The Poison Oracle

by Peter Dickinson

  Anyway, I didn’t want my marsh people to be Arabs. There’d be too much to get wrong. I could announce the difference by giving them their own weird language, and having Morris understand it, which would lend credibility to his expertise in his field. (When a book’s going well, randomly chosen plot details begin to mesh like that.)

  SP: Morris has a complex personality, but his inability to connect with people emotionally makes him a bold choice as a protagonist.

  PD: I said just now I started without much thought. I can actually remember writing those first words “With as much passion as his tepid nature was ever likely to generate . . .” and wondering whether this was what I wanted, not an anti-hero, but a non-hero. I suppose I could argue now that I needed him because he lives largely in the mind, which is where language lives, but back then I don’t think I’d got that far. At the same time in that first scene I set about establishing the Sultan as both domineering and eccentric—he already had a zoo before Dinah came, names the chimps after Oxford dons, and so on—and Dinah as the focus of their interest.

  SP: Morris often refers to himself as a coward, both morally and physically, but it is he who comes through in the crunch.

  PD: Only when he is pushed into it. When the Sultan orders him to visit the downed plane on the tarmac, he goes most reluctantly. When ibn Zair manipulates the situation in the Council meeting so that Morris is forced to go into the marshes he’s scared enough to take Dinah with him for comfort.

  SP: Still, once he’s there, fear doesn’t cloud his mind, or at least only at brief moments. When he sees the dead bodies at the entrance to the marshes, he realizes that they were lying in wait for him, and it starts him on the road to sorting out ibn Zair’s role in the Sultan’s death. He reminds me very much of Pibble, especially when Pibble is physically weak in One Foot in the Grave.

  PD: Yes, I know. My original non-hero. That’s why I wondered whether to make Morris like that.

  SP: On re-reading The Poison Oracle this time, what I found chilling was your prescience: ibn Zair is going to destroy the marshes with air strikes and napalm just as Saddam did a decade after you wrote the book.

  PD: Put yourself In Saddam’s shoes—now, there’s a feat of the imagination!—or ibn Zair’s, what else could you do?

  SP: One thing I’ve always admired about your writing is the way you write about women. You somehow get inside our skin, whether it’s the adolescent Princess Louise in King and Joker, dealing with murder and coming of age all at once, or the middle-aged Poppy in Play Dead. Anne in The Poison Oracle is yet another vivid and believable woman. She’s not a sympathetic figure in the same way Louise or Poppy are, but she’s someone the reader can understand. She uses her sexuality and her shape-shifting, but in a believable way, not the fantasy athletic sex machine that peoples too much of fiction.

  PD: I did worry about her being a bit that way, but I started from one of my South African cousins who spent some months with us in England when we were young, and was pretty enough to get asked about a bit. We could always tell what sort of people she’d been visiting by the manner in which she spoke when she returned. It wasn’t just accent, it was her whole style of speech. (Not that she was inwardly malleable. Far from it.) And so I began imagining the way in which a person’s whole approach to the world would shift as she moved into different milieus, and who then finds when she runs into the marsh people that it doesn’t work with them.

  As for writing about women, I just feel comfortable with them. If I’d ever been offered the traditional three magical wishes, one of them would have been to spend a month or two as a woman.

  SP: The Marsh People’s culture is one that Morris first wants to preserve, and then comes to loathe. As we see it through his eyes, we readers also find it loathsome. This depiction goes completely at right angles to a modern sensibility of treating tribal cultures with an almost religious respect. Why did you to choose to take the opposite tack?

  PD: For practical reasons, to start with. They’ve got to be dangerous to deal with. They’ve survived by killing intruders. And they’re surely riddled with disease as the marshes get more and more polluted. Like their language, they must be pretty well on the edge of extinction. The fact that Morris thinks their Testament of Na!ar is fit to stand beside The Iliad has no bearing on their being easy to get along with. (I’m glad I wasn’t born into Homer’s world.) I don’t actually remember, but I suspect that by the time I got to the marsh people, I was confident enough to choose to raise one of those major questions: a language it is almost impossible to understand spoken by a people it is almost impossible to like or admire—what makes it worth the effort to try and keep them going?

  As I say, I don’t normally think much about this sort of thing when I’m writing. I made the marsh people the way they are almost instinctively, but realized pretty soon that it was going to matter. So to put it aside for the moment I broke off and wrote the final few pages so that I had something to work towards.

  SP: You are an economical writer. We don’t get a detailed history of anyone, but we have a picture of Morris’s childhood from his brief mentions of his mother.

  PD: You’re also told his given names. Wesley Naboth. What sort of parents call their child that? That should be enough for the reader to go on. She has an imagination too. Again I don’t actually remember, but I suspect that’s something I put in second time through. I came late to using a PC, so I used to type a complete draft, leafing back occasionally to scrawl memos to myself in the margin. When I got to the end I’d read what I done, scrawl a few more memos (e.g. “More about M” at this point), try and check on the possibility of any facts I’d invented, and write the whole thing again.

  SP: This makes it sound as though it’s something anyone might do, but like a Tourbillon watch, if we took it apart, all we would have are the pieces, not the watch.

  PD: It doesn’t feel like that to me. I think if you took it to pieces all you’d have left would be a pile of driftwood that I’d found, beachcombing along the shore of my imagination and put together, trying to build myself some sort of a dwelling that would keep the rain out.

  About the Author

  Peter Dickinson OBE was born in Zambia and educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge. After graduation, he joined the staff of the British humor magazine Punch where he worked for seventeen years, leaving as Assistant Editor. At forty he began a career as a mystery writer. His first two books were awarded the British Crime Writers Association’s Golden Dagger Award, and each succeeding book has been published to wide acclaim. Among his mysteries are Hindsight, The Last Houseparty, A Summer in the Twenties, Death of a Unicorn, The Lively Dead, and King and Joker. He lives in England and is married to the novelist Robin McKinley. Find out more at peterdickinson.com.

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  DEATH OF A UNICORN

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  “Everything here is exactly right.”—The New Yorker

  EARTH AND AIR: TALES OF ELEMENTAL CREATURES

  “Mining folklore for ideas is routine in modern fantasy, but not many can add the surprising twists and novel logic that Peter Dickinson does. These are beautiful stories, deft, satisfying, unexpected. They deserve to become classics of the genre.”—Tom Shippey, Wall Street Journal, Best Fiction of 2012

  EMMA TUPPER’S DIARY

  “Fish out of water Emma must spend the summer in Scotland with cousins she’s never met. It’s the sort of family where everyone is whip-smart, conversations are fast and fascinating, and statements of fact are rarely truthful. All of which makes for one extremely suspenseful and surprisingly thought-provoking adventure.”—Gwenyth Swain (author of Chig and the Second Spread)

  THE SEVENTH RAVEN

  “This steady, sober hostage story
is not quite a thriller . . . but anyone . . . can be engaged by the argument and enveloped in Dickinson’s carefully textured citadel.”—Kirkus Reviews

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