Book Review: Fork in Dog Leaves Dork in Fog

M. Haddon (2003) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. London: Jonathan Cape.

"I am writing a murder mystery novel." - C.J.F. Boone (page 5)

2. This is a murder mystery novel review. Actually it is my notes on reviewing a mystery novel that is really a diary of someone writing what he thinks is a murder mystery novel -- in which the writer is the reporter, detective, hero and victim -- but is really a book by someone who writes for children and now has written this one which is supposed to be the thoughts of a teenage boy with Asperger syndrome who finds a dog with a garden fork stuck through it.

4. It's like when I fix the mirrors in my room opposite each other to see how many cross-reflections you get before you disappear to infinity. This is a clever idea by the author, who is mostly called Mark Haddon, but I saw one review where he was Marc Haddon [2]. He is now a Mark of Distinction (ha ha) because the book won a big literally prize in England, which is also called the British Isles but now is part of Europe because they dug a tunnel under and so they are no longer isles. Haddon is obviously a made up name, from the phrase "have someone on", like "He haddon the readers that he was writing like an Asperger". I read in a book of literally criticism that Nothing is ever what it seems. If you find Nothing you can be sure that there was Something in the author's head which he never knew was there but you know it was there because you are the literally critic and you can put it there and then it was there, literally (meaning in the critic's head).

8. Another thing that literally criticism tells you is that writers are lazy and recycle the same ideas in their books. I read other books by Mark Haddon, and it's true. In the Forked Dog book he keeps going off in his head as an astronaut on space travel across the universe and meeting black holes and aliens and stuff (like on pages 11-13, 42, 65-66, 86-87, 95, 112, 156-157, 193-194 and all over), which is just like another Haddon book about a little boy who had the solar system on the wall of his room and went to the moon as an astronaut. (This little boy is really Haddon. He says so later in that book when he is older). [3] There are also lots of scenes in the Forked Dog which are like things that happen in Gridzbi Spudvetch by Haddon, where two boys try to detect something fishy their teachers are doing but the teachers are really aliens and they go off in a spaceship. [4] While they are detecting they sneak into the teacher's house, but she comes back and they have to hide, and it is like when C.J.F. Boone finds the hidden letters from his mum in his dad's wardrobe, then his dad comes back and nearly catches him (pp. 118-19).

16. Writers often fill pages with the scenery and what people wear and the expressions on their face, which sounds like padding it out because they can't think of a complicated plot, or because like Haddon they write children's books where there are loads of pictures. But here Haddon is clever. He makes Boone give pages of random detail because he thinks this is what Aspergers do (except for people's faces because Aspergers use a different part of the brain to process faces which is why they don't make sense of other people's emotions). Haddon is also clever because he never actually says Boone has Aspergers, but all the reviewers say so, or say he is autistic. But they ought to read some books written by people who really are Aspergers, [5] who don't sound much like Boone. Otherwise people will believe that all Aspergers think like Boone. One of these books is by Luke Jackson, and he says how annoying it is that everyone thinks of the Rain Man film whenever autism or Asperger comes up, but most Aspergers don't have amazing powers, they may be average, or stupid, or clever, like anyone else. [6]

31. Hah, gotcha! Bet you thought this would be paragraph 32, but it's 31. Boone (or maybe Haddon) numbered his chapters with prime numbers, but I'm using this series 2 4 8 16 31 57 and so on. Forked Dog has lots of math in it because some Aspergers love playing with numbers, but not all do. It's full of diagrams and puzzles which have nothing to do with Forked Dogs or what his dad was plotting or why his mum went off with Mr Spears (which he found out because some old woman told him, which she wasn't supposed to). One of the Forked Dog reviews was by a math professor called Fung (like: "Math can be Fung...") and she thought it would get people interested in math in a sneaky sort of way. [7] Prof. Fung also showed that the Monty Hall Problem on pp. 78-82, which a lot of people get wrong and get very angry about, is not as simple as Haddon makes it out. [8]

57. I think Haddon is one of these grown-ups who is really a child but has just got bigger. His wife says he is short and has a low centre of gravity so he does marathon kayaking because he is the right shape to paddle a kayak without tipping over. [9] That does not prove that he is a child. But Haddon does have a lot of tubes in his writing. In Gridzbi Spudvetch when they beam the aliens up to planet Za'in they go up through this glagolitic tube of blue light. In Forked Dog, when they are diagnosing Boone as autistic, his teacher does the Smarty Tube test (p. 145), and it shows that he didn't realise (this was when he was small) that other people have minds and thoughts and don't automatically think the way you think. Another tube thing is where Boone is on the train trip, after he has tricked the policeman and escaped from him, and he gets to London and has to take the Tube (Americans won't understand this, but the underground railway in London is the Tube. Pronounced Choob, not Toob). This proves that Haddon is not too badly grown-up. He is still in touch with his Inner Tube. (There'll be another one along soon).

