The Mysteries of Asperger Fiction

Among the recent children's novels about autism and Asperger syndrome, some of the most notable are narrated by characters with a condition along that spectrum. The two best-known examples are The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon, and The London Eye Mystery, by Siobhan Dowd. Both are, not coincidentally, mysteries.

Becker discussed the conjunction of Asperger fiction and the mystery genre last spring at Guys Lit Wire:

Some manifestations of autism/Asperger’s are portrayed as helping the characters in solving the mysteries--dependence on routine, obsession with numbers and puzzles, and having spent much of their lives trying to figure people out.

Another typical trait of autism/Asperger’s is the lack of understanding of others’ emotions--this shows up in the characters having trouble reading people’s faces and moods, being overwhelmed by sensory input, and sometimes seeming insensitive to others’ thoughts or feelings--not because they’re mean, but because they don’t have a shared understanding of emotion. The first person narration in all of these stories gives you a real sense of being in the character’s head and seeing the world through his eyes.

Readers of mysteries are trying to figure out what happened and what people's real intentions and emotions were. That reading experience thus parallels the major challenges of living with Asperger syndrome, making the genre a fine channel for exploring such a life.

In addition, the protagonists' focus on perceptible details rather than on characters' underlying emotions or intentions also makes an easy match with the modern fiction writer's fundamental rule: "show, don't tell."

And of course, the Asperger's mystery has a long and honored tradition: Sherlock Holmes is literature's most famous and beloved high-functioning "Aspie."

The Spectrum of Autism Fiction

On the School Library Journal website, novelist Suzanne Crowley wrote about recent children's books on autism and the related spectrum of conditions. Is it fair to consider that the “current cool disability”?

Certainly there's been a spate of novels for young people touching on autism and Asperger syndrome in various ways: through the protagonist, or through a relative or friend. In addition to her own The Very Ordered Existence of Merilee Marvelous, Crowley mentioned:

• Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
• Cynthia Lord’s Rules.
• Nora Raleigh Baskin’s Anything but Typical.
• Francisco X. Stork’s Marcelo in The Real World.
• Kathryn Erskine's upcoming Mockingbird.

And she could have added:

• Siobhan Dowd's The London Eye Mystery, the most recent Cybils winner for middle-grade fiction.
• Diane Duane's A Wizard Alone, a late sequel to So You Want to Be a Wizard.
• Kochka's The Boy Who Ate Stars.
• Celia Rees's Truth or Dare.
• Caroline Lawrence's The Charioteer of Delphi, part of her Roman Mysteries series.
• [ADDENDUM: Gennifer Choldenko's Al Capone Does My Shirts and Al Capone Shines My Shoes.]
• [ADDENDUM: Lauren Tarshis's Emma Jean Lazarus Fell Out of a Tree and Emma Jean Lazarus Fell in Love.]
• [ADDENDUM: Delia Sherman's Changeling.]

As usual, small specialty presses were early to put out such titles:

• Alexandra Eden's "The Bones and the Duchess" mysteries from Knoll Publishers, including To Oz and Back.
• Kathy Hoopmann's "Asperger Adventures" series, starting with Blue Bottle Mystery, from the neurology publisher Jessica Kingsley. These books appear to cross fantasy genres: one tale of magical wish fulfillment, one of science fiction, and one of time travel.

All those novels were published in the last decade, when understanding and diagnoses of the autistic disorders became much more common. However, I suspect we can push back the advent of autism/Aspergers children's fiction, though the portrayals might not be so acute as they are now.

People with autism conditions used to be considered mentally retarded. I met some among the special-education classmates of my older brother, Al, who had Down syndrome. Only lately have the cognitive and behavioral aspects of the pervasive developmental disorders been considered separately.

Thus Rules, about a twelve-year-old girl with an autistic younger brother, has an antecedent in Betsy Byars's Summer of the Swans, which won the Newbery Medal in 1971. In that book, fourteen-year-old Sara has a younger brother Charlie, who is considered retarded. Today some people are instead interpreting the book as a depiction of a child with borderline autism.

COMING UP: Autism/Asperger’s in mysteries and fantasies.

2009 Cybils Winners

The winners of the 2009 Cybils were announced today, and in the category of Middle-Grade Fiction published last year our choice was:

The London Eye Mystery
written by Siobhan Dowd
David Fickling Books

Brother and sister, Ted and Kat, take their cousin Salim to see the London Eye, the city's gigantic Ferris wheel. While Ted and Kat watch, Salim gets into one of the glass pods, but thirty minutes later he doesn't get off. So the siblings set out to find their cousin.

Complicating the situation, Ted's brain "runs on a different operating system" from other people's, which makes him a lot better at facts and figures than he is at reading people. Narrated in Ted's voice, this is a page-turner that brings London to life and takes readers inside a powerfully rational mind.

The London Eye Mystery shows off kids' natural ingenuity and proves that difference can be a strength, as Ted and Kat work to solve the irresistible riddle of their cousin's disappearance.

One of the challenges of this evaluation was that the five nominated books are so diverse: in reading level, in genre, in narrative approaches, in settings, in protagonists. Each book had unique strengths. As I told the other judges at one point, it wasn't like comparing apples and oranges. It was more like comparing apples, grapefruit, tractor tires, pocket lint, and a shade of orange.

