Experimental Narration in the Postmodern Detective Story: What a Carve Up! and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime

In postmodern literature, authors utilise a variety of stylistically innovative techniques to reject the ‘traditional’ conventions of the novel. By subverting and merging a range of genres, forms and structures, contemporary novels disobey ‘expected’ narrative rules and produce literature which defies easy categorisation. Postmodern literature is often self-referential and deconstructive, creating a hyperawareness in the reader through metafiction, unreliable narration, and genre blending. Therefore, this article will examine to what extent Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) and Jonathon Coe’s What a Carve up! (1994) can be considered postmodern novels. It will begin by analysing both texts’ use of metafiction, to create a self-conscious narrator/author who signifies the processes of writing. Simultaneously, it will provide an examination of Haddon and Coe’s experimental uses of form, structure and genre to suggest that both authors distort conventional narrative devices. Finally, this article will examine the adherence and subversion of the conventions of the detective genre in both novels. It will suggest that both Haddon and Coe reject ‘traditional’ narrative devices, in similarly innovative ways, to produce works which can be considered postmodern detective stories.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, published in 2003, is unique as the first novel to be published simultaneously in the UK for adult and child audiences. Thus, from the offset, the novel adheres to a key trope of postmodern fiction in its “hybridity of… literary and cultural allusions in the text” (Ciocia, 2009, 324). However, the novel avoids easy classification and Haddon’s blending of forms and structures from a variety of genres, and his narrator’s self-conscious writing process, marks the text as one which both adheres to and rejects traditional narrative devices. The novel is narrated by fifteen-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone who discovers his neighbour’s dog, Wellington, has been ‘murdered’ and thus begins to write a ‘murder-mystery’ book in an attempt to uncover the culprit. It is generally assumed that Christopher has some form of Asperger’s, although the narrator does not identify this, and Haddon later insisted that the book was “not about Asperger’s. It’s a novel whose central character describes himself as ‘a mathematician with some behavioural difficulties’… I slightly regret the fact that the word ‘Asperger’s’ was used on the cover” (Haddon, 2009). Thus, when Christopher decides to investigate Wellington’s ‘murder’ he models himself and his book on the stories of his favourite detective, Sherlock Holmes, whose logical and detached mind he can identify with. However, although Haddon’s narrator/author attempts to reproduce a work of detective fiction, the novel also rejects many of the tropes of a ‘whodunit’ novel through his protagonist’s metafictional and self-referential narrative, fluctuating form and structure, and Christopher’s wide frame of reference. Thus, as Christopher’s own life becomes entangled in his murder-mystery, the plot structure disintegrates, and the novel begins to reject ‘traditional’ narrative techniques.

The use of metafiction as a literary device is a common feature of postmodernism. By drawing the reader’s attention to the act of storytelling, metafictional texts can examine both the process of writing itself and the relationship between literature and reality. To achieve this, metafictional texts often self-consciously allude to the artificiality of the novel by parodying or departing from traditional narrative devices, thereby producing a highly sceptical reader who questions the reliability of the narration. This self-consciousness is evident in both Curious and WACU!, and both novels ultimately examine the process of writing through the use of a dual narrator/author. In Curious, what is later to become Christopher’s mystery novel begins life as a school exercise set out by his teacher Siobhan, who tells him that he should “write something [he] would want to read [him]self” (5). Christopher does “not like proper novels” (5) because he struggles to correctly interpret emotions. Similarly, he is unable to take the expectations of potential readers into account. Thus, Siobhan “becomes the incarnation of social story-telling norms: she explains to him what to do and what not to do in writing a story” (Freibmann, 2008, 405). Siobhan metanarratively imposes on Christopher the conventions of detective fiction and offers him advice in terms of content, form and structure. To some extent, Christopher is able to adhere this guidance; he begins “with something to grab people’s attention” (5) and tries to “include some descriptions of things” (85). Siobhan’s metafictional influence on the novel is also often a source of humour. For example, when Siobhan tells him that he should “describe people in the story by mentioning one or two details about them”, he remarks that that is why he included “the policeman who looked as if he had two mice in his nose” (85). Similarly, when describing a field of cows, he assures us that “there were 31 more things in this list… but Siobhan said I didn’t need to write them all down” (176). Christopher self-consciously attempts to adhere to the traditional narrative devices outlined by Siobhan. However, despite his best intentions, Curious is Christopher’s own book and therefore the narrative invariably struggles because of the narrator/author’s inability to correctly interpret his own environment.

