The London Eye Mystery

“[T]he Barracks was the local name for Barrington Heights, the tallest tower block in our South London borough. It used to be where people who are socially excluded lived. Being socially excluded is a bit like being excluded from school. Instead of a head teacher telling you you have to leave, it’s more that everybody in the rest of society acts like you don’t exist. And you end up with all the other people who are being ignored. And you’re so angry that society is treating you like this that you take drugs and shoplift and form gangs in revenge.”

Ted’s description of public housing gets to the core of the social and political issues that surround the topic. He has a knack for seeing things just as they are, without opinions and judgments. He also understands intimately what it’s like to feel left out of society, and he can sympathize with others who find themselves rejected by others. The mention of the Barracks early on also serves as an example of “Chekhov’s gun,” a narrative principle stating that if a the narrative mentions an object (for example, a gun hanging on a wall), that object should come into play later in the tale—and, indeed, the Barracks will return to haunt the story.

“‘You’ll probably end up arguing again,’ Dad said to Mum. He sounded like a weatherman when he’s predicting a really bad storm. I have looked in the thesaurus for the right word and it is ‘gleeful.’”

Ted is perplexed by the social dynamics between his aunt and mother and ponders his father’s emotions about the relationship, demonstrating his confusion about the emotions of others. Ted must figure out what his father means with his ironic joy at the advent of trouble, and his father’s happy anticipation of trouble fills the boy with uncertainty.

“Everyone laughed their heads off, which is not what literally happened but I like the idea of laughing heads becoming detached from bodies through extreme hilarity, so it is a good way to describe things. I didn’t know what was funny but I laughed too. Mr. Shepherd says it’s a good idea to laugh when others do as it means you can fit in and become friends.”

Ted’s neurodiversity requires his masking, or camouflaging himself by mimicking the emotions of others, and he remembers a tip from Mr. Shepherd that helps him to fit in with his peers. Ted’s thoughts illustrate his true emotions as he thinks about a literal depiction of heads laughing off, and explains how he processes metaphorical phrases that aren’t as natural for him to imagine.

“‘Salim,’ I said, ‘If you’re a practical joker, what’s a theoretical joker?’ Salim considered. ‘Someone who just thinks about playing jokes but never actually does them?’ I nodded. That made me the theoretical kind. I often think of pranks I could play on Kat, like telling her that a tsunami is scheduled to come up the Thames at twelve thirty and ruin her hairdo, but I never carry them out.”

Ted resents cruelty as much as anyone, and his sister’s jibes and taunts make him wish he could retaliate. However, his idea of retaliation is unintentionally comical because it is highly impractical. Nevertheless, his outlandish (and mostly harmless) schemes of revenge reflect his inventive mind, and this trait will prove quite useful.

“I know I’m a weirdo. My brain runs on a different operating system from other people’s. I see things they don’t and sometimes they see things I don’t. As far as I’m concerned, if Andy Warhol was like me, then one day I’d be a cultural icon too. Instead of soup cans and movie stars, I’d be famous for my weather charts and formal suits and that would be good.”

Ted has grown comfortable with the different way his brain works. He imagines using that difference to his advantage and attaining respect for being himself. There’s a defiant confidence to his attitude, one that serves him well. This passage also shows Ted’s mature self-awareness, and his remark about “see[ing] things [others] don’t” highlights a motif of perspective.

“[…] I like systems. The weather system is hard to understand because there are so many variables. And variables are interesting. If the system goes wrong, it’s a disaster. And some people think the system is starting to go wrong and that could mean the end of the human race. I want to be a meteorologist when I grow up so that I can predict things and help the human race to survive. But I will have to study very hard and find out about all the variables.”

Ted explains to Salim why he likes to study weather. As a system, it’s orderly, and Ted likes having things in order. As a complex system, though, it’s dynamic and challenging and interesting and mildly scary, which captures Ted’s imagination and dares him to use his powers of thought on it. He may never be able to put weather into perfect order, but knowing how it works and helping others understand it might be enough.

