Fiction: At a time when the international publishing world's zealous abilities to hype "product" increasingly resemble those of the movie business, Mark Haddon's breakthrough novel might appear a somewhat cynical exercise, cunningly designed for pre-packaged "cult" breakthrough status, writes Derek O'Connor
The Curious Incident has been published twice, in editions aimed at adults (through Jonathan Cape) and teenagers (younger readers' imprint David Fickling). The word-of-mouth, with advance raves from such disparate (and credible) voices as Ian McEwan and Oliver Sacks, were positively euphoric. The film rights were snapped up pre-publication as a potential vehicle for writer/director Steve Kloves, anointed adapter of Harry Potter for the big screen.
Everybody involved, it may be fair to say, has a decent idea that they might be onto a winner. What this translates into for the casual reader, however, can often be another matter altogether.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time presents itself as a novel penned by its unlikely hero, Christopher Boone, a 15-year-old boy with Asperger's Syndrome, a form of autism. Boone is documenting his investigations concerning a homicide, of sorts: the dispatching of a neighbour's dog, courtesy of a common garden pitchfork. "Because it was a Good Day," he writes (passing four red cars on the bus to school making it so), "I decided that I would try and find out who killed Wellington because a Good Day is a day for projects and planning things." Christopher's inability to communicate with anything outside his rigidly ordered and logical thought-processes, naturally enough, makes for wryly observed encounters aplenty: "I did not knock at the door of number 38 which is the house next to our house because the people there take drugs and Father says that I should never talk to them, so I don't. And they play loud music at night and they make me scared sometimes when I see them in the street. And it is not really their house".
The concept of the detective as social misfit stretches all the way back to Arthur Conan Doyle - indeed, the Holmesian allusions are made more than clear through explicit reference to The Hound Of The Baskervilles. What drives Haddon's tale, however, is his empathy for his protagonist: it might have been easy to make Christopher an amusing suburban hybrid of Forest Gump and Adrian Mole, but the author digs deeper, mining a deeper emotional truth with a rigorous sense of purpose, one expressly devoid of cheap homily. He also knows how to build a damn good page-turner: the emotional beats here are resonant and well deserved, the key plot revelations affecting, and the payoff deeply satisfying.
Thankfully, the presence of The Curious Incident on this year's Man Booker Prize for Fiction longlist isn't a triumph of hype over content, more a sign that the grudging acceptance of young people's literature as worthy of proper critical contention, nay celebration - as witnessed by the laurels recently and belatedly thrown Phillip Pullman's way - continues to spread across the publishing mainstream. Long may it continue to do so.
Derek O'Connor is a freelance writer and regular contributor to The Irish Times
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. By Mark Haddon, Jonathan Cape, 272 pp. £10.99