Not sure what your point is there.
The book works excellently until the boy discovers who killed the dog. After that, I admired how the writer worked at keeping the narrative rolling on, as it must have been excruciatingly difficult to do, but I personally don't think he pulled it off. For example, the scene in the tube station with his pet rodent is plain awful. However, when he walks along keeping his eyes "as slits" so people don't notice him is brilliant.
It's more a long short story than a novel. Haddon got lucky, definitely, but I say fair play to him as he made it as readable as possible.
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I am left wondering exactly how the author managed to delve into the mindset of 'a 15 year old with Aspergers Syndrome'. Men do actually have 'a touch of Aspergers' which comes out in times of extreme stress which looks like a form of social withdrawal ('The Times' 10/07/2004)
I suspect this 'withdrawal' is what the person in the previous post is refering to- perhaps Jeremy's 'friend' had an abusive relationship so started ingoring his spouse by just becoming depressed/staring at the TV/concentrating/whatever and therefore ignoring/angering his former spouse so much she wanted revenge via 'posion pen'. A lot of the story is laced with very dry humour and I would not be surprised if there was alot of womens input in. I myself display this behaviour when my wife nags me (!) Therefore this is not unheard of. There is a reference to this in the novel-
'a virus which is caught because of the meaning of something an infected person says....... and when people get it they just sit on the sofa and don't eat and do nothing and die'.
Post traumatic stress disorder/catatonic schizophrenia/manic depression all have the some of the symptoms as Aspergers- withdrawal socially. All exist in a scale from heavy to light. Catatonic schizophrenia is the heavy end and Aspergers may be the lighter end.
The person the book is -maybe- based on may actually have some sort of problem or displayed this behaviour to someone who took it completely the wrong way. Often it is confused as such when men are concentrating heavily on something important. Aspergers is indeed 'High functioning Autism' which a lot of people must look like they 'have' because they are often concentrating but can basically interact on some level, like Christopher:
An air traffic controller, for instance has to concentrate all day and communicate on a certain level that means life or death so could be percieved as very clever but socially inept because he barks (excuse the pun) orders all day and may not have much of a social life. Police officers may speak an official 'language', as do Solicitors. As any University culture tutor will tell you, the language of the public sphere is male. Women traditionally dominate the private sphere (the home) so the level of communication is different. As these roles have and are constantly changing and evolving, so are levels of communication.
There is no right/wrong, black/white distinction of it. It could perhaps be called a 'continuum of communication'. A working example from the above post:
'When Christopher walks along keeping his eyes "as slits" so people don't notice him is brilliant'.
I do this myself, but not so people will not notice me, it is so I can filter them out when I am concentrating on say, crossing the road- a 'narrowing of eyes' can mean intense concentration in most cases.
Perhaps, just perhaps, it explains a fundamental difference between men and women- women can multitask, concentrate, chat, drive, whatever- all at the same time. Men generally cannot. This is a fact. Perhaps Mark Haddon is a pen name and the writer is in fact a woman or haddon is a woman in disguise? (haha), or Haddon does all the media apperances on behalf of women writers? Who can tell. Only a few know the real situation.
I truly imagine that the novel will be one that is studied and discussed at length in schools, colleges and universities for many years to come. As Haddon said himself, there are undoubtedly many layers to the story on many obvious, subtle and complex levels. What is certain is that it is a truly groundbreaking experiment in narrative.
Okay, the novel doesn't work. The overall mindset of the kid is not convincing. The layers that are referred to, in my mind, arise from the author not having enough control over the narrative. It's a very readable failure, for the first main section, then the text comes apart like a sandcastle.
I think the book is good to read because it is a brillant example of first person narrative gone awry.
In no way is the novel groundbreaking.
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Having just scanned through it again, you are probably right.
It is disjointed most of the way through- perhaps the narrative is 'awry' because Chrisophers adventure goes 'awry'.
As I said before, the narrative probably falls apart because it is an amalgamation of many peoples opinions on this person Jeremy was referring to, some research on Autism and Haddons input of the mathematics. He said himself in an interview 'the Maths was something from my own background', indicating that the writing of the novel was not exclusively all his own input. I suspect that the input was from about 10 women bitching about mens behaviour in general and 3 men who were too afraid to present other opinions.
