does love not drive us to do—-can Christopher’s mother’s leaving him and her husband be understood as how much she loves her son?

It is a tough puzzle to solve. Love, it is said, is not quantifiable—it is infinite, especially a parent’s, a mother’s, love for her boy.

Ever since finishing The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time I have been wondering at the ending—Christopher’s carefully laid out proof of a mathematics problem. After reading Janet Maslin’s comment on the book in An Age of Tainted Admissions and Too Much Homework, the ending of the book makes sense: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time ends with a puzzle, with numbers and math, rather than a narrative because a math problem is the be-all and end-all for Christopher. Ending the novel with such a puzzle is the only logical ending for Haddon’s autistic narrator.

How and what to write after The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time must have been a very tough puzzle to solve and I look forward to reading—yes, to puzzling over—Haddon’s new, second novel, A Spot of Bother.