Christopher’s supposed Asperger’s allows for the novel to reject traditional narrative devices in terms of both plot and character. Despite his love of lists, numbers and accuracy, his inability to correctly comprehend emotions or events distorts the narration and he “lives in a world of… sensory overload” (Schultheis, 2004, 193). Therefore, there are discrepancies “between the narrator’s report and the reader’s inference” and the book becomes “an example of interactional storytelling” (Freibmann, 2008, 414) in which the reader has to actively ‘fill in’ the gaps in the narrative. Haddon himself has indicated his intentions here: “For me, Curious was a book about reading and books, and how people fill in the gaps when they read something on the page. But everyone said it was about Asperger’s” (cited in Allfree, 2010). Moments in the novel where Christopher keeps strict orientation to fact and ‘describes things’, as Siobhan has instructed him to, do little to further the plot for the reader. However, the accompanying diagrams and illustrations facilitate the reader’s insight into both Christopher’s mind and the author/narrator’s writing process. Because of Christopher’s limited perspective and inability to correctly interpret information, readers must complete the story themselves “with interpretations that in many other novels are at least partially given by the narrator” (Freimann, 2008, 410). Despite Christopher’s fully realized narrative voice, and self-confessed inability to lie, Haddon’s use of an autistic protagonist, who is unable to fully adhere to traditional narrative devices, produces an unreliable narrator. However, in “a book about reading and books”, Christopher’s unreliability invites the reader to “reflect on the connection between creative writing and truth” (Ciocia, 2009, 328).

Aside from the novel’s use of metafiction and self-reference, Haddon can be considered stylistically innovative in his use of form, structure and genre. The timeline jumps between the past and present, and the narrative flow is interrupted with memories, digressions and mathematical problems. Christopher’s mystery story also rejects a traditional chapter structure. Instead of cardinal numbers, the chapters begin at ‘2’ and continue in the form of prime numbers, because he both likes them and can associate with them: “I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules” (12). The form and structure of the text emulate Christopher’s characterisation. The text also relies on an assortment of visual aids which diverts from traditional narrative devices; Christopher includes charts, graphs, drawings, logos, photographs, maps. Similarly, while blurring the boundaries between different genres, “Curious also makes several tangential forays into different disciplines, both from the humanities and from the pure and applied sciences” (Ciocia, 2009, 324) — the narrative includes references to maths, astronomy, linguistics and philosophy. Haddon’s use of a simple form in terms of font, spacing, chapter lengths and paratactic syntax also emulates Christopher’s naïve characterisation. As a protagonist who has problems with change, hypothetical knowledge and contingencies, “the structure of the novel mirrors Christopher’s approach to the world, which is based on logic, deduction, truth, and objectivity” (Matos, 2013). Through the subversion of expected forms, structures and genre the novel can therefore be considered postmodern.

Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! similarly blends a variety of forms, structures and genres in a style that can be considered postmodern. Published in 1994, the novel is also an example of metafiction; while Christopher is the narrator/author of his mystery novel, WACU! begins life as a biography on the Winshaw family written by the narrator/author Michael Owen. The Winshaws “are a representative breed, whose members you keep meeting because they are responsible for most of the ills of British society” (Mullan, 2013): they include Dorothy, who is building a ready-meal empire at the expense of animal welfare and her customers’ health; Henry who is single-handedly privatising the National Health Service for his own gain; and Hilary, who is making money by peddling toxic and self-serving views in her tabloid column. Clearly, Coe’s text is a political and social satire of Conservative Britain under Margaret Thatcher. However, as the novel progresses, Coe plays with a number of literary modes and genres which deconstruct the ‘biography’s’ initial realism, until the text eventually transforms into a parody of a ‘whodunit’. Like Curious, the investigation of the Winshaws is shown through the eyes of a narrator-turned-detective, Michael, and while Haddon’s plot begins to structurally unravel once it becomes evident that Christopher is intrinsically involved in his own ‘mystery’, WACU!’s genre is deconstructed as Michael realises that almost every aspect of his own life is tied to the Winshaw family.

