Mark Haddon, The
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, 2003
People found this book a very compelling read. Some were surprised that it is a children’s book as they were not sure what children would make of it. It certainly helps one to understand a bit better when people look odd or behave oddly.
Some days before the
meeting, Ranmali sent round a link to an online questionnaire pointing to
certain character features on the Asperger’s Syndrome / autistic spectrum. The
website makes it clear that many people who do not actually suffer from those
disorders can have plenty of these features. Sure enough, Helena, Ana and Irene
all found they had scores of between 24 and 32 – relatively high! Introduction
and link copied at the end of this post.
Notes and reflections
stemming from our discussion:
Christopher needs to work by rules – loves mathematics and science; when Rhodri asks how he’s doing, ‘I said “I’m doing very well, thank you,” which is what you are supposed to say.’ He wants there to be rules for understanding human facial expressions, and cannot deal with metaphors – and so dislikes and despises them; dislikes novels.
No understanding of love at all. “I know Father
loves me because...” and a check-list. When he becomes afraid of his father, he
works out that he will have to go to his mother after discounting other
possibilities on his list, not because he loves her; he cannot respond to her when
she wants to hold his hand.
He sees people – his parents, Siobhan – in
totally utilitarian terms, as people who are, or are not, useful to him. When he
gets exam panic, “I wanted to hit somebody or stab them with my Swiss Army
Knife, but there wasn’t anyone to hit or stab with my Swiss Army Knife except
the Reverend Peters and he was very tall and if I hit him or stabbed him with my
Swiss Army Knife he wouldn’t be my invigilator for the rest of the exam.”
His happiest dream is a world without any human
being except himself, and possibly other people like him, where everyone else
has died or been killed.
He wants to reduce everything to something that
works by rules and is therefore intelligible – his mind, other people, and the
universe; and concludes that belief in God is just stupidity.
Haddon is a professed atheist. He has said that
Christopher isn’t meant to be autistic or Aspergers Syndrome, specifically. To
a believer, it seems as though Christopher is a portrait of what happens to
people who close their minds to the spirit.
Both his parents really love him. His
father is determined to rebuild their relationship no matter how long it takes.
His mother, although she walked out, is constant in writing to him even though
she never gets a reply. The spelling mistakes in her letters make you feel you
know her. She doesn’t handle Christopher well at all (and recognises this). His
father handles him much better (and recognises it, because ‘we’re not that
different, me and you’).
There is a lot of irony in the book in that
Christopher describes his father’s reactions and behaviour without any
understanding of what he is feeling, but the reader understands Ed and suffers
with him.
--
Psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues at Cambridge's Autism Research Centre have created the Autism-Spectrum Quotient, or AQ, as a measure of the extent of autistic traits in adults. In the first major trial using the test, the average score in the control group was 16.4. Eighty percent of those diagnosed with autism or a related disorder scored 32 or higher. The test is not a means for making a diagnosis, however, and many who score above 32 and even meet the diagnostic criteria for mild autism or Asperger's report no difficulty functioning in their everyday lives.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/9.12/aqtest.html
