Peter Dickinson - The Poison Oracle

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.

Peter Dickinson titles available from Small Beer Press

DEATH OF A UNICORN

Peter Dickinson is my own chosen demigod in the pantheon of crime fiction.”—Laurie R. King

“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

Mysteries and more from Small Beer Press for independent-minded readers:

Poppy Z. Brite, Second Line: Two Short Novels of

Love and Cooking in New Orleans

“Fun foodie fiction, and readers will scarf it down.”— Publishers Weekly

Kelley Eskridge, Solitaire

“Jackal Segura has committed a capital crime. Instead of life in prison, she agrees to a virtual solitary confinement . . . an impressive achievement.”— Strange Horizons

Trafalgar (trans. Amalia Gladhart)

“Delightful. Thought-provoking. Impressive. Brilliant.”—Liz Bourke, Tor.com

Elizabeth Hand, Generation Loss

“A thriller. . . . A dark and beautiful novel.”— Washington Post Book World

Ayize Jama-Everett, The Liminal People

“A damn good read. It’s a smart actioner that will entertain you while also enticing you to think about matters beyond the physical realm. It will be especially welcome if you are one of those people, like me, who was riveted by the first season of Heroes , with its multiracial cast and intriguing new perspective on superpowers. This novel is the second season we always wanted.”—Annalee Newitz, io9

Kij Johnson, At the Mouth of the River of Bees: Stories

“Thought-provoking . . . emotionally wrenching stories.”— Publishers Weekly, Best Books of the Year