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Christopher Solves the Mystery of Who Killed Wellington
One night, at seven minutes passed midnight to be precise, fifteen-year-old Christopher Boone from Swindon, England, found his neighbour’s large poodle, Wellington, dead in its garden, pierced with a garden fork. Four minutes after this discovery, the neighbour, Mrs Shear, came running out of her house in her pyjamas and shouted:
“What in fuck’s name have you done to my dog?”
Christopher, who suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome (AS), was frightened and put his hands over his ears, closed his eyes and pressed his forehead into the grass. When the police arrived he was still in that position. A policeman asked him various questions, including his age. He replied that he was fifteen years, three months and two days old. He was asked if he had killed the dog and if the fork was his. He said, no.
The policeman persistently asked questions and Christopher began groaning because there was “too much information coming into my head from the outside world.” The policeman forced Christopher to his feet, at which point he hit the officer and was then arrested for assault. In the station they made him empty his pockets, took away his Swiss Army knife and removed his shoelaces. They asked him if he had any family and he told them, his father, but that his mother was dead.
At 1.28am his father arrived at the station and shouted at the police. Christopher was cautioned and then released.
Undaunted by this experience Christopher, prompted by a teacher in his special school, decided to write a murder mystery novel about the killing of the dog and his subsequent investigations. ‘Proper’ novels, he wrote, are lies about things that didn’t happen and make him feel shaky and scared. He quotes a character in one such novel to show how nonsensical it is: “I am veined with iron, with silver and with streaks of common mud. I cannot contract into the firm fist which those clench who do not depend on stimulus.” Christopher proves his point by saying that nobody he knows, not his father or his teacher, can tell him what that means.
Because he has Asperger’s he cannot lie and so everything in the book is true. He says that it will not be a funny book because he cannot tell or understand jokes, yet he goes on to describe metaphors and similes, and the tone of his writing and his lack of irony are themselves a source of great irony and humour.
His favourite book is Conan Doyle’s ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ and from Sherlock Holme’s lexicon he borrows many idioms to describe certain things a detective might encounter - the Prime Suspect, the Red Herring, the Double Bluff, and the dangers of Relaxing Your Guard or Leaping to the Wrong Conclusion. Thus, Christopher’s regimented mind is opened up to understanding creative expressions from which his condition should normally exclude him. Catching a train would be quite normal to us but for Christopher it is a nightmarish proposition that he braves.
‘The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night-Time’ (Jonathan Cape, £10) is a brilliant novel but it is not by Christopher Boone. It is a first-person narrative by Mark Haddon whose main character is called Christopher Boone, a fifteen-year-old with Asperger’s Syndrome. And it is absolutely brilliant.
It takes us into the world and the mind of such a child in a way that is a revelation and wants to make you cry and laugh, sympathise and be angry over the course of many chapters which ‘Christopher’, because he loves mathematics, decides to number, not in the usual one, two, three way, but in prime numbers, beginning with 2 and ending on Chapter 233.
“Prime numbers,” Christopher notes in his deceptively deadpan way, “are useful for writing codes and in America they are classed as Military Material and if you find one over 100 digits long you have to tell the CIA and they buy it off you for $10,000. But it would not be a very good way of making a living.”
Asperger is named after a Viennese paediatrician, Hans Asperger who in 1944 published a paper describing a pattern of behaviour in four young boys who had normal intelligence and language development but who also exhibited autistic-like behaviours. (Asperger and a North American psychiatrist, Leo Kanner, simultaneously but separately, coined the term ‘autism’ from the Greek word, ‘autos’ meaning ‘self’ – because such children seemed to withdraw into worlds of their own.)
Allied bombs destroyed Asperger’s clinic during the war. He died in 1980 and the term Asperger’s Syndrome was coined a year later. His original paper wasn’t translated into English until 1991.
The disorder affects more males than females and individuals can exhibit a variety of characteristics from mild to severe: from the most able, highly intelligent person with social impairment in it subtlest form as the only disability, to the most profoundly physically and mentally retarded person. It overlaps with learning disabilities and shades into eccentric normality. There is still no known cause, no miracle drug and no cure.
For the first two years of life for an Asperger’s (or autistic) child nothing seems wrong then suddenly the child’s behaviour can change and the child become withdrawn and display obsessive routines. It can have difficulties with transitions or changes and prefer sameness. Individuals lack or are slow with social and communication skills, read life literally and perceive the world very differently from the rest of us. They often cannot develop peer relationships and can be subject to bullying because of their naivety, vulnerability and extreme honesty. Yet, many become high achievers in academia, especially in maths and the sciences.
The greatness of Haddon’s novel is that when we come to understand Christopher’s view of the world we understand his responses and we see the validity and richness of Christopher’s interpretations. And we believe him when after getting an A Grade in his Maths A Level he says, towards the end, that he WILL go to university and WILL live in a flat with a garden along with his new dog Sandy, his books and his computer. And he WILL get a First Class Honours Degree and WILL become a scientist.
“And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery of Who Killed Wellington … and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.”
Parents and Professionals & Autism, the Northern Ireland Charity for Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome, may be contacted at 028 90401729
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© 2007 Irish Author and Journalist - Danny Morrison