The coming of age novel is about as over done as the biopic. It is rare to find any form of originality in this genre and I have generally never really been a fan of it. This book is different. It is simple. It is short. But what makes it great, is that it tells a rather ordinary story from the perspective of an extraordinary character.

This could have come off as a gimmick, having a regular man write as if he was an autistic teenager, but Mark Haddon was able to make Christopher believable and entertaining without the writing style becoming strenuous. Most importantly Haddon makes me as a reader really like Christopher and enjoy all of the quirks that make him who he is.

Who is he? He’s a boy. Not an average boy, but he likes many of the same things such as drawing aliens, and playing computer games. He is different from the others at his special school because even with all of his dysfunctions, his brain works in a way such that he can solve the most complex of mathematical equations, knows all the prime numbers up to 7,057, and wouldn’t tell a lie to save his life. With ambition, some dire needs in life, and of course some things he hates, Christopher sounds just like any other boy.

His journey is about as normal as some of his qualities of life and about as strange as others. Anyone else could be in Christopher’s place and the story would just be unremarkable. Through Christopher we feel just how difficult it is to overcome the social taboos and fears of many who are autistic in order to accomplish what he thinks is best for himself. For someone who was so dependant on his parents and teachers for all of his life, he is able to break free and shows surprising independence.

Whether it is conquering his phobias of masses of people and noise at the train station, or facing the reality that he has to live with his father, Christopher perseveres and in the process grows a lot as a person. He does this just as any other would while living through something so traumatic, even if what he found most disturbing about the whole chain of events (his dad killing Wellington) was different from what any ordinary boy would find most disturbing (his parents splitting up and mother not actually being dead).

Christopher has matured so much by the end of the novel that he decides that after he is done with his current schooling he will “go to university in another town” and then “I will get a first class honors degree and I will become a scientist.” Hearing this earlier in the book I would have thought it crazy for him to set such high hopes when he is having so many troubles functioning in a sheltered world, but at this point I was able to see that he could will himself to do, or as he says it “I solved the mystery of Who Killed Wellington? And I found my mother and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.”

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