Poison Oracle

by Peter Dickinson

In this bizarre thriller set in an Arab emirate, an English scientist is trying to teach a chimpanzee to communicate. But when the chimp is the sole witness to a murder, giving evidence strains its new skill to the limit.

Genres: Mystery, Fiction, British Literature

224 pages, Paperback

First published April 28, 1974

About the author

Peter Malcolm de Brissac Dickinson OBE FRSL was a prolific English author and poet, best known for children's books and detective stories.

Peter Dickinson lived in Hampshire with his second wife, author Robin McKinley. He wrote more than fifty novels for adults and young readers. He won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Children's Award twice, and his novel The Blue Hawk won The Guardian Award in 1975.

Reviews

[DeAnna Knippling · Rating 5 out of 5]

A linguist hired by an Arabic prince to teach a chimp how to talk discovers that language itself isn't as innocent as it seems.

An odd tale, one in which you would barely know it was a mystery until halfway through the book, aren't really aware of the efforts of the main character to solve the case, and, even though the case itself is suddenly and successfully resolved, no happy ending is anywhere in sight, with the main character having to face the moral implications of his love of language itself.

If you think in epic terms, a good book. The racism and subconscious biases of the narrator are a deliberate plot point, I think, written as if in blackest bitterness about the fact that one gets infected with such things. Anyone who wants to read a simple mystery should avoid this like the plague.

I'll probably read more by the author, but I don't know that I'll read his stuff when I'm in a mystery mood. You know, this was more of a Le Carre political espionage novel than it was a mystery.

So let's say...recommended if you like Le Carre, and his mopey, over-thinking characters, doomed to succeed.

[William Leight · Rating 4 out of 5]

The sheer inventiveness of “The Poison Oracle” is recommendation enough: it combines teaching chimpanzees basic language, a version of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, oil politics, and the interface between a people living the same way they have for centuries and the modern world into a fascinating mystery. As is usually the case in Dickinson mysteries not featuring Jimmy Pibble, there’s no detective here, just Wesley Morris, a linguist who is studying the (insanely complex and completely invented) language of the marsh people of the made-up Arab oil sultanate of Q'Kut, as well as trying to teach the chimpanzee, Dinah, some very basic speech using plastic tokens that represent words. The first third or so of the book sets up the characters and their relationships, also including the Sultan of Q'Kut, an old friend of Morris's from Oxford; the Sultan's son, Prince Hadiq, who Morris is tutoring in English; Anne, who arrived as the hijacker of an Air Japan flight on behalf of the Palestinian cause, and is now the Emir’s mistress; bin Zair, the Grand Vizier; and Dyal and Gaur, the bodyguards assigned to the Sultan and his son, respectively, according to the terms of an ancient treaty between the Arabs of Q'Kut and the marsh people. Dickinson lays out the relationships and the people perfectly — he is especially masterful on the way almost everyone, with the exception of Morris himself, is in some ways playing a role — and has everything set up for the perfect crime, the only witness to which is none other than Dinah, the chimpanzee. As Morris is not really a detective, he doesn’t really do much detecting: in fact, Morris, socially awkward, easily cowed, intelligent but not quick-witted, not exactly brave, and disliking above all things to have to deal with other people's problems, is quite far from the standard image of a detective. But standard detection is not Dickinson’s method: his crimes are big ones, driven by politics and society, and the solution therefore involves understanding history and culture as much or more as establishing alibis or finding clues. So Dickinson spends a fair bit of time on Morris's linguistic and ethnographic studies of the marsh people, for whom he has invented not just a language but a history, a culture, and even an epic poem. But it’s never less than gripping, and the denouement plays brilliantly on the old “bring everybody into the room and let the detective explain” formula.

However, unlike in the old formula, the fact that the crime has been solved and the murderer identified does not mean that everything has been resolved. Morris is well aware that his actions will result in a similar, if less bloody, outcome than what would likely have happened if the criminal had never been found: though he was motivated to act in large part by a desire to preserve the unique language and culture of the marsh people, by the end of the book he has realized that at this point this is no longer possible, and though he can prevent a war of extermination against them, it can only be done by dragging them into the modern world. Indeed, the modern world has already started forcing itself on them: at the end of the book, a doctor visiting the marsh points out that many of the diseases they suffer from are likely due to pollution in the river that runs into the marsh. The depiction of the marsh people is in fact one of the best parts of the book, with Dickinson managing to point out the less savory aspects of their culture without being unnecessarily derogatory, and largely avoiding condescension: the scene in which Dyal demands that Morris erase a tape-recording of another marsh-dweller's voice, since it has captured that man's soul, even manages to create sympathy for such a demand in the reader's mind. And Dickinson is well aware of the ease with which nominally primitive people can adapt to modernity, and is even willing to be a little bit skeptical as to whether the advent of the modern world will be an unalloyed good. The one thing that grates occasionally is Dickinson’s attitude towards the Arabs, which tends to be less generous and leans a bit too heavily on stereotypes. But mainly "The Poison Oracle" is a demonstration of Dickinson's creativity, his ability to take the mystery form and make it do things that Conan Doyle and Christie would never have thought of.

