Reading Group Roundup: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon.
Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger’s Syndrome. He knows a lot about maths and loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates being touched and finds people unreadable. He has never gone further than the end of the road on his own, but when he finds a neighbour’s dog murdered he sets out on a terrifying journey which turns his whole world upside down.
Curious Incident was published 20 years ago but it’s one of those books that seems to re-surface in waves. In the last few months three of our groups have read it – at Wormwood Scrubs, at Pentonville and at Bullingdon. The report this month comes from the Pentonville group who had lots to say.
Several people reported first-hand encounters with autism. One had worked with autistic teenagers in a special school and another had been a football coach for an autistic teenager. Others recognised themselves in Christopher and shared their own autistic experiences such as an inability to use a zebra crossing if ‘the wrong sort of car’ approached. One member bravely spoke out:
‘In fact, being in this room now, so close to other people, is hard for me – it feels like sensory overload.‘
And there was general agreement about the special challenges of prisons for autistic people:
‘It’s the noise more than anything else, sometimes it feels unbearable.’
Almost everyone commented on the book’s visual strangeness – it’s full of diagrams, lists, maps and puzzles which draw the reader in. It’s also told in the 1st Person which helps us understand the world from Christopher’s point of view.
His parents clearly love him but are close to the end of their tether. When anxiety overwhelms him, Christopher is likely to lie down, curl up and moan regardless of where he is. If strangers accidentally touch him he lashes out uncontrollably. Most difficult of all is that he can’t openly express love, either in words or gestures. Indeed it’s hard for the reader – or his parents – to know if he can experience it.
The only physical gestures of affection Christopher uses are towards animals, his pet rat and the dead dog he finds. We talked about why it might be easier for him to love an animal than another human being and that led us to the question of whether animals can love us – and to the inevitable dogs v cats debate.
We also talked about the critical backlash from people with autism about whether someone without direct experience could write about it authentically. Some were uneasy about it but most argued that imagining people different from yourself is what novelists are all about and that the book had helped to bring autism to the fore and make us all think more about neurodiversity. And everyone agreed on the irony of Haddon using his novelist’s imagination to create a character who lacks it.
Check out your library to see if your prison has a reading group. If not, encourage your librarian to have a look at PRG’s website www.prisonreadinggroups.org.uk.
PRG is part of Give a Book.