Visit the Cybils website for the complete list of winners.

Narrating The London Eye Mystery

On her website, the late Siobhan Dowd wrote this about the release of The London Eye Mystery:

Things got just a tad delayed when Mark Haddon's (wonderful) Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time came out. I was halfway through my own story of a boy with Asperger Syndrome who turns sleuth when Mark's book hit the stands and went instantly stratospheric (to use a Ted-ism). Not that I was jealous or anything...

But it is thrilling to see my own story finally make the light of day and with the same (and much beloved) publisher. How odd life is. But the two books, despite some similarities, are really very different.

Both books face the same narrative challenge, though. Their narrators are also the main detectives in their plots. Each young protagonist consciously tries to reason out a mystery in his life like Sherlock Holmes (another candidate for an Aspergers diagnosis).

Which brings me back to a point about mysteries that I identified as "Reason for Robin #2." (And you thought you could get away with skimming those weekly posts.) When detectives narrate their own stories, often their narrative voices must either skip the moments or their brilliant deductive breakthroughs or risk boring the readership by revealing the solution to the mystery well before the resolution of the plot.

Of course, Raymond Chandler had Philip Marlowe narrate his own cases, but since they don't make sense as puzzles--have you ever tried to fit the pieces of the The Big Sleep together?--that's not a problem. Plus, withholding information fits Marlowe's wise-guy character.

Christopher in Curious Incident and Ted in The London Eye Mystery are different. They have trouble lying, they're attuned to details, and they struggle to understand emotions. It doesn't make sense for their characters to conceal their deductions from readers, either for their ego or for entertainment's sake.

I don't recall noticing Christopher do that in Curious Incident because basic facts about the mystery he's investigating are beyond his comprehension. They involve emotions, and they completely upend his understanding of the world. He can't reveal what he can't understand to begin with.

In contrast, Ted faces a more classical puzzle involving a cousin's disappearance at the London Eye. Early on I noticed how often The London Eye Mystery ended chapters on cliff-hangers. Later its narrative voice skips over Ted's deductions and his explanation to the police. Those artifices in the narration, which would be unremarkable in some mysteries, stood out for me because Ted himself is the narrator. However, that compromise might have been necessary for the book to work.

Divided by a Common Language in The London Eye

While reading Siobhan Dowd's The London Eye Mystery as a judge for the Cybils middle-grade fiction category, I came across a British term I didn't know. Since I like keeping up with British terms, this both intrigued and annoyed me.

Here's a passage with the word in question. Can you spot it?

Salim slept on the lilo next to my bed that night. I'd hardly ever had to share before. My hand shook itself out. Salim shuffled into a sleeping bag without saying much.

A quick Google search showed me that the word "lilo" has several common meanings--common as far as the internet is concerned:

• Software for loading Linux.
• Title character in one of Disney's last successful traditionally-animated movies.
• Gossip-column abbreviation for Lindsay Lohan.

And Wikipedia listed several other possibilities.

None of those was right, obviously. In The London Eye Mystery, the lilo is what teenagers have to sleep on while Aunt Gloria gets a real bed. So it's either a mattress or a cot--but which?

It turns out "lilo" is a British term for what we Americans call an "air mattress." Furthermore, the Brits use the same word to refer to a pool float while we Americans seem to keep those flat inflatable objects in separate mental categories.

So now I'm wondering when the term "lilo" became established--perhaps from the brand name Li-lo. And are there class or regional overtones to its usage that I'm still unaware of?

What I Did on My Summer Vacation, part 5

This is the London Eye on the southerly bank of the Thames, as seen from near the Houses of Parliament. The large waterfront building at the right was once London's city offices; now it's a private overpriced Salvador Dali museum and a bunch of other attractions.
When the London Eye was built for the millennium celebrations (remember those?), it was considered a temporary structure. However, like the Eiffel Tower, it's proven so popular and iconic that no one's talking about taking it down anymore.

In 2000, the London Eye was the largest observation wheel in the world. Since then, a larger one has been built in Asia--but that's just a testament to the Eye's popularity. Another sign of its influence: this summer in Britain I spotted two other new observation wheels, at Greenwich and York.
Each of those pods can hold 20-30 people, and the wheel rotates slowly but continuously. Entering or exiting a pod is therefore rather like stepping on or off an escalator.

Having taken a recent "flight" on the London Eye left me in good shape to assess certain details of Siobhan Dowd's The London Eye Mystery, one of the finalists for a Cybils Award for middle-grade fiction.

First of all, as the kids in the book come to realize, there's no way to get on or off the wheel without being noticed. There are security people and other attendants everywhere. There are glass walls on the pods and much of the embarking area.

Secondly, the plot of the book depends on there always being a long line/queue to buy tickets and get on. Based on bitter experience (I can still hear Godson's brother saying sadly, "Toooo crowded"), I was expecting to find a long line when my dad and I arrived at the Eye this summer. It was a warm day in late June, you can see there was no rain or fog, and we weren't arriving at the very start of the morning.

But Dad and I were able to buy tickets and get on with hardly any waiting at all. That would have completely thrown off the London Eye Mystery plotters. Only when my father and I exited did we run into a mass of people--the school groups had arrived at last.

Photographs by Jerry Bell.