The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night Time: Book review

The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night Time: ***

Amongst a host of them, probably the most efficient or shall I say the most salutary asset of “The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night Time” is its spotless, pure and a sickeningly cute narrator’s voice. Me being me, wouldn’t have cared two hoots to type the whole book here, but in an attempt to just appear saner have typed in two of my favourite-st dialogues:

’’I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.’’

and, this: ’’Our mind is just a complicated machine. And when we look at things.. we’re looking at a screen inside our heads… People think there is someone in their head looking at the screen and they think, this is their special human mind which is called a homunculus, but this homunculus is just another picture on screen and when homunculus is on screen (because the person is thinking about it), there is another bit of brain watching the screen . And when the person thinks about this ’’another bit of brain’’, there’s yet another bit watching the screen but the brain doesn’t see this happen because people are blind inside their heads when they do the changing from thinking about one thing to thinking about another… Feelings are just pictures on the screen in your head about tomorrow.’’

Just a day of reading is all it takes to hear (and not read) Christopher, as he babbles about everything under the sun. But given the 268 pages he’s been assigned to write his first ever “detective” book he’s actually quite triumphant in solving the mystery of the murder of a neighbourhood dog, given that he’s afflicted with Asperger’s syndrome (a mild form of autism) and motherless. The book is his own memoir of how he solves the two mysteries of the dead dog and the “dead” mother and how his own probing judders his own life.

The USP of this book is, as I commented earlier, the untainted, undiluted first-person narration by Christopher. Which must be probably the most challenging portion for Haddon, whose intention of actually aiding his readers have a full-blown view into his narrator’s disassociated mind is a hugely ambitious (and consequently, a triumphant) effort. With Christopher taking the centre-stage and writing his own “secret diary”, the whole book seems to have this whole raw, wet-in-the-ears energy about it with the invasive Asperger’s neither leaving Christopher’s voice nor the reader’s thought for even a second.

Then be it Christopher’s self-absorbed, self-aware and emotionally flat speech (“The idea of a constellation is very silly because it is just stars, and you could join up the dots in any way you wanted..” or ’’I didn’t reply to Mrs Alexander because she was doing what is called chatting’’) or his sheer inability to treat others as people and read their faces (“I kept a piece of paper in my pocket with lots of faces drawn on it and took it out when I didn’t understand what someone was saying… It was really difficult to decide though because people’s faces move very quickly”) or even his esoteric self-stimulatory behaviour (“4 red cars in a day make a Good Day… 4 yellow cars in a day make it a Black day”)—every aspect of a child with Asperger’s flows so unconsciously through the book that the work can well become a chronicle of the cryptic syndrome though its very instinct seems quite departed from this very fact (the name “Asperger’s” finds a mention solely on the blurb). The narration seems so drenched in the character’s soul that there’s not a single encounter where the medical side seems ham-handed and is stuffed into the pages. Its Christopher’s diary and so shall it be till the last sentence.

And Haddon is largely helped by his publishers who bring about Christopher’s photographic memory and his obsession with pictures, patterns, font-plays and mathematics in pages that are adorned in such numerous pictures, mathematical equations and different fonts that I won’t blame anyone who labels this as an amateur work. Unlike some other ostentatious efforts like “Catcher in the Rye” and “A Child Called It” where the child-narrators seem rather too hard-pressed to pose as child-narrators, Haddon’s Christopher can much rival Arundhati Roy’s exquisitely etched out Estha and Rahel for both novelty and honesty. There’s none of the sloppy sentimentality attached to a child with “special needs” for his whole sense of being is so removed from normal, that an expectation for him to suddenly recuperate or see the other side is, frankly speaking, impossible.

And any sympathy that Christopher gains as a narrator (like when a policeman laughs at him or he sits haplessly at an underground station for hours, afraid about the crowd around him or even when the mystery about the murdered dog unveils) is purely unintentional, and simply put, incidental. As a matter of fact, the child himself is so casual about his abnormality that any special conduct of people towards him (read pity) only triggers warning signals. He isn’t an innocuous angelic bubble waiting to be hugged. He hates strangers, he calls others stupid, he patronizes himself, he groans loudly for hours with his head between his hands as he finds himself in a crowd and he carries a Swiss army knife waiting to be stabbed into anyone who touches him. And Haddon makes sure that his vulnerabilities and his reciprocations (however “seemingly” inappropriate) stretches out to the reader.

But it only takes a tiny slip of your perceptive mood to erode the effect of this work as the emotionally flat narrator starts to seem irritatingly repetitive. The moment you begin to judge this work as yet another work of fiction, even Christopher’s matter-of-factly style of expression starts appearing shallow and nit-witted. Sans the Asperger’s syndrome, the book is actually quite devoid of a decent plot and unless you are ready to see the world through a different pair of eyes, don’t expect a bone-jolting experience.