I found the end particularly disappointing - it kind of fizzled away. I was bored by the end with the character and the situation. The character had started to annoy.
My main thought as I left the book was that there was some manner of political correctness going on - that the book could've been much shorter, but carried on to make it publishing length - that the author/marketing people realised it would be difficult to criticise a work about a sensitive subject.
I did like it a lot - was attracted to Christopher as a character... liked the way adult speach was reported through him so the reader was sympathetic to the adults and Christopher.
I wasn't sure about the London stuff. I got confused and a bit bored with the bit on the train and London. The mum's boyfriend was too much of a villain.
I didn't mind that we found out who killed the dog early on - I took that to mean that Christopher thought all he wanted to know was who killed the dog and actually his investigation was something more human than that.
I do think that Haddon might have tapped into the Holywoodisation (think Rainman) of autism - put an attractive character with special skills and not too much danger up for the public to love. Something tells me Aspergers is more complex and not so 'gloss' as that in many cases...
The voice is quite compelling though, although a good friend just started it and branded it 'annoying'.
I really liked 'The Curious...' and found it to be a much better portrayal of Autism than is the norm in fiction or film.
In another life I was a community support worker, and worked one to one with clients with learning diffuculties in the community. One of my clients was autistic, or more correctly was on the autistioc spectrum and displayed a lot of the kind of thinking that the main protagonist of 'The curious...' does.
The narrator of 'The Curious...' is very high functioning, and probably needs to be to be able to carry the book.
I thought that it caught the incomprehension very well, the lack of gut understanding of the rest of humanity. I often found myself in a similar role to the woman at school who helps him, attempting to explain things that the rest of us take for granted.
It's really easy to get annoyed by autistic people, because they don't play by the same rules of personal interaction as the rest of human beings. The slightly repetitious nature of the narrators voice rang very true in that respect for me.
I liked the fact that the mystery disappeared well before the end of the book, because I think it kind of reflects what the narrator thought was important.
I also thought the way that the narrators inability to deal with ambiguity rang very true also.
Mark, I don't think my friend found the voice annoying because Christopher is autistic as my friend has an autistic son and works with autistic kids on a daily basis.... It's easy to shun criticism of the book because the main character has autism and say people are reacting to that. Maybe some people are reacting to the voice as a voice, not as a voice with autism...
However, I stick by my opinion of enjoying the book, found it very readable and was touched by the stuff about his mum, and the letters from her were very hard to read... I liked that we liked the mum and the dad even though they'd both done things that might normally be judged.
I was thinking about this while making a cup of coffee this morning which makes me a very sad individual indeed. The book is successful because it's light to read and it is very funny. The kid is a nut and that creates some very funny episodes.
The book is not a valid document into the autistic mind. If its a choice between pathos and comedy Haddon goes for the joke, and then by the time he thinks, bloody hell, I better have some serious stuff in here to really appeal to my adult readership, that serious stuff he inserts into the text to try and get the pathos doesn't ring true.
Come on, everything about the trip to London feels tacked on and forced. But then, in the tube station for example, the kid compares the noise of the wheels on the tracks to the clicking of swords. That's a brilliant description.
The character is an idiot savant in the Hollywood tradition. As a document into an autistic mind it is as flabby as you like.
I read the interview with haddon and that made me buy the book. He's a clever bloke who got lucky. But he made his own luck and those first 130 or so pages are terrific to read.
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Hmm- the kid is a nut? To some people he may come across as very single minded and determined to live his own way and might see just other people as mere annoyances on his journey. If he is very clever anyway he must think he is right about everything all the time and above everyone else eg:
'Like Jason at school smells because his family is poor'.
'And Grandmother has pictures in her head too, but her pictures are all confused, like someone muddled her memory up and she can't tell what happened in what order, so she thinks that dead people are still alive and she does'nt know whether something happened in real life or whether it happened in television'
Any sort of autistic person would not make that realisation about someone elses mind if they were indeed autistic.
