Well, we have finally reached the end of our four-week long emotional roller coaster. We have entered the mind of an autistic individual and walked in his shoes for a while to understand his perspective on life and adult social problems. Overall, I have nothing to complain about regarding the book. However, I do have a problem with one thing.
The conclusion was extremely rushed and didn't give much closure. At one moment, we're in London, and Chris is living with his mother and Roger Shears. The next moment, Chris and his mother have returned to Swindon (via stealing Roger's car) and are talking to Ed about living back at the house again. By the end of the book, Roger taxied out to Swindon just to dump all of Judy's stuff on the lawn and flip her off, followed by Chris taking his A level maths, Ed apologizing (to very little success with reconnecting with Chris), the family buying a golden retriever and naming it Sandy, Toby dying, and Judy living in a small apartment.
I found there was too many details left out, sort of like the ending to the Hunger Games books or Mass Effect 3. I was still asking a lot of questions that weren't answered at all in the book and felt as if Mark Haddon betrayed Chris' character in a way. Chris is focused on detail (ex. him describing standing in a field and noticing the details. "There are 19 cows in the field. 15 are white with black spots and 4 have brown. There is a town in the distance with 300 noticeable buildings and a church with a square steeple. The southeast corner of the field is more elevated than the northwest corner. etc. etc. etc.") and his obsession with detail is what drives the story forward.
Like the Hunger Games (where so many details were left out after the fight at the Capitol that those extra details could have made a whole other book) and Mass Effect 3 (where Bioware [the video game's developer] received extreme backlash from an extremely loyal fanbase for leaving hundreds of questions unanswered with the ending), there was lots of missing pieces to the puzzle of "Who Killed Wellington," even though we did find out who the murderer was and what really happened with his Chris' mother. I just wished it had more closure and wasn't as rushed.
Despite this tweak in the storyline, it was an extremely good book.
Interesting point about the "emotional roller coaster"... Just like we discussed in my week about character: Christopher does indeed have emotions, even though he doesn't always show them in regular ways. Of course so do the other characters (*coughcough* Mr. Shears, Mr. Shears, Ed... just about everyone in this book is f**ked up).
ReplyDeleteI 100% agree that the book ended to fast and it did remind me of the end of hunger games in the sense that it just wrapped up too fast. One minute they were coming home from London and the next the book just finished without, in my opinion, any real conclusion.
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