Written on 2014 (Year 11)
Edited on 24 June 2018
Rate: 8/10
Since there was a possibility that this book could be the set text for the 2015 HSC Standard English exam (which was not) I chose to read it ahead. I was prepared to suck it up even if the book was to be plain bad. But this book actually blew my mind... only for the first-half. Sadly, the ending seemed a bit rushed.
Brief overview
The book is about a British boy named Christopher who is considered to have special needs. He discovers that his neighbour's dog, Wellington is murdered by a garden fork (like the image on the front cover). His attempt to detect the murderer becomes a catalyst for all the mind blowing events.
Life
I chose to listen to the audio-book for the first few chapters (very effective when you are not in the mood to sleep), and I recommend this method when reading a text for an exam or an assessment. Firstly, the narrator introduced the author and began unravelling the story.
“Chapter 2”.
Huh?
I paused the audio to see if I skipped Chapter 1. I didn’t.
Subsequently, on Chapter 19, page 14 he explains,
“Chapter in books are usually given the cardinal numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and so on. But I have decided to give my chapters prime numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 and so on because I like prime numbers.”
How unique is this? I was astonished by the amount of detail the author has put into the book (even the Appendix was unusual. They were purely just answers to a mathematical question???). Then he quotes,
“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.” (pg. 15)
Wow. He just turned prime numbers into a meaning of life. But this is not the only time.
“some of the stars don’t even exist any more because their light has taken so long to get to us that they are already dead, or they have exploded and collapsed into red dwarfs.”
This surprised me. I did know that the visible stars are actually dead but I’ve never questioned "Why?". Nonetheless, the next quote resonated with me.
“And that makes you seem very small, and if you have difficult things in your life it is nice to think that they are what is called negligible which means that they are so small you don’t have to take them into account when you are calculating something.” (pg. 158)
Christopher has done it again, turning his incredible knowledge into a deeper meaning of life.
Science
This book is also educational. Although these educational parts comprised only small segment of the story, I found them the most intriguing. The author challenges us to question things that we don't normally think about.
“Why the sky is dark at night, even though there are billions of stars in the universe?”
“Because the universe is expanding, that the stars were all rushing away from one another after the Big Bang, and further the stars were away from us the faster they were moving, some of them nearly as fast as the speed of light, which was why their light never reached us.” (pg. 12)
Consequently, he warns us that when the space stop its expansion, the stars will head back to the earth and we will ultimately die. Um, gr8 m8.
There’s another reason for the question, and I knew this already, vaguely - the Light Pollution: “Light Pollution which is light from streetlights and car headlights and floodlights and lights in buildings reflecting off tiny particles in the atmosphere and getting in the way of light from the stars.” (pg. 247)
Also, our body and brain are inexplicably strange things.
“when your eye flicks from one point to another you don’t see anything at all and you’re blind. And the flicks are called saccades... But you don’t notice that you’re blind during saccades because your brain fills in the screen in your head” (pg. 146)
(I think I learned this in HSC Biology) This made me wonder does Christopher or anyone who has the same condition know that they are “special”?
“And there is life on earth because of an accident. But it is a very special kind of accident. And for this accident to happen in this special way, there have to be 3 Conditions, And these are 1. Things have to make copies of themselves (this is called Replication).
2. They have to make small mistakes when they do this (this is called Mutation).
3. These mistakes have to be same in their copies (this is called Heritability)” (pg. 203)
In the beginning, Christopher tells the audience that this book won’t be funny as he doesn’t get jokes. But there were hints of humour:
“Beer. Helping ugly people have sex for 2,000 years.” (pg. 47)
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