This reading blog uses the May 2004 Vintage Contemporaries version of the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Any page numbers will refer to this version.
The novel begins on chapter two, and thus starts us off with one of the many quirks of our protagonist. The chapters are numbered by prime numbers, in sequence. It also begins with the aftermath of a murder, the description of which of is our introduction to another quirk – our protagonist is hyper analytical. This will be one of the sources of unintentional humor (Or is it intentional?) in the novel. “I decided the dog was probably killed by the fork because I could not see any other wounds in the dog and I do not think you would stick a garden fork into a dog after it had died for some other reason, like cancer, for example, or a road accident. But I could not be certain about this.” This novel, ostensibly a murder mystery (We are told on the fourth page, in no uncertain terms that this is so, and in the blurb on the back are told that this is the “improbable story of Christopher’s quest to investigate the suspicious death of a neighborhood dog.”) is not quite as it seems. The meat of the story will not be in the investigation itself, but in the interactions that Christopher has with the people around him, and with his environment.
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