Coming Down the Mountain

The title of Mark Haddon's first TV drama creates mental links to the gospel account of the disciples coming down the Mount of Transfiguration for me. I don't know if this was intended.

I enjoyed the novel "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time" very much. That was written from the pont of view of the special needs member of the family. Last night's drama was complimentary written from the point of view of the brother of a Down's Syndrome boy.

Mark Haddon is a novelist and poet, best known for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. He was born in 1962 in Northampton and educated at Uppingham School and Merton College, Oxford, where he studied English.

In 2003, Haddon won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and Commonwealth Writers' Prize Overall Best First Book for his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, a book which is written from the perspective of a boy with Asperger's Disorder. Haddon's knowledge of autism comes from working with autistic people as a young man. However, some people with Asperger's Disorder disagree with his depiction. On the other hand, many people who have some sort of relationship to an autistic person will find many incidents in the book to be well described. According to an interview with the author at Powells.com, this was the first book that Haddon wrote intentionally for an adult audience; he was surprised when his publisher suggested marketing it to both adult and child audiences. His second adult-novel, A Spot of Bother, was published in September 2006.

Mark Haddon is also known for his series of Agent Z books, one of which, Agent Z and the Penguin from Mars, was made into a 1996 Children's BBC sitcom. He also wrote the screenplay for the BBC television adaptation of Raymond Briggs's story Fungus the Bogeyman, screened on BBC1 in 2004.

Haddon is a vegetarian, and enjoys vegetarian cookery. He describes himself as a 'hard-line atheist' In an interview published in The Observer on Sunday 2004 April 11 Haddon said "I am atheist in a very religious mold".

Mark Haddon lives in Oxford and is married to Dr. Sos Eltis, a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford.

Telegraph TV Review

BBC1’s Coming Down the Mountain (Sun) was the first TV drama by Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Like that novel, it featured a child with special needs – but here the main focus was on another member of the family.

Nicholas Hoult played David Philips, a London teenager who hated having a brother with Down’s syndrome. His own, more ordinary needs had always taken second place to Ben’s – and his parents had apparently never considered the possibility that he’d mind. Early on, in a rare act of rebellion, he left Ben (Tommy Jessop) to find his own way home from school, and went to a party. Just as he’d started snogging the lovely Gail, his mum showed up with Ben in tow. “You’re coming home with me right now, young man,” she yelled in front of his friends.
Apart from perhaps overdoing the parental insensitivity, this seemed a promising, even brave situation for a drama. The trouble was that, having come up with it, Haddon never seemed entirely sure what to do next. In the end, he opted to separate out David’s conflicting feelings, and present each of them in turn. He also got from one to the other by means of some frankly implausible plot twists.

As it turned out, David’s relationship with Gail survived his public humiliation. Yet, no sooner was he tasting first love than the family moved to Derbyshire – so that Ben could go to a special school. (Again David was neither consulted nor sympathised with.) In his new friendless environment, you could understand why David would be badly depressed. Far harder to believe was that he’d take Ben to Wales and push him off a mountain.

Luckily, Ben landed on a ledge, but in hospital he told the nurse what had happened. More luckily still, David then bundled him out of the hospital without anybody objecting much, or telling the police. As for Ben, he quickly abandoned his plans for legal revenge and (like David) realised that the attempted murder had been just the thing to heal the brotherly rift. Now firm pals, the two returned home – where before long their parents joined in the mood of general reconciliation.

Several of the individual scenes last night worked very well, especially the teenage party at the beginning and the touching chats between the brothers at the end. Nonetheless, the journey between them felt too contrived to make for a satisfying whole.

Novel Reviewed

Writing his first novel from the point of view of an autistic 15-year-old, Mark Haddon takes the reader into the chaos of autism and creates a character of such empathy that many readers will begin to feel for the first time what it is like to live a life in which there are no filters to eliminate or order the millions of pieces of information that come to us through our senses every instant of the day. For the autistic person, most stimuli register with equal impact, and because these little pieces of information cannot usually be processed effectively, life becomes a very confusing mess of constantly competing signals.