“‘It’s not that I’m sick.’ ‘No.’ ‘Or stupid.’ ‘I know that.’ ‘But I’m not normal either.’ ‘So? Who is?’ ‘It’s like the brain is a computer,’ I said. ‘But mine works on a different operating system from other people’s. And my wiring’s different too.’ ‘Neat,’ said Salim.”

Rather than being judgmental or uncomfortable about Ted’s individual cognitive experiences, Salim enjoys chatting with him and compliments him on his unusual “wiring.” Salim’s attitude contrasts with the patronizing or stigmatizing attitude that some people have toward autism. The older boy’s inclusive attitude may be rooted partly in his own experiences of feeling singled out and “different,” as he has endured racist bullying from classmates.

“‘I don’t like being different. I don’t like being in my brain. Sometimes it’s like a big empty space where I’m all on my own. And there’s nothing else, just me.’ ‘Nothing at all?’ ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Not even the weather. Only my thoughts.’ ‘I know that place,’ said Salim. ‘I’m in there too. It gets real lonely in there, doesn’t it?’”

Ted describes the loneliness of autism to Salim. Salim’s response suggests that Ted isn’t as different as he thinks he is. Salim’s validation of Ted’s feelings demonstrates that Ted struggles with the same feelings that many others do and that they can empathize with his point of view.

“Typical Kat. One moment she’s saying how brainy I am, the next she’s assaulting me and telling lies. Predicting what Kat is going to do next makes predicting the weather seem easier than counting to three. Kat is not only more unpredictable than the weather, she is also more unpredictable than a) volcanic eruptions or b) lunatics or c) terrorist attacks. It is a fact that her name sounds like the first syllable of words like:

Catastrophe

Cataclysm

Catatonic.”

Ted never knows what’s next with Kat. She’ll be kind to him, but then she’ll hit him. He doesn’t do well playing with her because make-believe makes no sense to him, but her selfishness is the major cause of her difficulties with Ted. They’re both smart, but they must learn to navigate their stark personality differences to solve Salim’s disappearance.

“I thought about Salim and the way his eyes shifted around the ground a lot and how he’d looked up towards the sky when Aunt Gloria was talking. But it didn’t fit into the five-point code. I didn’t know what emotion it matched. I thought of him in the queue to get on the Eye, squinting upwards, looking down, turning this way and that. I thought of him shuffling in his sleeping bag, sighing in his sleep.”

Salim’s complex emotional expressions far surpass Ted’s simple five-point system for recognizing others’ feelings. Nevertheless, Ted realizes that clues may hide behind Salim’s body language, so he keeps a mental inventory of it. His attention to detail illustrates how, while he may not understand the feelings behind the actions, Ted does notice and catalog the changes of those he cares about, like Salim.

“I often don’t sleep at night. My brain is filled with all the strange facts about the world. I switch on my reading lamp and listen to the shipping forecasts on the radio on low volume. I get out my weather books. I study the charts of isobars and isotherms. I examine photographs of what the weather leaves behind: dried-up lakes, wrecked shanty towns, mud-slides, people rowing boats around the roofs of their houses. And I plan how when I grow up I will help people prepare for the disasters and save their lives and their money and advise governments on how to manage the weather.”

To calm himself, Ted works on his favorite subject, the weather. He takes a great interest in weather disasters and wants to help those caught up in them. The weather is like the big, dangerous world out beyond the relative safety of his family: Ted wants to learn how to overcome those dangers and then share his knowledge with others. It’s a positive aspiration built out of his own fears and unique abilities.

“No amount of making up shipping forecasts could stop me from thinking about it. Death. I realized it was real. I would die one day. Kat would die. Mum would die. Dad would die. Aunt Gloria would die. Mr. Shepherd at school would die. Every living thing on this planet would die. It was not a question of if but when.”

