ABSTRACT
As we have seen, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials depicts an extraordinary journey through multiple fantasy worlds which culminates in a resolution to fi nd the present world equally extraordinary. It seems eminently fi tting, then, that the next major step in the expansion of crossover fi ction in millennial Britain should be with a work of luminous realism. Like Pullman, though via a very diff erent route, Mark Haddon aimed to convey a sense of ‘the extraordinary inside the ordinary’ with his novel,Th e Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time.1 Haddon explains that he set out ‘to take a life that seemed horribly constrained, to . . . show that if you viewed this life with suffi cient imagination it would seem infi nite’.2 He chose to write from the point of view of a boy with a mental health condition, because ‘disability is a way of getting [to] some extremity’ that is ‘also terribly, terribly ordinary’. His fi ft een-year-old narrator, Christopher Boone, has a form of Asperger’s syndrome which makes him brilliant at mathematics and logic but limited in empathy or certain forms of imagination.3 Growing up in Swindon, a market town lying to the south of Oxford’s ethereal dreaming spires, the monosyllabic Christopher Boone is the very antithesis of Philip Pullman’s charismatic, silver-tongued Lyra, and at the time, seemed to be an unlikely fi ctional child to enchant an adult reader. Nevertheless it was this novel that brought home the point that realist fi ction for children could cross over to adult readers as easily as fantasy.
