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

It used to be that when I told people that I worked at a special needs school, people would immediately respond with something like: "Oh like that kid in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Dog in the Night-Time. Have you read it? It's great."

So I picked it up about 6 or 7 years back and read the first couple dozen pages. The answer to the question is: "No, this is not what I do." I put the book back down with a certain amount of irritation. Which is not the books fault, of course.

Outside of that very specialized context, it's a decent book, I suppose. The voice of the narrator, Christopher John Francis Boone, gets a little tedious by the end, but that's probably an inevitability of the Boone's condition. However, his condition is where I get generally irritated. Boone is autistic. So, Haddon, when he wrote The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time spent much of the narrative depicting the strange rules some autistics use to impose order, the strange phobias, and the general impression of overstimulation shared by many types of autism.

In my time teaching special needs, I've become convinced that Autism Spectrum Disorder does not describe one condition but rather a range of conditions sharing similar attributes. Christopher Boone is nothing like the autistic kids I work with. He's way more severe in many ways, and yet in the range of Autism, there are many more severe.

Somehow though, this book became the face of Autism for a time, and I found that irritating. I can also acknowledge that isn't Haddon's fault. He didn't set out to elucidate autism for the masses. He just wrote a book with a somewhat unique narrator.

I shouldn't be irritated, but I still am.