Defining Normal.

I’m getting through my latest book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, at double-quick speed. I usually read novels quite slowly, but not this one. Then again, it’s as much a documentary about autism as it is a novel.

The protagonist, fifteen-year-old Christopher Boone, has become frightened of his father so he decides to seek out his mother who lives a hundred miles away in London. He’s never been further than the shop at the end of the road on his own before, so it’s a massive undertaking in which he has to draw on his superior logical faculties and employ all his survival devices (like counting the numbers of things he sees and working out the cubes as he goes along.)

The author describes the journey in such minute detail that it would ordinarily be tedious in the extreme. Instead, it’s riveting, because we’ve already been made privy to a mind that sees the world a little differently from the rest of us so we can feel his pain and fear.

I don’t usually recommend books, since I realise that taste in literature is very personal. But to anybody who is interested in looking well outside the box, this is one worth trying. And let’s imagine for a moment that, by some curious genetic mutation, the majority of the next generation of children were born with the neurological structuring that gives rise to autism. Before long it would be you who would be regarded as odd, wouldn’t it?

And by the way: at one point in the book, Christopher lists the things which ‘normal’ people see when they stand in a field, and compares it with what he sees. His list is more familiar to me than the other one. But I’m just an observer.