A book review

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A beautifully written book delving into an autistic mind, viewing the world and relationships through the thoughts of a 15 year old boy.
It is the story of a boy, an avid fan of Sherlock Holmes, who wants to find the killer of a dog that has been brutally murdered.
The writing is racy and grips you right through. It is a one sitting read.
I shall leave you with some pertinent excerpts from the book and urge you all to give the book a read. You will not regret it.

I think people believe in heaven because they don’t like the idea of dying, because they want
to carry on living and they don’t like the idea that other people will move into their house and put
their things into the rubbish.

All the other children at my school are stupid. Except I’m not meant to call them stupid,
even though this is what they are. I’m meant to say that they have learning difficulties or that they
have special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning to speak French or understanding relativity is difficult and also everyone has special needs, like
Father, who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him from getting fat, or Mrs. Peters, who wears a beige-colored hearing aid, or
Siobhan, who has glasses so thick that they give you a headache if you borrow them, and none of
these people are Special Needs, even if they have special needs.

People think that alien spaceships would be solid and made of metal and have lights all over
them and move slowly through the sky because that is how we would build a spaceship if we were able to build one that big. But aliens, if they exist, would probably be very different from us. They might look like big slugs, or be flat like reflections. Or they might be bigger than planets. Or they might not have bodies at all. They might just be information, like in a computer. And their spaceships might look like clouds, or be made up of unconnected objects like dust or leaves.
And sometimes, when someone has died, like Mother died, people say, “What would you
want to say to your mother if she was here now?” or “What would your mother think about that?”
which is stupid because Mother is dead and you can’t say anything to people who are dead and dead people can’t think.

Eventually scientists will discover something that explains ghosts, just like they discovered
electricity, which explained lightning, and it might be something about people’s brains, or
something about the earth’s magnetic field, or it might be some new force altogether. And then
ghosts won’t be mysteries. They will be like electricity and rainbows and nonstick frying pans.
And it made me think how all the water in the world was connected, and this water had evaporated from the oceans somewhere in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico or Baffin Bay, and now it was falling in front of the house and it would drain away into the gutters and flow to a sewage station where it would be cleaned and then it would go into a river and go back into the ocean again.

People who believe in God think God has put human beings on the earth because they
think human beings are the best animal, but human beings are just an animal and they will evolve
into another animal, and that animal will be cleverer and it will put human beings into a zoo, like
we put chimpanzees and gorillas into a zoo. Or human beings will all catch a disease and die out or they will make too much pollution and kill themselves, and then there will only be insects in the world and they will be the best animal.



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