The possibility of Salim’s death strikes deep into Ted’s mind, and the truth of mortality hits home. No amount of thinking or logic can erase that simple fact. For Ted, it’s the discovery that his strongest abilities are no match against fate. Even he, with his relentless mind, can’t hold back death’s continuous advance.

“[…] I realized that there are two kinds of knowledge: shallow and deep. You can know something in theory but not know it in practice. You can know part of something but not all of it. Knowledge can be like the skin on the surface of the water in a pond, or it can go all the way down to the mud. It can be the tiny tip of the iceberg or the whole hundred per cent.”

Ted realizes what Socrates and Aristotle discovered before him: that it’s impossible to know how much knowledge one has or even how accurate it is. He sees that there are limits to understanding, but, like the philosophers, he can’t tell where those limits are located. This passage also illustrates Ted’s growing sophistication in thinking both logically and poetically; he draws analogies between abstract realities (like knowledge) and material realities (like pond water), yet he scientifically categorizes knowledge into two kinds: “shallow and deep.” In turn, even those adjectives are figurative.

“‘If God made me, who made God?’ Father Russell had smiled and said I was a born theologian but didn’t answer my question. ‘Did another God make him?’ I’d said. And in my mind’s eye, I saw a chain of Gods, each having made the last, going back into infinity. Father Russell had sat down beside me and said, ‘There is only one God, Ted. One God who has always been there. He is outside of time. He is beyond our understanding. He is always with us.’ I wondered now about this God who was beyond our understanding. I closed my eyes. I tried to imagine him. But no matter how hard I thought, all I could see were clouds of confusion in a vast and silent universe and if I’d still had my trampoline, I would have jumped extra hard and extra high.”

For Ted, one major problem with understanding the idea of God is that it involves trying to imagine the infinite. Where many turn away from the frustrations and anxieties of such a question and distract themselves with easier entertainment, Ted engages the mystery and finds it calming. Father Russell’s remark about God being “outside of time” ties back to when, in the beginning chapters, Ted was perplexed by his mother’s figurative expression that she “just doesn’t know where the time’s gone” (12). When Ted encounters something he doesn’t understand, he sits with the mystery instead of dismissing or belittling the idea.

“I picked up a pen. ‘Let’s try a process of elimination,’ I said. The world’s most famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, said that once you have eliminated all the possibilities, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true.”

Any theory that’s impossible can be dropped from Ted’s list of theories; this helps him and Kat to narrow the options. Ted’s inspiration from Sherlock Holmes illustrates how Holmes is a hero to Ted, who admires the sleuth’s tightly logical thinking. Ted looks up to the detective as a role model for logical and relentless deduction that inspires him to achieve the same levels of thinking.

“‘Body language’ is a form of communication, like speaking English or French or Chinese, but it has no words, only gestures. Humans and chimpanzees and meerkats and stingrays can read body language by instinct without having to learn it. But according to the doctors who diagnosed me, people with my kind of syndrome can’t. We have to learn it like a foreign language and this takes time.”

Ted’s autism significantly alters his perception of others’ gestures and facial expressions. Instead of relying on the social intuition that so many others take for granted, Ted must intentionally build an intellectual facility with this “language” as he reasons his way through countless social signals. This adaptation demands hard work, and it doesn’t give perfect results, but Ted daily commits himself to learning. His tenacity for navigating such clues is ultimately what allows him to solve the mystery of Salim’s disappearance.

“Sometimes I think there’s more in that brain of yours, Ted, than in the rest of ours put together. If brains alone could bring Salim back, yours would do it.”

Aunt Gloria thanks Ted for trying to figure out where Salim went. It’s the first time any of the adults show appreciation for him or consider his views during the crisis. Gloria’s acknowledgement highlights how Ted’s thoughts and insights taken from his surroundings are valuable, though many, including his sister, often shun him for it at the same time.

