The Poison Oracle

by Peter Dickinson

Paperback, 1977

Status

Available

Call number

Fic Mystery Dickinson

Genres

Mystery

All Topics

Fiction

Collection

Your library

Publication

New York : Avon, 1977 c1974.

Description

Take a medieval Arab kingdom, add a ruler who wants to update the kingdom's educational facilities, include a somewhat reserved English research psycholinguist (an Oxford classmate of the ruler) invited to pursue his work on animal communication, and then add a touch of chaos in the person of Dinah: a chimpanzee who has begun to learn to form coherent sentences with plastic symbols. When a murder is committed in the oil-rich marshes, Dinah is the only witness, and Morris has to go into the marshes to discover the truth. The Poison Oracle is a novel of its time that uses the everyday language people use to expose humanity's thinking and unthinking cruelties to one another and to the animals with whom we share this earth. The Poison Oracle is the second in a series of reprints of Peter Dickinson's mysteries from Small Beer Press.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member LaurieRKing

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

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LibraryThing member SeriousGrace

What an easy premise: a murder is committed and only an animal witnessed the crime. The reader knows from the beginning, well in advance there will be murders. At least two of them. There are frequent reminders to these crimes throughout the book if only to keep the upcoming events in place and

anticipated. The story centers around Dr. Wesley Naboth Morris. He is a zoo keeper who speaks Japanese; tutors his Oxford classmate's son, an Arab prince in English and is, by trade, a psycholinguist. His side project is working with Dinah, a chimapanzee, to determine if primates can learn coherent sentences using plastic symbols. It is Dinah who witnesses the promised murders. The story begins with an interesting twist when a Japanese airliner is hijacked and makes an emergency landing at the Sultan's palace. To further complicate The Poison Oracle the Sultan's palace is surrounded by the Swampmen. Living in the swamps these tribes are outsiders to the palace. They are different from the community of Arabs that border their swamp - divided by skin color, culture, and most obvious of course, language. Some end up as servants in the palace but most are misunderstood and feared to be evil. The Poison Oracle is a story about language but it is also a story about oil. The Arabs believe there is oil in the marshland. A war with the marshmen would drive their tribes out. Dr. Morris has the thankless task of trying to solve the mystery of the murders, but also acting communicator with the marshmen.

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LibraryThing member JenneB

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!

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