The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time


We are listening to this in the car with a good deal of pleasure and laughter. It is eerily familiar. Now none of us are autistic or have aspergers. However, we are pretty logical, and intellect-dominated rather than emotion-dominated. For instance, we would probably all be T on the Myers-Briggs for Thinking, rather than F for feeling. 


So we couldn’t help laughing when Christopher’s father tells him that his mother died of a heart attack. Christopher asks, “What kind of heart attack?” His father, infuriated says, “Christopher, this is not the time to be asking that sort of question!” But Christopher wants to know if it was an aneurysm, or embolism, or just a regular heart-attack. We laughed because it is the kind of question that 3 out of the 4 of us at least would ask in a similar situation. 


An autistic savant, Christopher offers a combination of a relentlessly logical mind with very little understanding of how society or the adult work operates. Many children are like this. Most learn; some do not. 
 
Postscript. Now finished listening to it. Though bits are tedious–how Christopher gets to London etc–it is a most moving book.


I like his parents’ care and concern for someone who apparently has no feelings for them, nor any concern beyond himself and self-protectiveness. He does not some ethical concerns like “It is not good to kill dogs” and “one should not tell lies,” but no understanding of love for others. When he describes what love is, for instance his father’s love for him, he says, “Love is when you cook someone’s food, and wash someone’s clothes, and tell them the truth.” His parents are nevertheless fond of him, as one is fond of a totally selfish toddler. Christopher is now 15, but since he has not grown up morally or imaginatively, they are as fond of him as when he was three. 


Interestingly, people who behave like Christopher does would have been institutionalized in the past before they was much understanding of autism. Christopher is an autistic savant. I wonder if tuning out so much of reality enables an intense focus on aspects of it. Christopher is very good at both maths, physics and chess like my husband and one of my daughters. Extreme excellence in one sphere always comes at the cost of other spheres being underdeveloped, I think. The question is how excellent, how underdeveloped.


The book is probably so successful because autism or extreme neuroses are probably on a continuum and many people will find echoes of their own neuroses and hang-ups or those of their family in Christopher. 


If nothing else, the combination of extreme cleverness and extreme naivete does make you laugh.










Wikio


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