99. Actually what I like best in Forked Dog is the whole journey thing, like the Oddisy of the Oddity, (my eccentric helper suggested that one -- it's supposed to be a joke), where it takes him from p. 170 to p. 191 to find the station and buy a ticket and board a train because the whole station is too noisy and crowded and he is sufferingfrominformationoverload and can't pick out justthedataheneedsandscreenouttherest, and sometimes he has to make another (here it comes:) tube by rolling his fingers up and looking through them so he sees only one thing at a time. Then it takes from p. 192 to p. 228 to get to Willesden Junction on the Tube, because he can't stand the crowds surging on and off and then he loses his pet rat (but see the rat's side of the story, below) and nearly gets killed and a man shouts seriously rude words at him like you would only hear in the school playground. But I think you don't need to be autistic to have most of these traumastic experiences.

163. I had to do some more calculations here, to find the next one in the series. Maybe you'd like to try it. You take two points on a circle and join them with a line (called a chord). The chord divides the circle into two areas. Take another point, draw chords to join all the points, you get four areas. The next points brings 8, then 16, then 31, then 57, then 99 areas. There's also a formula for calculating it, on the net. [10]

256. [This of course is 2 to the 8th power. But if the series hadn't started wobbling at 31, it would now be 2 to the 9th power. Why did it wobble?] A lot of reviewers liked the book, though it's obvious that few of them knew much about Aspergers, and those that knew something wondered whether it was realistic to expect an Asperger kid to write a mystery novel with a lot of crashing about and a true account of the sex-lives and mathematical proclivities of dogs and people in Swindon, England. [11]

386. Haddon wondered this too. He wanted to do the book in Boone's voice, but thought that if Boone were real, it would be difficult for him to write a book: "The one thing he cannot do is put himself in someone else's shoes, and the one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes." I'm not sure that a lot of Aspergers would agree with that restriction. Anyhow, Haddon got Boone to use Sherlock Holmesian methods so he could solve things not by shuffling the footwear, but by logic. [12]

Quod Erat Demonstrandum. (His pet rat went on a protest march).

References & Notes

[1] Nah, this isn't really C.J.F. Benoo writing for C.J.F. Boone writing for Mark Haddon writing for children or adults. It's just a nym. Here it's a pseudo one.

[2] P. McGuire (2003) Stretching for teens. www.asianreviewofbooks.com/arb/article.php?article=304

[3] M. Haddon & C. Birmingham (1996) The Sea of Tranquility, London: HarperCollins.

[4] M. Haddon (1993) Gridzbi Spudvetch. London: Walker.

[5] There are quite some books by people who battled through to their 30s before they finally learnt that their peculiarities and problems would now be called "on the autistic spectrum". Donna Williams wrote several, starting with Nobody Nowhere, New York, Times Books, 1992, [London: Doubleday]. Then there is Gunilla Gerland (translated 1997) A Real Person, London, Souvenir Press. There are about 50 books by parents mostly writing about having an autistic kid, but a few try to put into words what they believe their kid is thinking, like Karen L. Simmons, "Little Rainman", Arlington, Tx, Future Horizons. Most of these are a few jumps away from telling how it is for you, now.

[6] L. Jackson (2002) Freaks, Geeks and Asperger Syndrome, London: Jessica Kingsley, (see page 189). This is a teenager writing his own thoughts (so we are told) and doing it very well. He seems to know a helluva lot about the autistic spectrum and Aspergers, explains it quite well, and keeps a balance between different points of view. He even understands that if parents have a kid who is incontinent, head-banging and self-mutilating all the time, with no form of communication, it's not unreasonable for them to look for something to "cure" the kid (p. 78) -- and such a "cure" would not be like genocide on all autistics and Aspergers. Another quite informative book, by a ten-year old boy with Aspergers, is: Kenneth Hall (2001) Asperger Syndrome, the Universe and Everything, London: Jessica Kingsley, though it doesn't have such good coverage of Everything.

[7] M.G. Fung (2003) Review: The curious incident of the dog in the night-time. (www.maa.org/reviews/dogincident.html)

[8] Our math teacher Mr Wynne Wilson asked us if we'd bet with him that out of 35 kids in class, two had the same birthday. One of the kids straight off said no, he wouldn't bet. He didn't think there would be two same birthdays, but if a math teacher offers you a bet it's bound to be fixed so that you lose. Most of us thought WW had looked up the birthdays in the school office beforehand, which would be cheating. But actually he was right, there were two same birthdays and WW proved on the board that in 35 boys it was a good bet that there would be. I could show you the proof, but it would take too long. (I still don't really believe it, anyway).

[9] M. Haddon (2004) The curious incident of the writer in the kayak. The Guardian 13 January 2004, G2, p. 4.

[10] http://mathworld.wolfram.com/StrongLawofSmallNumbers.html

[11] Swindon is called "a small place" (p. 57). But it has approximately 165,000 people and a similar population of dogs and rats. It is really not small. I don't know whether this was Boone's mistake, or Haddon's. Another thing that looks odd is the orang-utan drawing on p. 220. One of the thumbs seems to be on the wrong side of the foot; or if it's on the right side, then the fingers are back to front. It's hard to remember always to put thumbs on the proper way round, but people should take care with it because it makes a lot of difference to the orang-utan. Especially if it likes to go kayaking.

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