So I have about a zillion things to study for, so obviously I just spent the last two hours reading this book. I'm just gonna keep trucking through the titles on the list that I own until I can make it to the library, and this book seemed like it would be a nice, quick afternoon read.
This is a story about Christopher John Francis Boone, who lives with his father in England, loves astronomy and maths, and has a pet rat called Toby. He is also autistic, and the book - a "murder mystery" he is writing about the death of a neighbor's dog - is written entirely from his point of view. This is actually one of the few books I own that I didn't buy for myself. My mother bought copies of this book for my entire extended family one Christmas because I have a cousin who is autistic, and after she had read it she thought it was something all our relatives needed to read and understand. I'm glad she did, because this is really a remarkable little book.
Without a trace of preachiness or sentimentality, Haddon paints the picture of someone who is, really, just a boy going through troubles any fifteen year old might face; conflicts with classmates, divorced parents, and confusion about the future. That Christopher is autistic doesn't impede the story, it just forces us to view the events going on with a slightly different lens. Some parts of this book are just so lonely and sad, but in a way that turns our normal experiences of these emotions on their head. For instance, Christopher feels lonely when he's with other people, because he can't understand their emotions and he becomes confused when they act in anything other than expected ways, and this confusion is something he doesn't want and can't escape as long as these other people stick around. He knowns perfectly well when he's feeling terrible, but can't understand that emotion well in relation to other people. It creates this interesting paradox where we, the reader, are peering out from Christopher's eyes and can see the pain the other characters are feeling, but Christopher himself cannot. A good example is from the beginning of the book, on the night after the neighbor's dog Wellington has been murdered and Christopher has been arrested. This is the first time we get a glimpse of some of the demons Christopher's father struggles with, but all of this is lost on Christopher himself.
"At 2:07 a.m I decided I wanted a drink of orange squash before I brushed my teeth and got into bed, so I went downstairs to the kitchen. Father was sitting on the sofa watching snooker on the television and drinking scotch. There were tears coming out of his eyes.
I asked, "Are you sad about Wellington?"
He looked at me for a long time and sucked air in through his nose. Then he said, "Yes, Christopher, you could say that. You could very well say that."
Bah, I was thinking about writing this post and I didn't want it to turn into one of those, "I know someone with autism let me tell you about their struggle" sobfests, but apparently I'm go right ahead and do it anyway. Aside from my cousin, I've known a lot of autistic kids because I worked at a camp that had an unusually high percentage of autism cases, especially Ausbergers. Now, I worked at this camp for a long time and saw all manner of kids- kids you would never, ever know had been diagnosed with anything on the spectrum and kids who would burst into tears if the breeze blew the wrong way. Now, one of these kids, let's call him Mark, was my camper for a few summers and I grew to be incredibly fond of him. He was the sweetest kid you could ever imagine. There were a few struggles, of course; he didn't really like it when we played sports and he obviously wasn't great at interacting with the other kids, but they were shockingly good with him (I say shockingly good because these were twelve year old boys, and in my experience there aren't a lot of things twelve year old boys are great at besides being smartasses and hurling balls at each other). When he didn't want to play with the other kids, he and I would play this game where we'd ask either-or questions- for instance, would you rather have green skin for a month or a third ear for a year?
Well, this book made me think of Mark for obvious reasons, but what it reminded me of especially was how scared I was when I first started working with him, like everything I did could be this catastrophic mistake. I was so cautious, at first. I sort of tip-toed around him, like he was this live bomb that could go off anytime, and I think that's how a lot of people feel around kids with any sort of autism- like you either need to know exactly what you're doing or stay the hell away. And I won't lie, there were a few times, even after we had known each other for awhile, where I would do something wrong- touch him on the shoulder by mistake, or make a joke he didn't understand - and things would go badly for a little while. But god, he was a bright, friendly kid, and you just had to talk to him for a while to see that. I still remember Mark as being one of the best campers I ever had, and not because he was an autism success story, but because he was a genuinely amazing boy.
Anyways, that's enough about that. Final words: I liked this book a lot on the reread, the math problems still kind of go beyond me, and it's a great chance to poke around inside a different mindset for awhile. And if I remember right, this was the first book that introduced me to the idea that all the elements in our body are the leftovers from exploded stars, and that is a freaking amazing thought, so bravo, book!
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