More than the humdrum of Christopher’s surroundings, it’s his perception of world that should be looked for and appreciated. The story per se resembles a played-to-death next-door soap and one might guess the twists and the turns sooner than the unpretentious title suggests, but that shouldn’t be why you read the book. You should read it to step into the shoes of someone who’s so illiterate about the people around him that he can’t tell the difference between a question and a rhetorical, a frown and a deep breath, a snigger and a laugh. A tickling and prickling tragicomedy, “The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night Time” throbs with so much life that it leaves you all warm and smug. Touché.

PS: Was just wondering if my being in UK, where the book’s based, and in the medical profession has to do anything at all with my liking for this work. Err.. Umm.. Maybe you can ignore this post-script.

Critical Judgement by Michael Palmer: Book Review

Critical Judgement (Michael Palmer): ***and 1/2

No need for pondering over sentences for days on stretch, no need to indulge into the magnificience of carefully etched out paragraphs, and absolutely no need of even imposing your version of the title or the left-ajar climax. Simply because thrillers have grave disregard for such linguistic frills, and why shouldn’t they? Detached from these arduous and cloggy formalities give them more than enough space to develop in all directions into an instantly stimulating and electrifying capsule that has you sweating, panting and breathless with each sentence. One of my all-time favourite medical thrillers, Critical Judgement, is all this and more.

Coming to the plot (ah! these obligatory fillings of a review), Critical Judgement tells the story of a surgeon (Abby) who leaves her job at a high-profile hospital in San Francisco only to move with her fiancee (Josh, who’s been sacked at his workplace) to a suburbian

Californian town with a wilfully deceiving name–Patience. While Abby finds herself suddenly stepping into the shoes of the Head of the ER team of the Patience Regional Hospital, Josh finds an equally well-paid job at the town’s sole employer–which doubles up as the country’s foremost battery manufacturer, Colstar.

Trouble starts trickling in as Abby, much stressed from the explosive workload and responsibility, starts encountering patients with seemingly simple, but undiagnosible symptoms. In jest, Abby calls them NIWWs (No idea what’s wrong) until a violent incident in which a Colstar employee, Willie Cardoza, in a manic fit, zooms his 4×4 into a tennis court almost killing three old ladies. And this obscure insanity also seems to have caught up with other Colstar’s employees–Angela, (who’s turned into a self-multilator), Josh (who’s suddenly become maniacally ill and has threatened Abby physically) and Ethan Black (the son of a supremely influential Ezra Black, the financier of Colstar, who jumps off a high-storey building when visiting his psychiatrist). The outlandish fury and rage in these Colstar employees kindles Abby into investigating the cause of the eruption of these sudden cases, but she doesn’t have to go far as one of her colleagues, Dr. Lew Alvarez seems to have all the answers to her NIWWs and violent cases–cadmium spill from Colstar.

Running an Alliance against the Colstar, Lew and his small team, has infact been accusing Colstar of neglecting the health of Patience’s population and even forging laboratory results keeping the cadmium spill well under covers for years, but have been muted by the influential Big Daddies. As Abby becomes the crusader, she finds both her life and job in serious jeopardy, as she’s been penalised at every stage for her probing. Has Abby got the strength to outperform her enemies? How successful does she become in unraveling the mystery? Is it really the cadmium spill causing the mysterious illnesses? Is Colstar really the culprit?

What instantly separates Palmer from other thriller-jotters is his care for his book’s characters which infact feel so alive and kicking, that the book has an ineluctable cinematic ambience to it. This, and his graphic style of writing uplifts even the most mundane of sequences enlivening the reading experience thoroughly. Some of the sequences like the introductory defibrillation (unpleasantly graphic), Abby treating an eccentric Old Man Ives outside her neck-breaking schedule (deeply empathetic), the pretentious celebrity psychiatrist (inescapably comic), Abby’s decision to treat a killer rather than the killed (thrilling and true-to-bone), a claustrophobic patient recollection of her experience at MRI (stomach-churning) and the orgasmic end keeps afloat the belief of Palmer being a storyteller to vouch for.

The protagonist’s character, an ER doc, is on the predictable side of the fence as from the very premise you expect her to be the crusader, the saviour, the find-all-reveal-all belle and Palmer’s heroine, Abby fits in all these gloves, yet comes across convincing thanks to bountiful nuggets of vulnerability and conflict that’s thrown into her sketch. The third-person narration, though glues to Abby’s every move, every thought, surprisingly keeps the sentimentality-quotient close to neutral with extremes of alkaline and acidic emotions kept much at bay. Their pictorial descriptions consistently withstanding, Palmer populates his book with believable and distinguishable characters with equal success, even though the genre means that almost all the characters have a meagre life outside the incidents involving them.