As discussed, Curious can be defined as postmodern in its self-conscious writing style and its use of a fully realized metanarrative. Similarly, from the beginning of WACU! the reader acknowledges Michael’s function as an author/narrator. While in Christopher’s novel Siobhan stands as the dictator of literary norms, in WACU! Michael lays bare his own narrative devices, breaking the frame of his fiction and revealing “his awareness of the constructed-ness and instability of narrative discourse” (Guignery, 2011). The book is a biography which he has been commissioned to write by an unidentified benefactor, and thus the narrator/author is hyperaware of his own writing process. Initially, the protagonists’ self-consciousness regarding the artificiality of fiction is presented through the novel’s intertextuality. The novel’s main inter-text is its namesake, a 1961 British ‘whodunit’ film by which Michael is obsessed. A particular scene from the film (in which Shirley Eaton begins to undress) is repeatedly referenced and reproduced in the novel. Throughout most of the text the significance of these intertextual references is not apparent. However, as the novel transforms into a parody of a whodunit, and each of the Winshaws meet their deaths in ways that accord with their professional sins, the final scenes of the film are identically imitated. Clearly, the film is a significant inter-text and this highlights the novel’s use of a self-conscious narrator. However, the intertextuality of Coe’s novel is not the only aspect which indicates a postmodern consciousness of the writing process. For example, in other comedic moments in the book, Coe self-consciously pokes fun at literary publishing — “Nobody gives a tinker’s fuck about fiction any more, not real fiction” (102). Similarly, when Michael’s editor considers Hillary’s ‘cheap’ fame, he says that her column is “the usual sort of rubbish… Cheap tricks, mechanical plot, lousy dialogue, could have been written by a computer… Empty, hollow, materialistic, meretricious.’” (103). In the framework of a novel about writing a novel these moments are pointedly comic, as Coe ironically points to the literary processes which affect both himself and his protagonist as authors. This comic self-reference can also be seen in Curious, as Haddon appears to satirise ‘proper novels’: “In proper novels people say things like, ‘I am veined with iron, with silver and with streaks of common mud. ….’ What does this mean? I do not know” (5). Self-consciousness is both a convention of postmodernism and a device which Haddon and Coe similarly employ to highlight the artificiality of fiction.

Clearly, Coe’s use of a protagonist who is both conscious of his own writing process and the novel’s intertextuality is stylistically innovative. Similarly, as Curious plays with a variety of disciplines such as science, maths and linguistics, WACU! adventurously leaps from one narrative device to the next, presenting a pastiche of conventional literary modes. For example, Coe interweaves a number of literary genres such as tabloid newspaper articles, interview transcripts, diary entries, letters and the minutes of a board meeting. Coe “starts his novel with a prologue and ends it with a preface, alternates between chapters in the first and third person narration, does away with chronology and gleefully sprinkles his text with analepses and prolepses” (Guinery, 2011). This structure, by which the plot jumps forwards and backwards, and rejects traditional narrative devices, secures the novel’s place in a postmodern categorization. WACU! similarly mixes a variety of genres. Dumitrascu writes, “[Coe] has made a significant contribution to the socio-political novel” (Dumitrascu, 2017, 5). However, while WACU! can undoubtedly be labelled a socio-political novel for its satire on the condition of 1980’s England, Coe also experimentally employs and rejects a number of genres including detective fiction, social realism, satire and parody. The consecutive alternation between genres, and the double-structured narrative of the ‘mystery’ and Michael’s own life (which eventually collide), can also be seen in Haddon’s Curious, and both novels clearly reject ‘traditional’ narrative devices.

