Graeme Simsion’s manuscript, written in five weeks, won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript in June 2012. Promptly signed by Text Publishing (also the publisher of Addition), the rights to the book were sold in more than twenty countries. This sounds like a fairy tale, and in many ways it is: global publishing is in free fall and so are advances. But, unsurprisingly, there is more to it: Simsion had been working on the story, in various forms (it began life as a screenplay), for five years before he turned it into a novel. These years of development may be why the deadpan voice of the narrator is so convincing and assured; the reader is hooked from the first page.

Don, an associate professor of genetics, lives a highly regimented life. When he decides to find a life partner, he embarks on it in a systematic fashion: The Wife Project. He devises a complex questionnaire designed to find the ideally compatible mate: organised, punctual, logical, healthy living. Along the way he stumbles on Rosie – a feisty feminist smoker who is habitually late and works in a bar – and entangles himself in her quest to locate her birth father. Although he considers her ‘the world’s most incompatible woman’, Don enjoys Rosie’s company more than that of anyone he has met, and finds himself uncharacteristically breaking rules and routines (and trying new things) in order to spend time with her.

The book’s cinematic genesis is evident: this character-driven story is told in a fusillade of deadpan dialogue and charged scenes. It is also richly visual; Simsion makes deft use of physical comedy (such as dance lessons with a skeleton and a disastrous-turned-joyous dance scene) and sight gags (Don responding with revulsion to a gleaming Porsche, due to its second-rate engineering). The comic chemistry between romantic leads Don and Rosie smoulders nicely.

Don is a classically unreliable narrator; much of the book’s humour stems from his misinterpretations, miscommunications, and unconventional but weirdly logical approach to life. For instance, at a party he completely misses this overture from a beautiful woman:

‘You think we should go to a wine bar and get something better?’ she asked.
I shook my head. The poor wine quality was annoying but not critical.

It has been suggested that popular fiction is harder to write these days. Contemporary technology makes it more difficult to create the kinds of missed connections that throw up obstacles to prolong a plot. Asperger’s is a handy device: it creates the conditions for a host of missed connections between Don and the world around him, and for gaps between Don’s view of the world and our own interpretation of events.

The reader is often far ahead of Don in recognising what’s going on as he observes but fails to interpret clues that are laid out for the reader. His philandering best friend Gene discovers that his wife has put chillies in his sandwich, the day after Don has inadvertently exposed him in a lie about his whereabouts. Don can’t understand how she could make such a mistake, and Gene doesn’t know what he’s being punished for; we can enjoy the joke.

The joke is not always on Don, though. More than once he fools himself (and the reader into the bargain) by seemingly messing up a situation through a colossal social faux pas, when he is actually using his ineptness as an avoidance tactic. This keeps the reader on her toes and ensures that Don doesn’t descend into a one-note gag character – always a risk in a novel that plays character deficits for laughs.

As someone with personal experience of Asperger’s syndrome, I began this novel with a sense of unease, fearing a caricature that might add to the misunderstanding already rife about autism spectrum disorders (particularly in the wake of last year’s Newtown massacre, where media reports emphasised the perpetrator’s supposed Asperger’s diagnosis). Terms like ‘afflicted by …’ and statements about Don’s ‘inability to love’ initially raised my hackles. But each time I was ready to despise the book’s portrayal of Asperger’s, it redeemed itself by reversing the negative expectations it had deliberately set up, in order to knock them down.

While Don does resemble an exaggerated (textbook) Asperger’s person, this seems forgivable within a genre where characters and situations are often larger than life. Simsion has clearly done his research – and the overall effect of The Rosie Project will be, if anything, to increase genuine understanding of Asperger’s (or, as it will soon be called, the autistic spectrum) and to refute somecommon myths. It’s great fun, too.