The pace of the thriller is rocksteady and absolutely unwavering for if Palmer doesn’t have Abby stepping into the shoes of the investigator, we see her participating in some genuinely chilling ER histrionics or we might even find ourselves reading first person gruesome accounts of Colstar’s suddenly-venegeance-seeking employees. The surprise factor is 10 on 10 as the book’s so overgrown with unpredictable twists and turns that you might not realise you have actually skipped a day’s meal. More than justifying its ’’thriller’’ tag, since the catastrophe’s of a aesculapian core, even the ’’medical’’ prefix is more than suitable for this thumping 400 page fiction.

Testing of chemical weapons on innocent population, has indeed made to the headlines time and again, and with an appreciable amount of sensitivity with which the issue is dealt with, the author keeps the scare and seriousness much intact. The climactic showdown, swaying between wrenching unpredictability and hard-to-gulp unbelievability (the latter, solely visible in the fierceness of Abby which takes quite a huge leap to gallant levels of heroism) doesn’t try too hard to bring every thread of the plot to close, but the bemusing and horrifying epilogue more than makes up for that.

The author, being an M.D. himself has also instilled a decent degree of rawness in the ER histrionics, but let the seemingly honest and amazingly vivid sequence of events not blind you into believing that diagnosis at ER is always so fulfiling, well-defined, objective, active, glamorous and brimming, as the routine, repetitive and tiresome aspects get negligible prominence here (understandably so), and the fiction carries forward the legacy of painting a reasonably blushful picture of medicine in ER which had emerged with telly-tube’s babies like ER, Casualty and the likes. Its not gruesomely externally valid, but internally, the procedures and the few diagnoses made are masterfully written.

The bipolar reactions of the workforce (be it a nurse reluctant to treat a patient just because he’s the presumed criminal or Abby being unreasonably censured by her seniors for attending to that very criminal), the contamination running in the upper levels of hierarchy and the innocent dependence of the public on their doctors sears through with astonishing effect. However, since the author’s quite unapologetic about the generous sprinkling of medical terminology, I won’t really recommend it to the medically uninitiated or ignorant. The unobtrusive, simple language is a major plus though.

In all, Critical Judgement is a fantastic thriller, with dominant threads of the population being betrayed for their unflinching trust in the medics and venegeance acquiring phantasmagoric potency, sewn with perfection by the wilful and ferocious (if larger-than-life) Abby. As intoxicating, as the industrial toxicology at its helm, this memorable medical thriller begs to be read, and writing even a sentence more on it would give the plot away. Go read it and experience it for yourself.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004): *** and 1/2

Scrape off the glistening goldens to reveal the slinky silvers; splash the cheerful sky-blues with buckets of black and let the fierce fans slap the hair of the three adolescents way back. (Before you start scratching your uncombed hair, this was basically my imagination as I stood outside the theatre, pondering that if this dead-on target promotion doesn’t give way the mood of the film, wonder what does!)

Not long before you have made yourself comfortable, the action jumpstarts with a wine-glass exploding in Aunt Marge?s hand as she points her immediately provoking words at Potter ( ’’It’s one of the basic rules of breeding. You see it all the time with dogs. If there’s something wrong with the bitch, there’ll be something wrong with the pup’’ ). Of course she hasn’t yet realised that Potter?s thirteen and expecting him to be mum is like keeping a soap-bubble

from bursting. Wailing and hurt, the anguished Potter stomps out of his tormenting family, not before he has ballooned away Aunt Marge, only to find himself squeezing against the windows of the Knight bus which snakes, shrinks, expands, brakes at hilariously high speeds through the already squeezed London roads.

On reaching the Leaky Cauldron, he isn?t as much amused by him being escaped-of the dreary consequences for using magic in muggle-land as he is by a prisoner who?s escaped the dreary confines of the prison of Azkaban. Known as Sirius Black, common lore has it that it was Black who sold off Potter?s parents to Lord Voldemort and that he?s broken away from Azkaban to finish off what he left?Harry Potter, which surely isn?t the best news for young Potter to start his third year at Hogwarts. And so unfolds Potter?s quest into his past with two more threads?one of his whippy smart buddy, Hermoine Granger?s inconsistent presence and another, of an execution of a innocent magical creature?both masterfully sewn in to lead to a hugely satiating climax.

