The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

The Author

Mark Haddon was born in 1962 in Northampton and took a degree in English at Merton College Oxford. He is a poet, short-story writer, and screenwriter. Haddon is particularly known as a writer for children, especially for his series of Agent Z books, one of which, Agent Z and the Penguin from Mars, was made into a 1996 Children's BBC sitcom. He also wrote the screenplay for the BBC television adaptation of Raymond Briggs' story Fungus the Bogeyman.. In 2007 he wrote the BBC television drama Coming Down the Mountain.

In 2003, Haddon won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and in 2004, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize Overall Best First Book for his first adult novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, even though his agent also marketed the book as a novel for young adults. Haddon's knowledge of Asperger syndrome comes from his work with autistic people as a young man. However he has said that he did not set out to write a novel about the syndrome, rather that the ´voice´ he needed to tell the story turned out to be the voice of a boy with the syndrome.

Haddon is a vegetarian and describes himself as a 'hard-line atheist'. In an interview with The Observer, Haddon said "I am atheist in a very religious mould". He lives in Oxford with his wife, Dr Sos Eltis, a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, and their two sons.

A second adult novel, A Spot of Bother, was published in September 2006. In 2009, he donated the short story The Island to Oxfam's 'Ox-Tales´ project, four collections of UK stories written by 38 authors. Haddon's story was published in the 'Fire' collection.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is a murder mystery told by a boy with some degree of autism. Fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone is mathematically gifted and socially all at sea. He grows up in a working-class home with parents who can barely cope with their child. He takes everything that he sees, or is told, at face-value, and is unable to interpret the behaviour around him.

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 to discover just who has ´murdered´ Wellington and solve the case, like his admired Sherlock Holmes. (The book´s title comes from a line in a Conan Doyle short story) He is encouraged by Siobhan, a social worker at his school, to write a book about his investigations as a way of organising his thoughts. As the mystery leads him to the secrets of his parents' broken marriage, uses deductive logic to navigate the emotional complexities of a social world that remains a closed book to him. Christopher is a sympathetic boy: not closed off or empty, as the stereotype would have it, but overwhelmed by sensations, lacking the filters that would help him make sense of reality.

Haddon sustains Christopher´s distinctive voice and does a remarkable job in putting the reader inside his head. Having little emotional insight and only really feeling at home with numbers and facts, not people, Christopher shows us what he sees and allows us to draw our own conclusions. Though he insists, "This will not be a funny book. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them," the novel brims with touching and ironic humour.

Questions to think about while reading

How does it feel to see the world through Christopher´s eyes? Does the novel change your perspectives on people with learning difficulties? If so,how?

Haddon has said that his starting point for the novel was the image of a dead dog and that the voice was a point of view decision in order to sustain the plot he wanted. Most readers, however, have responded to the first person narrator. Could the story have been told from any other point of view?

The novel works on several levels. In your view, is it a novel for children or adults- or both?

For an interview with Mark Haddon about the novel go to:

http://www.powells.com/authors/haddon.html