Therefore I agree that it is not a 'document' into the autistic mind as you say because in his own way he does judge people for himself and can see that other people lead different lives (and therefore have different minds) than him.
This adds weight to the argument that the book is just an attack on some aspects of male social behavior. Like I said before, there is no mention of aspergers syndrome, except on the back cover; the marketers assigned this to the character after the book was written.
Christopher only reveals that he goes to a special school- what the writer(s) are really saying is that they are punishing someone in writing that they know who is very clever and perhaps successful mathematically (they are jealous and insecure about themselves perhaps?) and is an adult but appears to have the mental age of a 15 year old who would attend a special school and does not care about other peoples feelings. This should remind you of a lot of men you encounter in your lives.
Probably based on a nasty manager somewhere (he likes lists), Probably because he has dealt with them and not taken account of their feelings in some way either at some workplace or whatever. The whole novel smacks of an attack on the attitude of men towards women:
Think of the 'classic example' of men who father offspring but run away from their duties. Perhaps many of the writer(s) fathers displayed this behaviour and it was subsequently done to them by a partner. I am not criticising women here; however this sort of thing happens all the time. Men are verbally attacked by women for their shortcomings all the time. The way the book comes across with its humour and dry references to the persons mother (which is really an ex girlfiriend)- I find it hard to believe that a sentence in one of the mothers letters is really about a train set christopher had for xmas:
'And do you remember you were playing with it all day and you refused to go to bed at night because you were still playing with it'
This is not refering to the train set at all- rather a sly criticism about men shagging all over the place and not living up to thier responsibilities as husbands/fathers. When I said that the novel was a groundbreaking experiment in narrative I meant that the writers have included such phrases ambigiously as a sly attack on some man but also allows the book to masquerade as a childrens story. The fact that it is so layered with many phrases that can be interpreted like this on so many levels is an remarkable achievement in itself.
I enjoyed reading it, but it definitely lacked a third act from a structure point of view - however, so does life, so maybe what the writer was trying to achieve was a children's book without a neat ending, where everyone's life was messy and worse than when they began. It would have been very simple and neat to have had Christopher's mother to be saintly and wonderful and had a beautiful reconciliation, but instead what we got was a sense of how difficult it might be to love a child like Christopher unconditionally - her partner certainly wasn't up to the job.
I thought the book was very tight and sharp, up to the train journey, then it got quite baggy. I wouldn't say it was groundbreaking, but it was a very interesting idea to have such a critical plot point as him finding letters from his mum who he believed to be dead narrated by someone who had no idea whatsoever of the consequence of this.
To be honest, I never much care what writers are like in their own life, and I have no interest whatsoever in knowing whether Haddon had an acrimonious relationship breakdown, as is hinted at so strongly by Jeremy - hasn't everyone? He's written a book that made me think and that I enjoyed reading, and though it is flawed it was still a compelling read. And no, I don't think his description of Aspbergers is spot-on, it would be extraordinarily difficult to read a book genuinely narrated by someone with that condition, the author has to pull off certain conceits to make the book flow. And certain symptoms are omitted and others are exagerrated.
I haven't read the book in question, but I've still enjoyed following this debate - literary detective work et al.
I buy the idea that Haddon was, in some ways, taking revenge in writing this book. But thinking of the drawn out process of writing a novel, and considering what's been said about the structure, I find it hard to believe it is a consistent undercurrent, so much as a sporadic peppering. I do it myself - you can be working on a creative project, and something recently has riled you about someone, so you slip in something you want to say to or about them - you know it would just exacerbate things to say it to their face, but you've got to let it out *somewhere*.
I also don't agree that it suggests a female quality to the book - men are just as likely to think of ex-partners as childish and unsympathetic as women. I don't really see what it's got to do with an ability to multi-task!
"....an adult but appears to have the mental age of a 15 year old who would attend a special school and does not care about other peoples feelings. This should remind you of a lot of men you encounter in your lives."
God, I hope not! In fact, at the moment I think I've known more girlies like that. They were, however, about 15 or 16 at the time, so it stands to reason. I think what it *will* remind people of, as you state, is their feelings towards people they've had a messy break-up with.
