curious incident
I just noticed that this year’s winner of the Guardian’s Children Fiction Prize is “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time” by Mark Haddon. Nick alerted me to the existence of this book a couple of months ago, primarily because the progtagonist, Christopher, is British and has a pet rat. Not 24 hours later, my mother also mentioned the book to me because, as well as owning a pet rat, Christopher has Asperger syndrome, an autistic spectrum disorder.
For the past year, I’ve been a volunteer at a youth group for 9-13 year old boys with Asperger syndrome. Consequently, I have spent a great deal of time interacting with boys of roughly Christopher’s age, all of whom have Asperger syndrome to varying degrees. Reading “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time”, I was hugely impressed with the way in which Mark Haddon accurately captures the misunderstandings, novel interpretations and unconventional outlook that are so characteristic of people with Asperger syndrome. The narrative, told from Christopher’s perspective, is utterly brilliant, very funny, and will strongly resonate with anyone who has spent time with anyone with AS. The book is punctuated by Christopher’s tangential observations and statements, which not only provide a hugely insightful account of the world of an AS person, but also highlight interesting facts and details that are so often overlooked or unnoticed by “neurotypicals”. One of my favourites is Christopher’s comment regarding the numbering of book chapters: “Chapters in books are usually given the cardinal numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and so on. But I have decided to give my chapters prime numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and so on because I like prime numbers.” Brilliant.
I can totally see why this book won this year’s prize; not only is the book immensely enjoyable, but the insight it provides into the AS world is invaluable for anyone interested in autistic spectrum disorders. If you haven’t done so already, go read it.
October 18th, 2003 at 3:25 am
A young autism researcher recently wrote to me asking for help in finding young teen brothers of people with autism for a research project. I replied that this might be a difficult age from which to find willing siblings, but, of course, we would advertise.
When I said we’re having an open meeting on siblings-of-autism issues, he replied that his brother had classic autism. He went on to say how, as a teen, he went through a phase of not wanting anything to do with his brother, then at university beginning to to see similarities in how he and his brother throught. He has since come to believe people with autism “can and should be seen as normal human beings confronted from day one very abnormal perceptual and executive environments”.
Classic autism and Asperger Syndrome are thought to be at opposite ends of a continuum which, towards the Asperger end, merges into the wide band of normal. What autism shows us is that we don’t all perceive and process the world in the same way. Where we would have to accept classic autism must involve very “abnormal” ways of perceiving and processing, is that the best way to view Aspergers?
Perhaps the profound lesson from all shades of autism is that there are different (some frankly “abnormal”) ways of perceiving and processing. Aspergers might better be thought of as representing “different” perceptual/processing systems (or a range of these?). With this in mind, go read the book.
And then consider what other different perceptual/processing environmnents might exist among(”abnormal”? “difficult”? “weird”? “fascinating?”…) human beings.
Asperger’s points us to the reality of profound variety amonst us, within our families, communities, societies. Our usual ways of life can be exposed as highly arbitary by seeing from the Asperger lense. Let’s hope discovering, exploring, even appreciating some Aspergers differences raises our understanding and appreciation of other differences within the curious range of human perceptual and processing systems and their impact on everyday life in communities.
July 24th, 2004 at 10:17 pm
hi im heather i got the stupid bs dissorder and so does my bro but
it doesnt bother me cuz i got da looks and da sweet talk and da body and bassicly guys think i am so hot they dont even notice im a little differnt.but i do have a very bad memory and im kinda a dumb blond but i used to be fairly smart and creative until i got into we-ed and drinkin so if i cant get a good job when im older i might be a stripperor a por-no star or maybe even and actoress i was unlucky to be born with dis butt my looks make up 4 it oh and by da way i felt kinda sorry 4 sum of da boys with as so i rode some of da hot ones i new from my social skills class he he :) bye bye
August 8th, 2004 at 6:32 am
It’s good someone commented on this old post, because I wanted to link to it from my review of the book, and the comment made it easier to find. Now you’ve moved off MT I don’t seem to be able to trackback any more (or perhaps I’m just being clueless?) so I’m commenting with a link instead.
August 8th, 2004 at 3:42 pm
I’m glad that leaving that somewhat troll-esque comment on here has served some useful purpose! ;-)
You should still be able to trackback j-t-d even though I’m now using WordPress. Have you tried using Kalsey’s Simpletracks tool?
August 8th, 2004 at 3:45 pm
Argh! Ignore my previous comment. It seems that when I moved to WP, all old posts were migrated with trackback pings switched off. I’m not sure if there’s an easy way to enable pings on several hundred posts in one go, but I’ll definitely look into it as I’d really like people to be able to ping old posts again.