The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, a memorable title which Mark Haddon took from a comment made by Sherlock Holmes in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story Silver Blaze, represents a unique moment in modern fiction. Haddon’s novel may seem as if it fits neatly alongside those which deal with a child’s perspective on the darkest aspects of human behaviour, such as What Maisie Knew, Flowers for Algernon and To Kill A Mockingbird, but it is, above all, something entirely new. Haddon’s triumph is to have given us as unusual, convincing and strikingly alive a narrator as any in English literature. Christopher Boone is, in some ways, reminiscent of Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole …
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