Monday 18 June 2012

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon

Monday 11th June 2012

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.

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Take The AQ Test
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