The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

While I was on my honeymoon, I ended up finding the time to read a couple of books. When I was returning, I was a little over halfway through The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.



The book bills itself as something of a mystery novel, but light-hearted. The main character is autistic, narrating the book through his own view of the world. In some places, this turns out to be pretty amusing and in others, depressing. I thought I would really enjoy this novel, but in the end, I found it unsatisfying.

I had expected to gain more insight into autism, but from what I read, I was very disappointed. The character was portrayed as incredibly dense and unsympathetic to other people around him which, from my (albeit limited) research into autism following my finishing this book, that just isn't the case. Generally, from what I was reading, autism has more to do with a communication issue than with an inability to understand other people. An autistic child might not understand what is meant by certain facial expressions, but that doesn't mean he has no feelings of his own, and doesn't mean that he cannot recognize when another person might be feeling things through other cues.

Beyond that, as I said earlier, the book was billed as a mystery. The main character finds his neighbor's dog killed in the middle of the night and decides he's going to become a detective and find out what happened. Except that particular mystery is resolved about halfway through the book and for the rest of it, the main character kinda floats through the third act. Once the mystery was resolved, I didn't feel the urge to finish the book for any reason other than I like to finish what I start. I didn't care about any of the characters by that point of the book, I realized.

I finished it off, closed the book, and found myself more excited about reading something else than I was about what I just read.