“Being a dyslexic geographer, I can’t read maps. I never know if I should read them upright or upside down. But there’s one map I can read, which is the one of the London Underground. Because it’s a topological map, you are in a universe where the spaces between points don’t matter and all that counts is the sequence of stops and where the lines cross. You could stretch the tube map into all sorts of hoops and loops and it would be the same map, as long as the junctions were the same.”

Ted accommodates his trouble with visual cues by using logic to figure out the directions he must take in his life. A subway map is more a set of instructions than a picture of the Underground rail system. As such, it’s simply data in Ted’s capable hands. Yet again, he finds ways of interpreting his world using reason rather than instinct.

“I held my hands over my ears and shook out my head. My brain felt like it was overheated, going into melt-down. I paced the garden and recounted my steps, only this time the number came out wrong—eleven-and-a-half strides instead of twelve-and-a-half, so either my legs had grown in the last few minutes, or the universe had shrunk, instead of expanded. ‘Wreuurrrrr,’ I went, like the Earl’s Court motorbikes. I looked up at the sky. Evening. High strata cloud, fresh southwesterly, but air pressure falling. One of Dad’s shirts on the line flapped against my head. The wind was picking up.”

On a good day, Ted has trouble interpreting the fears and angers of the people around him. Now nearly everyone in his family is upset, their emotions bursting forth unpredictably. At the same time, his every effort to solve the puzzle of Salim’s disappearance slams into a dead end, and his own troubled feelings reach a boiling point. When he says that his “ brain felt like it was overheated, going into melt-down,” the simile alludes back to the first chapter, in which Ted compared his brain to a computer by saying it runs on a “different operating system” (4).

“Then, tonight, the police showed up. And they knew everything. Salim’s cousin Ted had worked it out, they said. They said how it had been with the wig and the Eye and jumping on the train. It was like Ted Spark had been in my head, seeing my thoughts. And I remember Salim saying how he had some weird syndrome that made him think like a giant computer.”

Marcus Flood, Salim’s best friend, confesses his part in Salim’s disappearance after Ted reasons out what happened. It’s the first time that everyone involved understands Ted’s ingenuity, and that he and Kat solved the case before anyone else. They also see that they ignored and dismissed Ted when he tried to explain the solution. It’s an eye-opening moment for the adults and a quiet moment of triumph for Ted.

“‘Mother of God,’ Kat shrieked. She ran out of the room. ‘Dad! Mum! Come quickly.’ When I talk to people about something I’ve found out, they don’t listen. When Kat does, everybody listens.”

Kat has an urgent way about her that gets her family’s attention. Ted is much quieter. He regards even important discoveries as information that doesn’t require people to rush around in a panic. Sometimes, though, getting people to a pitch of anxiety can motivate them to act. Thus, after Ted and Kat figure out where Salim must be, Ted needs her to raise the alarm.

“My colleagues say I’m a good detective. You have to be, if you’re a woman in the Force. But you two have taught me something. Youngsters are more worth listening to than a legion of adults. If it weren’t for you two, Salim might still be trapped in that tower block.”

Detective Inspector Pearce admits that Ted and Kat were the essential people in the search for Salim. She credits them with the kind of smarts the police department always needs. Knowing how hard it is for some groups to be heard, she’s aware that kids sometimes have valuable things to contribute but are often ignored.

“When we got home, Dad said he was going to spend the weekend in bed. But he didn’t. He began cooking eggs, whistling the Laurel and Hardy theme tune, as if the hurricane that was Aunt Gloria had never been. ‘I’m making my special omelette, Faith,’ he said. ‘The one you used to like when we were dating.’ Mum rolled her eyes but smiled at the same time.”

Ben announces that things at home are back to normal, but with the added understanding that what matters most is his family’s love for each other. The omelet signals Ben’s desire to provide to his favorite people what they love and want. Ben’s cooking represents the newly recharged closeness among Spark family members.