The hero of the novel is a young man of 15, suffering from a form of high functioning autism, who rarely ventures beyond the end of his street. One evening he found her neighbor's dog dead in the garden of her neighbor, and decides to investigate to find out who killed him. The survey will take him much further than you may think at first, making him discover things about his neighbors, his family, his entourage unsuspected.
To clarify the term "autism" that I used above, the hero has Asperger's syndrome, in which the subject is unable to detect facial expressions or signs of emotion in others, it n ' has no way to detect the state of mind of his fellows, and has a very vague modeling the mood of the people around him. It does not include the second degree, or metaphor, or the joke. He has great skills against deductive reasoning and great predisposition to mathematics. He likes everything tidy: either there is a logical and unique solution and it does everything to understand it, or it creates arbitrary and well established rules which he then applied to the letter to avoid leaving any room for uncertainty (example: he decided one day that three consecutive red cars meant that it was a great day, and in a "great day" he behaves in a certain way, for cons, two cars yellow in sequence, and it's a bad day, where other rules apply).
It is a book both funny and sad, seen entirely from the perspective of the young autistic, who is no fool and has an original vision of his fellows and on the customs and traditions of our society. Its "external, objective" perspective on our daily behaviors and non-expressed conventions is extremely intérressant.
You could almost draw a parallel with, for example, "foreign land" Heinlein (more limpid and built at the mentality of "foreign" looking at us, and without the religious from the end of the intrigue Heinlein novel).
The plot is rather humorous, tongue-in-cheek British enough, that the heroes do not perceives at all, always taking the most literal its most preposterous discoveries. But it is treated with delicacy and respect for the young man, the humor of the situations is not at its expense and there is no mockery.
It made me want to learn more about Asperger's syndrome in particular and the high level of autism in general. And it is an exploration that is quite interesting: they tend to mirror our society and groups of humans seems extremely intérressant, type of quasi-external vision whose novel by Mark Haddon already gives a good idea .