[Zoë · Rating 1 out of 5]

I can count on one hand the number of times I've given up on a book, and unfortunately I had to add one to that number with this book. I'd recently read The Seventh Raven (another Peter Dickinson book) and I'd liked it well enough, so I picked this one up thinking I was going to enjoy it. Boy, was I wrong. It didn't take too long for me to get bored, and the plot was just a bunch of nonsense thrown together. Then there was the racism–that was pretty much the last straw. I got 85 pages in (a miracle I made it that far!) and I couldn't do it anymore.

I got this from a box of free books at a thrift store, and after slogging through what I could (I didn't even make it to the introduction of the mystery!), I understand why no one would pay money for this. I'm sorry I ever picked this up.

[Kat]

An odd read. I'm not sure what to make of it. In places, it seems less like a mystery novel and more like an exercise in applied linguistics. There are four language systems in play here. The syntax of two of them is described in detail. (There's even a random footnote at one point about the syntax.) These linguistic systems seem to be more important to the story itself than the mystery. As I read through the book, I kept wanting to reclassify it as perhaps an allegory about... something? It seems like there is more going on here than meets the eye, but at the end I remained baffled. The solution to the murder made sense, but the rest remains a cryptic puzzle.

[Laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This man makes me proud to be classified as a mystery writer.

[Violinknitter]

A fascinating, if disturbing, read. Yes, the British protagonist from whose point of view the story is told has most (if not all) of the race & class prejudices one would expect from someone raised in the British Empire while it was still an empire. But the story is a bleak tale: *none* of the three cultures in the story are portrayed positively. Even chimpanzee culture (debateably the fourth culture in the novel) is bleak. We see the Arab & marsh people's cultures through Morris' eyes, and the writer gives us enough of Morris' thought processes for us to realize he is not an impartial observer.

The murder mystery itself (in some ways it is only an excuse for the rest of the book) was satisfying to me. But I may be an easily pleased mystery reader… I rarely even bother to *try* to figure out whodunit.

It's difficult for me to rate this book. Was it well-written? Yes. Was the mystery satisfactorily solved? Yes. Was it a hugely depressing book that I don't want to read again anytime soon? Yes. Four stars for the writing. Less than that for my enjoyment of the novel.

[Jenne · Rating 2 out of 5]

First line: "With as much passion as his tepid nature was ever likely to generate, Wesley Morris stared at Dinah through the observation window."

Well, in 1974 this might have been an amusing little mystery novel, but today it just reads as atrociously racist.
Too bad, because I love the idea of a psycholinguist as hero!

[Bernard Convert · Rating 1 out of 5]

Pénible...

[D-day · Rating 3 out of 5]

A British linguistic academic, Wesley Morris, takes a job in an Oil rich emirate teaching the Sultan's son English, although his real academic pursuit is teaching language to a chimpanzee named Dinah using symbols. The Sultan is murdered and the only witness is the chimpanzee. How about that for a hook!
I can understand why The Poison Oracle is not to everyone's taste. The hook was interesting but not shocking; it was fairly obvious very early on that this would be the premise . But the mystery is not really the focus of the book anyway. The core of the book is the relations between the Arabs of the emirate and the local Marsh people living nearby. In fact the focus of the book is a rumination on culture clashes: Arab vs Marsh People, Arab vs English, Modern vs Traditional and even Human vs Chimpanzee. I was surprised to learn that the culture and language of the Marsh People was entirely the creation of Dickinson. I had though he was referencing the Marsh Arabs of Iraq until I did some research.
One of those books easy to admire but hard to enjoy

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely one of the weirder murder mysteries I have ever read. Fascinating and not complementary description of Arabic beduin people living next door to a black primitive swamp people. All as seen by a naive English scientist of linguistics and zoology. Mixed in is a crazy radical sexually promiscuous English female. Very different approaches to life from each of the different groups. On top of that is a chimpanzee trying to learn to communicate with the scientist through the use of symbols to construct language sentences with some meaning. Stir all that up and throw in a murder and you get some idea of the story.

[Frederic · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think I first saw this on a list of strange books, and it definitely is that. There's a murder to be solved, but the real core of the book is pretty detailed linguistic and ethnographic description of the (made up) Marshman culture and to a lesser extent the Arabs among whom much of the book is set, and also of chimpanzee language-learning -- the prime character is a psycholinguist who is working with chimpanzee Dinah (who also happens to be the best witness to the murder). The writing is pretty dated in tone, but there's a good deal of anthropological interest along the way.

[Carol Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Peter Dickinson's work is always enjoyable. The premise of this story is similar to "Walking Dead" in some ways, but it has its own flavor. I take minor issue with the definition, early in the book, of psycholinguistics as the study of the effect of language on the mind--that is not quite accurate. And I'm pretty sure the language of the marshmen is not really plausible. But the marsh language and the education of the Dinah, the chimp, are interesting to think about all the same

[Lila Kitaeff · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was tough to get through. The murder mystery itself was mildly interesting but the overtones of colonialism and racism were sickening. The apes being studied seem to be treated with more humanity than the Arabs and Marshmen in this book. Ouch.

[Tony · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this a bit disappointing and confusing really, although it was a pretty quick read.

[Tyrannosaurus regina · Rating 1 out of 5]

Under other circumstances I might have enjoyed this book more—I like mysteries and I love linguistic complications—but it was just unbearably racist.

[Jack Heath]

Synopsis: set in an Arab emirate. An English scientist is trying to teach a chimp to communicate. It becomes the sole witness to a murder.