lightreads

Christopher Boone is a fifteen-year-old high-functioning autistic who sets out to solve the murder of his neighbor’s dog. He bites off a lot more than he anticipated, though, and things get more complicated as Christopher discovers there are a lot of mysteries around him, even within his own fractured family.

This is a first-person narrative. It’s arrhythmic and off-kilter and peppered with Christopher’s odd side-trips and mathematical puzzles. There are a lot of things this book does very well, not the least of which is successfully selling me the fictional autobiography form – I pretty much never like that, but here it works quite well. The book also does an incredibly good job with layered narratives: the straight factual line of Christopher’s narrative, layered with the reader’s wider perception of the social cues and emotional undercurrents which Christopher misinterprets or misses entirely. It’s an incredibly difficult trick to manage throughout the whole book, particularly when trying to foster narrator-reader empathy, but Haddon does it very well. He also draws complicated, deeply flawed characters all around Christopher, and he never once balks at compassionately showing us just how much we can all screw up sometimes.

This is not a comfortable book, mostly for that double-narrative. It’s a messy story, full of overwhelmed people and wrenching situations. Christopher finds himself in the middle of many emotionally charged scenes, and I really admire the way Haddon preserves Christopher’s symptomatic emotional disconnection while also doing some fast and subtle footwork to show just how much is going on in Christopher’s head that he simply doesn’t have the vocabulary or normally functioning circuits to talk about.

There was controversy about this book, as you might expect. Some autistic readers were simply unconvinced by Christopher’s purported self-awareness – a necessary device to educate the uninformed reader about his various symptoms and fears. I’m not about to cast judgment on this book’s worthiness as a representative of autism, except that I view with instant skepticism any community response which basically boils down to, “but your character’s experiences aren’t exactly like mine.” I will grant that Christopher is a much stronger communicator than you’d expect for his age and the severity of his symptoms, and that he displays far too many normative logical thought patterns. But you know, I’ve also spent a lot of time talking to people in the neurodiversity movement, and I’m just not interested in coming down hard on a book for ‘not doing it right,’ particularly when the words “autism” or “Asperger’s” never appear in the text. Because that would just be too ironic.

It’s a great book, really. It made me uncomfortable a lot, but it was supposed to. It avoided the pitfalls of this kind of story – ‘autistic boy overcomes the obstacles and fears of his condition to solve a mystery! Hugs and warm hearts for all!’ and I’m honestly still marveling a bit over the smoothness of the doubled narratives. Neat trick, that. I think the book suffers by its own unusual nature – because of what he is, Christopher is incapable of completing the sort of emotional journey arc we expect in modern fiction. But that’s not so much a failing as another facet of an unusual, well-crafted story. Highly recommended.