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Essay on The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime by Mark Haddon
Mark Haddon was born in 1962 at Northampton. Mark graduated from Merton College, Oxford, in 1981. Mark has a lot into his career over the years since graduating, with working as a live in volunteer to working a string of part-time jobs in London, from theatre box office to bicycle mail order work.
At first glance, Mark Haddon’s novel has all the accessories of literary gamesmanship. The convoluted title appears on the front cover exclusively in lower-case print, and a quick turn over through the within pages reveals a massive amount of pictures and diagrams supplementing the narrative. These outward personalities seem to indicate a preference for style over substance, as if the text alone punctuation intact would be insufficient to hold the attention of experienced readers. What a wonderful surprise it was, then, to discover within these trussed-up pages one of the year’s most simple and strikingly original stories.
In a publishing foremost, Mark’s latest book and first novel for older readers, 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time' has been published concurrently in two imprints. It has sold co-editions in no less than fifteen other countries. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime is the often amusing and compelling story of Christopher, an adolescent with Asperger’s Syndrome. Shown through his unwavering eyes, his family and associations come under sharp scrutiny in this unforgettable novel.
Writing his first novel from the point of view of an autistic 15-year-old, Mark Haddon takes the reader into the chaos of autism and creates a character of such empathy that many readers will begin to feel for the first time what it is like to live a life in which there are no filters to eliminate or order the millions of pieces of information that come to us through our senses every instantaneous of the day.....