Evidently, WACU! is postmodern in its rejection of a single genre and its alternating narrative. However, despite the use of a variety of forms and genres, the first two-thirds of the novel still draws upon aspects of realism. This evolves as Michael realises that his own life has been secondarily affected by the Winshaw’s crimes (the most poignant moment being Fiona’s death at the hands of an under-resourced health department), and he realizes that he is a character in a plot: “I thought I was supposed to be writing this story… but I’m not. At least not any more. I’m part of it” (472). At this point, the novel disintegrates all aspects of realism and rejects a traditional plot structure, undercutting the narrative devices already established to become a parody of a ‘whodunit’. His ‘biography’ becomes a ‘murder-mystery’ story (as relished by Curious’ Christopher), and Michael “reimagines his life as a work of genre fiction” (Shallcross, 2016), refiguring the consequent events in the book as scenarios from both Conan Doyle’s fiction and What a Carve Up! the film. He recasts the family members as “stock comic types and himself as an archetypal bungling detective” (Shallcross, 2016). Thus, at this point Coe’s narrative style converts to an explicit parody of the detective genre. While the novel’s moral and socialist content, developed through pastiche, farce and satire, allow for its categorisation as a socio-political novel, it is the postmodern twists on the detective genre which are arguably Coe’s most innovative technique.

As outlined, both Curious and WACU! clearly reject traditional narrative devices and can be considered examples of postmodern literature. However, “one of the characteristic features of postmodern writing consists of bowing to, and borrowing from, the literary past” (Guignery, 2011). Thus, the postmodern technique which most clearly links the two novels is their adherence to, and distortion of, the conventions of the detective genre. Both Christopher and Michael are self-conscious narrators who demonstrate metafiction through intertextuality. However, a key intertext for both Curious and WACU! is Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. In Curious, the title itself directly alludes to a Conan Doyle novel, Silver Blake, and we are told that The Hound of the Baskervilles is Christopher’s favourite book (88). Therefore, when he embarks on his mission to uncover Wellington’s killer he models his detective abilities on Holmes, “whom he reads as autistic” (Resene, 2016, 81). Christopher identifies with Sherlock’s over-developed powers of observation. He says:

“I like Sherlock Holmes… he says
The world is full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observes.
But he notices them, like I do.” (92)

Not only does Christopher associate with Sherlock’s ability to disassociate his mind from his emotions, he “regards the social world mainly as a puzzle to be solved” and therefore, “chooses a genre that is equally focused on puzzles” (Freibmann, 2008, 412).

However, as the novel develops it becomes apparent that Christopher’s suitability as a detective is equal to his suitability as an author. Christopher’s inability to lie or recognise lying (a key requirement in a genre which Dorothy Sayers labels “the art of framing lies” (cited in Resene, 2016, 84)) inhibits his detection. When he finds out that his father has been lying to him, he cannot process the information and withdraws from the narrative — “I don’t know what happened then because there is a gap in my memory” (113). Thus, the detective genre is subverted by Haddon’s use of a ‘doomed detective’, whose investigative powers, unlike Holmes’, cannot be relied upon to solve the mystery. As Christopher writes, a murder mystery novel “is a puzzle. If it is a good puzzle you can sometimes work out the answer before the end of the book” (5). In Christopher’s murder mystery this is true; he is unaware that his own father is the ‘killer’ and that, like Michael, he is the ‘real mystery’. By the time Christopher infers the motivations behind both Wellington’s ‘murder’ and his mother’s disappearance, the reader has already ‘worked out the answer’ to the puzzle. Both mysteries are resolved by the reader in the first half of the book, at which point the novel reshapes; it is no longer a murder mystery story, but “a complex representation of how Christopher interprets the world through the lens of autism” (Resene, 2016, 81).

Like Curious, intertextual references to Sherlock Holmes are abundant in WACU!. Michael has been “brought up on a diet of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes” (232), dabbles in writing detective stories as a child, and when he visits the home of Findlay Onyx he has no trouble recognising that it is an exact replica of Thaddeus Sholto’s apartment in Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four. Similarly, Michael’s book has all the conventional tropes of a detective story: clues in the form of coded messages, a recurrent and mysterious ‘smell of jasmine’, red herrings, a strange man following from the shadows and a mysterious family secret to be uncovered. Guignery writes that “the novel can be considered… an exemplar of a postmodern whodunit”. However, Coe “both uses and abuses the conventions of detective fiction” (Guignery, 2011). Although written in the form of a biography, which incidentally germinates during a game of Cludeo, the novel at first appears to comply with all the conventions of the genre “before veering off into parody” (Guignery, 2011). Unlike Curious where the tropes of detective fiction disintegrate as the novel advances, WACU! begins more and more to resemble a golden-age detective story, finalising in a typical Holmesian scene in which the various members of the Winshaw family meet their deaths one by one at an opulent English manor. However, despite the novel’s evident adherence to the codes of the convention, Coe uses the platform of a murder mystery to satirise his society, using the genre’s ‘playfulness’ for socio-political means.

