Peter Dickinson: two Pibble novels

I was reading back through some of these entries and thought, "Shit, it's been a long time since I said anything about a book I liked." It's that old conundrum about how it's always easier to write about times you were upset or movies you hated, e.g. why Milton's Satan has all the best lines: there's something about being happy or uplifted that's hard to put into words. At any rate, I disliked the very negative emphasis here so far, so I'm crossposting some quick'n dirty reviews from that site I used to love.

Sleep and His Brother was the first Dickinson I've ever read, after a friend reviewed it -- I like procedurals and detective series, and other bookish friends had mentioned they liked Dickinson's prose style, so I was in. (I managed to snatch up a grand pile -- ten battered paperbacks! cheap! -- of Dickinson from a local used bookstore, only to get home and gnash my teeth on finding none of them were Pibbles.) I found this book (not the first in the series, but you can read them out of sequence, or at least I have) very oddly compelling. I can't think of very many good procedurals which also have supernatural setups -- Kate Wilhelm's Death Qualified is another (I'm sure there are more, that's just one of the few I can think of right now). Very satisfying in that first-five-minutes-of-Prime-Suspect way in which everything's happening and you can't figure it out and it all isn't neatly explained, so the plot stretches your brain a bit. The book was originally published in 1971 and some of the gender issues are very dated -- a scientist will "never" marry a young heiress because of her genetic background (can't they....just not have kids? adopt?), many nurses are pinched, women are automatically and bluntly rated on an attractiveness scale when they first enter the narrative, and so on. But the female characters themselves were quite good -- I liked the spoiled Doll, the comically gruesome Lady Sospice, and "poor Posey" all very much.

The book really isn't about genetics or telepathy or corruption or crime at all, although Dickinson weaves all these themes into his central, real one: obsession. The Dormice-children are like little fleshy rings of Gyges: what they are matters less than what other people do with them. And the book itself is almost hypnotically gripping....like the sleepy children themselves, eerily alluring. Dickinson makes even the tremendously stale copper-confronts-the-sympathetic-bad-guy endpiece (which actually happens twice) interesting -- it's a dangerous skill, like a knife: bright but with an edge.


The Old English Peep Show (a better, earlier title was Pride of Heroes) doesn't have any supernatural elements, but it was just as weirdly mesmerizing as Sleep and His Brother. Dickinson has the real, odd gift of making me read straight through in a day about almost entirely unsympathetic people in very puzzling environments. He doesn't coddle his reader at all, but he won't lie or trick you, either; he plainly, coolly plants two ENORMOUS clues near the beginning, and when they're recalled nearly a hundred pages later, I swore out loud and flipped back, sure I hadn't missed them -- but I had. He reminds me a little of Christie, except he's deliberately iconoclastic where she's more conservative. Parts of this book must have seemed much more daring in the late sixties, barely two decades after WWII, with its debunking of a mythical Naval operation and references to "Winnie." The people are nearly all cardboard but somehow vivid, and Pibble is a complete schlub but somehow it's a pleasure watching him doggedly tease everything out.

Dickinson's prose style is amazing -- poetic but concise, stripped bare but never ostentatiously simple. I've heard friends say they find Dickinson off-putting, and I think part of it is in how nearly everyone is lying and trying to conceal their motives, which of course fits well into the typical mystery plot. But there's a sort of cold rock-bottom callousness about human nature -- as Ginsberg wrote of Junky, "the stoic cold-humor'd eye on crime." I suppose you could call him an uncozy mystery writer.


(Side note: .....I first read Junky when I was about fourteen ((yes)) in an edition that had Ginsberg's introduction, and his phrase was so striking I've remembered it ever since -- but Google wouldn't cough it up so I had to check my 50th anniversary copy to be sure, and realized only then my lifelong tic of spelling "humour" and "favour" (probably too much Dickens as a kid) was what had gotten in the way.

(Yeah.)