As for Marc's stylistic points - again, I haven't read the book, but I can see myself being on the opposite side. I loathe obvious structure in novels, and really like it when they trail off somewhere unexpected instead of bringing all the loose ends together. Kurt Vonnegut does it a lot, Leonard Cohen does it all the way through 'Beautiful Losers', and, to an extent, Chesterton does it in 'The Man Who Was Thursday'.
Doesn't he just - Thursday is one of my favourite books, but every time I finish it I do sort of wonder if there's a chapter missing from my print that makes it all a bit clearer...
I am glad that at least someone 'buys' the idea of a revenge novel. I believe that it (to use your words) is a very persistent undercurrent. I will attempt to explain my theory further.
It really does remind me of a woman attempting to discredit a man negatively by pretending to speak AS HIM or FOR HIM- This allows them to be free of any responsibility because it sounds like they are talking about themselves in a mocking way. What they are really doing is mocking/discrediting a man indirectly by pretending on one level to be mocking themselves but on another narrating sarcastically what his view is.
This 'ventriloquism' is the major narrative device of the novel.
That is why I said that Haddon may be a woman in disguise, have too many female hormones, has a burning desire to be a woman, whatever (it would be interesting to get him/her to join this debate!)
I am sure you understand what I mean. Women and some men do it all the time- (so I take your point that it may not be written exclusively by a woman (I am sure that haddon could be just the PR person who got interested in the attack on this real life character and saw dollar signs). The fact that the book is written in first person narrative all of the way through qualifies this eg:
Christopher on talking about wanting to be an astronaut: 'So I would have to be an astronaut on my own or have my own part of my spacecraft which noone else would come into'.
You have all probably read 'Men are from Mars, women are from Venus' where the author says men, when upset like to be 'the dragon in the cave' and be on thier own. We all have male relatives who retire 'to thier study', down the allotment' or to 'the den in the attic' when they want peace and quiet or when they are upset. The (female?) author(s) resent this behaviour and so attribute it to the person they are taking revenge on as having some sort of behavioural disorder.
The whole book is full of this bitter tone. It is an original idea to do this in a book, but it is very underhand, vindictive and spiteful to whoever the book is directed at. I also believe that the father in the novel is the representation of how this person (boyfriend/ husband/whatever) is percieved to have behaved towards the writer(s) during the abusive relationship:
'Father interuputed me and grabbed hold of my hand really hard. Father had never grabbed me like that before. Mother had hit me sometimes because she was a hot tempered person which means she got angry more quickly than other people and shouted more often.'
Sounds like an example of a woman trying to absolve hereslf of blame if ever I heard it.
So, it would seem that the situation is that we have a young couple who have split up and some time later one of them has written a book which defines each of their roles during that relationship as the woman being a 'mother figure' and the boyfriend behaving like a 'father figure'. Any good psychology book will tell you that people do act like a combination of thier parents, a cooperative adult, and a child. So the male acted like a father figure and blocked the female (mother figure) out by socially withdrawing (how a male deals with extreme stress from a woman), isolating himself 'in his cave' so that the female reached breaking point and dealt with the stress by leaving him for someone else (is it any coincidence that her new partner in the book is called 'Roger'? I think not.)
In conclusion, you said: 'I buy the idea that Haddon was, in some ways, taking revenge in writing this book. But thinking of the drawn out process of writing a novel, and considering what's been said about the structure, I find it hard to believe it is a consistent undercurrent, so much as a sporadic peppering'
If you read the novel, it so obviously does not have any sort of 'drawn out process', like other novels at all. It has no structure until the middle, where the writers think, 'oh well, lets send him on a trip to london to lengthen the story'. It is fragmented, disjointed and sounds like an accusing, whining, rant for reasons I outlined earlier. This is cleverly disguised as a disjointed diary of events, using numbering the pages by prime numbers as an excuse.
On this alone IT IS a new experimental narrative, but a poor effort. It is disheartening that it is the bad feeling and malice that caused it to be written in the first place, and it is this that is the glue that is loosely holding it together.
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