Christopher, at fifteen, has been attending a special school for most of his life, living at home with his father, a heating contractor who works long hours. A savant at math, he sometimes calms himself by listing prime numbers and squaring the number two in his head, and he tells us that his "record" is 2 to the 45th power. His teacher Siobhan has been showing him ways to deal with his environment more effectively, and at fifteen he is on the verge of gaining some tenuous control over the mass of stimuli which often sidetrack him. Innocent and honest, he sees things logically and interprets the spoken word literally, unable to recognize the clues which would tell him if someone is being dishonest or devious or even facetious. "I find it hard to imagine things which did not happen to me," he says. He can understand similes ("[The rain] was falling so hard that it looked like white sparks.") because he can see the similarities in appearance between the heavy rain and white sparks, but he cannot understand metaphors, which omit "like" and "as" and simply make statements, which, he feels, are not true. As he explains, "When I try…[to imagine] an apple in someone's eye, [it] doesn't have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about."

When Wellington, the pet poodle who lives across the street, is stabbed with a pitchfork and killed, Christopher decides to solve the mystery and write a book about it. Using his favorite novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as his model, he investigates the crime, uncovering many secrets involving his own family in the process. As he applies the lessons which Siobhan has given him for dealing with his overwhelming outside world, he also embarks on a most unusual, if not unique, coming-of-age story, and ends the book a much more mature 15-year-old than he was when he started.

Using the simple subject-verb-object sentence pattern in which Christopher tries to order and communicate with his world, Haddon tells his story with warmth and often humor, making us see and understand Christopher's problems at the same time that we experience everyone else's frustrations in dealing with him. All Christopher's conversations and the events he experiences are recalled from his own point of view, and the reader can easily see how difficult his world is, both for him and for those around him. As he seeks to order his day by the number of cars he sees of the same color (four red cars in a row mean a wonderful day, while four yellow cars mean a bad day, in which case he does not eat lunch and will not speak), we see how desperate he is to find some pattern which will enable him to make sense of his world. He hopes that by writing his book about the death of Wellington, he will be able to emulate his idol, Sherlock Holmes, about whom Watson says, "His mind…was busy in endeavoring to frame some scheme into which all these strange and apparently disconnected episodes could be fitted."
Investigating Wellington's death requires Christopher to venture forth from the safe world of familiar people and places, and this venturing forth is fraught with problems. Strange places are particularly traumatic. As he explains, "When I am in a new place, because I see everything, it is like when a computer is doing too many things at the same time and the central processor unit is blocked up and there isn't any space left to think about other things….And sometimes when I am in a new place and there are lots of people there it is like a computer crashing and I have to close my eyes and put my hands over my ears and groan, which is like pressing and shutting down programs and turning the computer off and rebooting so that I can remember what I am doing and where I am meant to be going."

Christopher's difficulties with his emotions are particularly poignant. "Feelings," he says, "are just having a picture on the screen in your head of what is going to happen tomorrow or next year, or what might have happened instead of what did happen, and if it is a happy picture they smile and if it is a sad picture they cry." Removed from his feelings, Christopher can only respond with logic, or with the anger which sometimes overwhelms him as result of fear or frustration, and the reader, responding to his difficulties as any loving caregiver would, cannot help aching for Christopher and empathizing with his family.

As Christopher investigates Wellington's death, he makes some remarkably brave decisions and when he eventually faces his fears and moves beyond his immediate neighborhood, the magnitude of his challenge and the joy in his achievement are overwhelming. Haddon creates a fascinating main character and allows the reader to share in his world, experiencing his ups and downs and his trials and successes. In providing a vivid world in which the reader participates vicariously, Haddon fulfills the most important requirements of fiction, entertaining at the same time that he broadens the reader's perspective and allows him to gain knowledge. This fascinating book should attract legions of enthusiastic readers.