Play Dead by Peter Dickinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"The hardest thing for us to accept about the universe is its sheer bloody randomness. Our minds are programmed to look for reasons, for patterns, for purposes, for justice. They are simply not there."

I have reviewed here on Goodreads one novel by Peter Dickinson: One Foot in the Grave , which I found a bit of disappointment. About 40 years ago I read the outstanding A Pride of Heroes (U.S. title: The Old English Peep-Show), which I would rate with at least four stars. While Play Dead is for me a better book that One Foot it is quite far from an almost-masterpiece of mystery novel genre such as Peep-Show.

We meet Poppy Tasker, a youngish grandmother, as she looks after her two-year-old grandson Toby in a children's play centre. The memorable opening scene of children play proves beyond doubt that Mr. Dickinson knows children and their behavior. Toby fancies playing with Deborah Capstone, also about two years old, which poses a problem. Poppy's daughter-in-law is running for a seat in British Parliament as a Labour Party candidate, against Ms. Capstone, Deborah's mother, a Conservative Party candidate.

The criminal thread begins when a young man intently watching Toby is spotted just outside the play centre. The same man later follows Poppy as she walks home and she has to retort to clever tricks to lose him. Few weeks later a mutilated body of a man is found in the play centre and - when interrogated by the police - Poppy suggests this is the same man who watched the children and followed her.

Later in the novel we meet Ms. Capstone and Poppy gets involved with her husband, a Romanian man of Polish ethnicity. This is the fall of 1989: the Soviet rule over Eastern Europe is crumbling. The revolution in Poland has already been victorious, other Eastern Bloc countries have followed and now Ceausescu's regime in Romania is about to collapse. Politics plays quite a significant role in the plot, and not just the fight against Soviet domination. The account of a Labour Party election meeting is vivid and hilarious:

"[...] he said much the same as Janet [...] but making it all so grey and parochial that he might, Poppy thought, have been a woodlouse addressing a convention of woodlice and affiliated beetles and millipedes about the dilapidated state of bark they lived under."

But the best passage in the novel is the astute analysis of the nature of corruption and how it so naturally embeds in a society: why massive corruption works so well and becomes a convenient way of life for most people. Alas, despite Mr. Dickinson's accomplished prose, the novel is marred by too much preachiness, particularly towards its end. Instead of the author explaining the Big Picture behind the events and motivations of the characters, the readers should get that on their own.

On a positive note, the affairs of the heart of late middle-age people are very well portrayed and the author makes it clear that they are so much more interesting than those of the under-30 crowd. Interesting, well written, readable book, perhaps not as much as a mystery novel.

Three stars.


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