The Reading Monk

The uniqueness of Mark Haddon’s book lies not entirely in its mystery plot but more so in the choice of its protagonist – a 15 year old boy with autism who is unable to comprehend facial expressions, slangs, tone of voice, humour, sarcasm and figures of speech – to undertake the exploration of the human condition. The story is told in the first person narrative by Christopher John Francis Boone in the form of a mystery novel school assignment.

It unfolds with the discovery of his neighbour, Mrs Shear’s pet poodle dead on her front lawn, impaled with a garden fork. Christopher is holding the dead dog in his arms when Mrs Shears opens her front door and screams. She calls the police and in the ensuing questioning, Christopher hits the police officer when he grabs his arm. He gets arrested for assault and is released with a caution.

Going home with his father, Ed Boone, we learn that father and son have been living alone for the past 2 years. Christopher’s mother, Judy apparently died of a heart attack though later on in the book, it becomes apparent that this is a lie by Ed to cover up the fact that Judy left him and Christopher for Mrs Shears’ husband, Roger.  An affair that would evolve to be central to Christopher’s investigation of the dog’s death – one that he doggedly pursues despite the repeated warnings by his father to cease it.

It is in this context that Haddon marvelously conveys the realm of autism to us through Christopher. We are privy to his ordered and routined life, eg. seeing 4 red cars on the road meant a good day, 5 red cars meant a super good day, or counting the number of times he played minesweeper in one afternoon (76 games) and playing the expert version in 102 seconds (which is 3 seconds off his own best time of 99 seconds), drinking orange squash at 2.07pm, insisting that there be no yellow colour in his food (often solved by adding red food colouring) because yellow amongst other things reminds him of sweet corn (it comes out in your poo and you don’t digest it so you are not really meant to eat it, like grass or leaves) or yellow flowers (hay fever from flower pollen).

Christopher sums up his mental condition like this -

My memory is like a film. That is why I am really good at remembering things, like the conversations I have written down in this book, and what people are wearing, and what they smelled like, because my memory has a smelltrack which is like a soundtrack.

And when people ask me to remember something I can simply press Rewind and Fast Forward and Pause like on a video recorder, but more like a DVD player because I don’t have to Rewind through everything in between to get to a memory of something a long time ago. And there are no buttons, either, because it is happening in my head.

Christopher’s inability to understand humour and taking everything in the literal sense provide for many moments of comedy. He struggles when hearing a joke, to suspend his mind’s inclination to view everything through logic. And yet Haddon successfully explains this to us so we see it from Christopher’s point of view.

This will not be a funny book. I cannot tell jokes because I do not understand them. Here is a joke, as an example. It is one of Father’s.

His face was drawn but the curtains were real.

I know why this is meant to be funny. I asked. It is because drawn has three meanings, and they are (1) drawn with a pencil, (2) exhausted, and (3) pulled across a window, and meaning 1 refers to both the face and the curtains, meaning 2 refers only to the face, and meaning 3 refers only to the curtains.

I try to say the joke to myself, making the word mean three different things at the same time, it is like hearing three different pieces of music at the same time, which is uncomfortable and confusing and not nice like white noise. It is like three people trying to talk to you at the same time about different things.

But most of all, this is a poignant story of a boy who ventures out of his safe cocoon in search of a logical solution to a simple mystery that isn’t so simple in the end. Christopher’s resort to mathematics to break down the complex situations he encounters only lends tenderness to his story, making us feel for him more.

Some things are common to us all – like emotions. We just feel it in different ways.

I give this book a 4 out of 5. It is short but very memorable. I’m really glad I read it.