Unlike its formulaic predecessors, the third Potter book was both denser and more character-and-dialogue driven and the new-found complexity and dexterity in the screen adaptation is certainly not going to draw in mad-after-hot-wheels-n-barbies youngsters in the same way as the last two films did. But Cuaron and Warner Bros. don’t seem to care. Neither do I, for what I got was two hours of slickly-shot, intelligently-mounted wizard-thriller which might have somewhat failed to bring out the emotional nuances and undercurrents of its printed sibling in the hush-hush of stuffing in everything the book had to offer, but still ended up way more edgier, and way more enjoyable than the last two films put together.

M uch oblivious of the absence of series’ main villian, Lord Voldemort, the film in its first hour tries to grip with the quandaries and allays of Hogwarts, with some success but as it transmogrifies into a freewheeling thriller in the second half, the effect is numbing. For the purists, there’s little to be zonked about and much to be cribbed about as even though the proceedings entertain, the much-needed ingredients to transport the viewer are mostly non-existent in the first half. For starters, the Quidditch (the much deservably famous game-on-broomsticks) which is the flesh, bone and blood of the whole series and particularly this very book (which had not one but three thoroughly enjoyable matches) finds a disgracefully restrained 5-minute entry on-screen.
 
Moreover, the Potter-Lupin conversations seem more to be dropped into the smooth narrative as an afterthought, which besides padding the hugely enjoyable Hogwarts antics, also poison the main point of the story (Potter’s questionable past) to some extent. However, the film resurrects itself tremendously in the second half, both in the quality and the speed in execution of the mysterious element which goes into a freewheeling Hitchcock-sque mode. And Cuaron is hugely helped by his consistent cast and crew.

Since its impossible to now imagine Potter, Weasley and Granger without thinking about Radcliffe, Grint and Watson, for most part one takes them for granted and expect them to just ’’deliver the lines’’. But here, save for Grint, Radcliffe and Watson surprisingly do conjure up performances that make their respective characters both believable and tremendously enjoyable. While Watson’s tone and body language has smoothened with her equally ironed tresses, one can’t miss the dormant angst and fury of Potter in Radcliffe’s eyes. The boy’s also surprisingly composed in the scenes where he’s asked to stretch his vocal-cords just that much more (which is more than thrice).

Even David Thewlis and Gary Oldman turn in such sincere performances as Professor Lupin and Sirius Black, its hard to imagine them outside the characters they play. Replacing Late Richard Harris, Michael Gambon as Dumbledore is just as efficient, if not as enigmatic while Alan Rickman carries on the histrionics as the stern Severus Snape with the same lucidity as he started (and yes I wasn’t the only one rolling over the aisle with laughter as Rickman found himself in Longbottom’s granny’s dress). While the rest of the cast also turn in commendable performances, they are terribly restricted by the editor’s scissors, and thus the effect of regular characters (including that of Hagrid, Dumbledore, McGonagall, Trelawney) and their interactions with Harry is quite blunted.

The production designer seems to be the most overworked here, as the film ’’feels’’ different right from the first shot– be it the visibly more sinsiter confines of Hogwarts or the gloomy thunder-storms, rain-clouds, snow and sleet which fill up every available screen pixel, the eerie ’’feel’’ is actually instrumental in giving the film it’s grip. The outlandish costumes are also thankfully missing for most part and the meticulously brought-to-life monstrous creatures like boggarts, dementors, werewolf and the hippogriff come across very convincingly, as do the amazingly well thought out Marauder’s Map and the Time Turner which are sure to make anyone’s jaws drop.

The acoustics are also stupendous and coupled with some fantastic cinematography, watching Harry perform the Patronus charm is as nail-biting as watching the Dementors sucking glee. The dialogues, particularly in crucial conversations, are devoid of any sentimenatlity whatsoever, and as pointed earlier, the director doesn’t seem as emotionally convicted as Columbus. However, the regular sprinklings of much-needed humour was much welcome, and prevented the film to be too dark or morose internally.

All-in-all, an extremely well-made film that is somewhat scarred by its low emotional quotient (both when viewed in its entirety and when compared to the book) which make it more apt to be flowered with adjectives like ’’dark’’, ’’edgy’’, ’’gripping’’, ’’mature’’, ’’visual treat’’, ’’scary’’… rather than ’’touching’’ or ’’poignant’’. Obviously crippled by the screen-time, Cuaron’s characters aren’t as wholly fleshed (though they aren’t pulse-less) to provoke immediate fanship from the uninitiated or even the die-hard Potter fans, but he more than makes it up by raising the bar of entertainment a few inches further in this film with its gripping content. Or probably this compliment is more for Rowling.

Whoever its for; at the end of the day, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban entertains all thanks to the neck-snapping second half, jaw-dropping visuals and refreshing performances