Ciocia writes that “Detective fiction has often provided fertile ground for postmodern literary experimentations, accompanied by reflections on the art of writing” (Ciocia, 2009, 321). Clearly, both Haddon and Coe use the platform of the detective genre in their novels. However, as discussed, the novels also reject the traditional narrative conventions of the genre through their postmodern mixing of forms, structures and genres. Thus, both novels move beyond both the playfulness of postmodernism, and the formalities of the detective genre, to create novels which avoid easy characterization.

References

Ahmad, A. (2009). We’re All Bourgeois Now: Realism and Class in Alan Hollinghurst, Graham Swift, and Jonathan Coe. In: L. Driscoll, ed., Evading Class in Contemporary British Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan US, pp.134–167.

Allfree, C. (2010). Mark Haddon: The curious incident of the novelist turned playwright. The Independent. [online] Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/mark-haddon-the-curious-incident-of-the-novelist-turned-playwright-1931469.html [Accessed 20 Feb. 2018].

Ciocia, S. (2009). Postmodern Investigations: The Case of Christopher Boone in The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Children’s Literature in Education, 40(4), pp.320–332.

Coe, J. (1995). What a Carve Up!, London: Penguin Books.

Coe, J. (2011) What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe — week three: Jonathon Coe on Writing What a Carve Up!. The Guardian. [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/16/jonathan-coe-carve-book-club [Accessed 20 Feb. 2018]

Dumitrascu, D. (2017) Power in Politics and Academia in Jonathan Coe’s Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp.1–8.

Freibmann, S. (2008). A Tale of Autistic Experience: Knowing, Living, Telling in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 6(2), pp.395–417.

Guignery, V. (2011) ‘Colonel mustard, in the billiard room, with the revolver’: Jonathon Coe’s What a Carve Up! as a postmodern whodunit. Études Anglaises, 64(4), pp.427–438.

Haddon, M. (2004). The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, London: Vintage.

Haddon, M. (2004). B is for bestseller. The Guardian. [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/apr/11/booksforchildrenandteenagers.features3 [Accessed 20 Feb. 2018].

Haddon, M. (2009). Asperger’s & Autism. [Blog] Mark Haddon Author. Available at: http://www.markhaddon.com/aspergers-and-autism [Accessed 15 Feb. 2018].

Hadley, L. (2011) Putting Class Back in the Picture. Contemporary Literature, 52(2), pp.384–393.

Jordan, J. (2014) Families in literature: the Winshaws in What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe. The Guardian. [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/dec/17/families-in-literature-the-winshaws-in-what-a-carve-up-by-jonathan-coe [Accessed 20 Feb. 2018]

Matos, A. (2013). Structure and Development in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. [Blog] The ever and ever that fiction allows. Available at: https://angelmatos.net/2013/10/04/the-curious-incident-of-the-dog-in-the-night-time/ [Accessed 21 Feb. 2018].

Mullan, J. (2011) What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe — week four: readers’ responses. The Guardian. [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/23/book-club-what-a-carve-up-week-four [Accessed 20 Feb. 2018]

Mullan, J. (2011) What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe — week one: mysteries. The Guardian. [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/02/jonathan-coe-carve-up-book-club [Accessed 20 Feb. 2018]

Mullan, J. (2011) What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe — week two: coincidences. The Guardian. [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/09/jonathan-coe-carve-book-club [Accessed 20 Feb. 2018]

Resene, M. (2016). A “Curious Incident”: Representations of Autism in Children’s Detective Fiction. The Lion and the Unicorn, 40(1), pp.81–99.

Schultheis, P. (2004). The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (review). The Missouri Review, 27(2), pp.193–194.

Shallcross, M. (2016). ‘The Parodist’s Game’: Scrutiny of Cultural Play in Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up!. Adaptation, 9(2), pp.123–141

Vincent, S. (2001) Jonathon Coe: a bit of a rotter. The Guardian. [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2001/feb/24/fiction.jonathancoe1 [Accessed 20 Feb. 2018]