Readers Place

Mark Haddon interview/review

1. What research did you do into Autism and Behavioural problems before writing this novel, is Christopher’s character based on anyone in particular?

After leaving university I spent several years working with adults and children who had a variety of physical and mental handicaps (as they were then known). Ever since that time I’ve been interested in the subject of disability and mental illness. As a result, hardly a week goes by without me reading an newspaper article or watching a television documentary about schizophrenia or manic depression or Tourette’s… And hardly a month goes by without me meeting yet another person who is the parent or grandparent of someone who has been diagnosed as having Asperger’s. I also know a number of adults (men, mostly) who would almost certainly be diagnosed with the syndrome if they had been born twenty, thirty, forty years later. And that was the extent of my ‘research’. I deliberately didn’t consult fat tomes on Asperger’s or visit special schools when I was working on the book because I wanted Christopher to work as a human being and not as a clinical case study.

1. The book has been published for adults and children simultaneously; did you set out to write a book which would appeal to such a wide age range?

No. I wrote it to entertain myself (which is, I think, the motivation behind any half-decent novel) in the hope that there would people out there who shared my interests and obsessions. So the much-vaunted ‘crossover appeal’ came as a very pleasant surprise.

1. Have you received any positive feedback from people with Aspergers Syndrome/ Autism, their families, or people who work with them?

To be scrupulously honest… the book had one very bad review from a young man with Asperger’s who thought the book was bad, mainly because Christopher wasn’t like him or like any other people he knew with Asperger’s. But the review missed the point, I think. People with Asperger’s are as diverse a group as Belgians or trumpet players or train drivers. There is no typical or representative person with Asperger’s. And to try and create one would have produced a stereotype.

On the other hand I’ve been genuinely moved and completely taken by surprise by the number of parents and grandparents of young people with Asperger’s who have written to tell me that the book rings completely true for them.

I have been even more surprised to receive several invitations to address academic conferences on Asperger’s and Autism. Which misses the point in a different way, I think. If Christopher seems real it’s because he’s well-written not because I’m an expert in the area. We live in an age obsessed with documentaries, with biographies, with investigative journalism. We often forget that you can have all the facts but be no nearer the truth. And this is what novels are good at. A novel can put you inside another person’s head and give you an understanding of their life you could only get by moving into their house for six months.

1. How did you come up with such and original idea for a novel?

It happened piece by piece and without any deliberate seeking after originality or quirkiness. I began with the image of the dog stabbed with the fork simply because I was searching for a vivid and gripping way of starting a novel. I then realised that if you described it in a flat, emotionless, neutral way it was also (with apologies to all dog lovers) very funny. So I had the voice. Only after using that voice for a few pages did I work out who it belonged to. Having done that the difficult thing was to work out a believable way for Christopher to construct a novel given that he is utterly unaware of the reader’s emotional responses to what he is writing. Having Christopher simply copy his hero, Sherlock Holmes, by borrowing the format of the murder mystery was the solution to this problem. Finally, because I genuinely believed that very few people would want to read a novel about a teenage boy with a disability living in Swindon with his dad, I arranged the whole plot round the central turning point (where we discover who killed Wellington and what really happened to Christopher’s mother) to make it as entertaining as possible, hopefully dragging the reader up to a highest point right in the middle, like a roller coaster, then speeding them down towards the conclusion.