BOOK REVIEW Understanding 'Curious Incident'

The story probes the delusions of communication and a dog's death.
By MARTA SALIJ
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
"The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," by Mark Haddon (Doubleday, $22.95)
Near the end of Mark Haddon's lovely debut novel, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time," a 15-year-old boy is sitting in a London subway station.
"And the trains coming in and out of the station were in a rhythm, like music or drumming," he writes. "And it was like counting and saying, 'Left, right, left, right, left, right,' which Siobhan taught me to do to make myself calm. And I was saying in my head, 'Train coming. Train stopped. Train going. Silence. Train coming. Train stopped. Train going,' as if the trains were only in my mind. And normally I don't imagine things that aren't happening because it is a lie and it makes me feel scared, but it was better than watching the trains coming in and out of the station because that made me feel even more scared."
The boy, Christopher, is not entirely well, which you might have guessed. But his difficulty in getting on a subway train is more than merely a description of his problems or a plot device, but also a reminder of two key challenges every novelist faces. How to get the reader to take the leap onto your storytelling train? And how to make sure he understands anything of what you're telling him?
The wonder of this deceptively simple book is how successfully Haddon uses Christopher's problems as a metaphor for the inherent frustrations in making yourself understood. "The Curious Incident" is as much about our delusions of communication as it is about a boy and a dog.
Autistic narrator
Christopher Boone is autistic. He has a gift for logic and mathematics, but no gift at all for understanding the nuances of the people around him.
He also is terrified of physical contact -- he'll permit people to touch his fingertips only -- and terrified of crowds. His closest friend is his pet rat, Toby, and his closest human friend is his teacher, Siobhan.
One day Christopher discovers the body of a neighbor's dog impaled on a garden fork. He decides to figure out who killed the dog, just as his hero, Sherlock Holmes, would.
And he decides to write down an account of his detective work in the form of "The Curious Incident." Christopher, who says he doesn't like "proper novels," does like murder mysteries. They have puzzles in them.
Off he goes to gather clues, at least until his father tells him to "stay out of other people's business." The father should have known to be more specific; Christopher, who is literal the way 3-year-olds are literal, has no idea how to obey, "because I do lots of things with other people, at school and in the shop and on the bus."
Do you understand?
Ah, my. A "normal" reader, one who is used to reading novels, would quickly see that there is something in the dog's murder that Christopher's father doesn't want him to find out. And that normal reader might also intuit that there will be other miseries for Christopher to stumble into, such as the explanation of his 38-year-old mother's fatal heart attack two years earlier.
But it would be wrong for the reader to think that he has a better understanding of this story than the autistic teenager telling it.
"The Curious Incident" is the rare book that repays reading twice in quick succession, once as the normal reader you are, then again with the idea that your normal reading isn't much help.