By some measurements, Peter Dickinson’s King and Joker was one of the first adult SF novels I ever read. By others, you could say it was one of the first adult mysteries, though I found it on the SF shelf. It’s probably not something anyone else would see as a great influential work, but it’s hardly possible to find anything that’s influenced me more. It’s a mystery set in an alternate history. It’s not a story about the alternate history, though the background is well worked out and the revelations are well fitted in to the story. I’m reluctant to say it isn’t SF, because the experience of reading first King and Joker and then The Dispossessed on the same afternoon is what made me fall in love with the possibilities and scope of a brave new genre that had such wonders in it.
I’d actually read several SF books before—Poul Anderson’s Guardians of Time, and Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day, Clarke’s Time and the Stars, The Penguin Best SF collection, others. But I’d never made the connection that these all fitted into one category—I’d read some science fiction, but without being aware of it. Awareness of the genre came from King and Joker, The Dispossessed and the fact they both came from the shelves in the adult library marked “Science Fiction”.
If I were to read King and Joker now for the first time I’m not sure how I’d define it, and I’m not sure how I’d rate it. I’ve been reading it every year or so since I was twelve, and my first overwhelmed read on the riverbank inevitably colours all subsequent readings. King and Joker is a grown up mystery—it’s full of sex and sexual motivations in the exact way that Agatha Christie isn’t. But it was very easy for me to read. It’s largely from the point of view of a fourteen year old girl, a princess in Buckingham Palace in a world where the succession has gone a little differently because Edward VII’s eldest son survived. It’s a story about having a public face and a private face, about how secrets can be poisonous, and about growing up. The alternate history is essential to the story, which has to be about a different royal family, and science is important, in terms of genetics and hemophilia and the machine that keeps Durdy alive. There’s definitely a murder and a murderer and a mystery. All the same, first and foremost this is a story about people.
Peter Dickinson is a wonderful writer, and thinking about it now, after having read all his books for children and for adults, fantastical and mundane, his real theme is how what we remember shapes our worlds.
King and Joker was published in 1976 and was set at about the same time. The point of divergence (“Jonbar point”) between their world and ours was the death, in our world, of Queen Victoria’s grandson Prince Arthur Edward in 1892. In their world he became King Victor I, in ours his brother became King George VI. Dickinson considers that it wouldn’t have made very much difference to the wider events of the world whether Britain has a queen with corgis or a king with bulldogs. There’s still WWII, and the end of the Empire, and in the mid-seventies Britain’s still in the grip of a recession and everyone’s cutting back, and the tabloid papers are fascinated by the details of royal life. The king has been trained as a doctor but the unions won’t let him treat anyone. The book begins with the royal family at breakfast going through a list of suggested money-saving ideas and rejecting one that suggests they should no longer keep a supply of sealing wax in all the guest bedrooms.
What Dickinson’s really doing is taking his royal family, who because of what they are must lead lives that are both public and private, open and hidden, and using them to talk about the way secrets fester. There’s a lot of the scenery of the typical cosy mystery—the old nanny who has known generations of children, pots of tea and crumpets by the fire. But the old nanny’s true love that she gave up to stay with her babies was a woman, and the king and queen who wave so nicely have a third person in their marriage. There are layers here, and a lot more depth than you might expect. Dickinson takes two people, the old dying Durdy, nanny to half the crowned heads of Europe, and Princess Louise, the girl on the cusp of adult understanding. Through them he evokes a whole world. Durdy’s old enough to have met Queen Victoria, and Louise is going to live into the twenty-first century. They’re facing in different directions, and this is the meeting point.
I always read this book in one session—it’s not very long, and I never want to put it down.
There’s a much less successful sequel, Skeleton in Waiting.
Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published eight novels, most recently Half a Crown and Lifelode, and two poetry collections. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here regularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.
Jo Walton! You know, ever since you introduced me to the Steerswoman books (previous post) I think I’m a bit of a devotee of your book recommendations.
Thanks! I’ll add it to my list.
A question for the management, would it be possible to have a link to an index of all of “Jo’s Reread-Review” posts, added to the “Featured on Tor.com” list on the right column of the front page?
Or else on tag that is just Jo’s rereads, or some other way to get to a lot of all of Jo’s reviews, and only Jo’s reviews?
These are good, and worthy of their own index.
Another useful thing might be an index of all book reviews, that can be searched by title, author and reviewer. Or an index of all reviews, searchable by title, author, reviewer, and medium, as well as fields relevant to non-book media, such as the directors of movies.
In the early ’70s I discovered Peter Dickinson’s mysteries and loved them. So when I saw “King and Joker” in paperback I grabbed it and loved it even more than the Inspector Pibble books. It reads like science fiction to me, because the alternate history is important to the story, and is provided by sfnal expository techniques. At the same time it is of a piece with Dickenson’s other mysteries in that motives and actions in the present are the result of deeply-buried motives and actions of the past, and often multiple mysteries entangle the characters’ present actions and dispositions.
The carefully constructed and described characters operating in a setting determined by their own and others’ (often hidden) past actions and motives is what I think I love most about Dickinson’s work. In a way, he constructs mysteries as if they were sf: you need to understand an entire world (albeit usually a small one containing a few dozen people at most) to understand the nature of the mystery, let alone its solution.
And at the same time, he describes not only the characters’ personalities, but often things about their lives or occupations that resonate deeply within them, and shows you what that resonance feels like to the characters. The example that always comes to my mind is the central character of “Some Deaths Before Dying”. She was a photographer (in time past relative to the frame of the story), and the mental and esthetic process of creating a photographic work of art, a process central to her life and work, is described in a way that resonated very deeply with my own experience of photography.
It should also be mentioned that there is a sequel to “King and Joker”, titled “Skeleton in Waiting”, also told from Princess Louisa’s point of view. I like it as much as the first book. In the beginning of the second book the characters in it have evolved both in their own lives and in their relationships, as they would have to given the events of the first book. Sounds obvious, but not as common in sequels as it should be.
Incidentally, I just discovered that Dickinson has been awarded an OBE on the 2009 Honors List.
SpeakertoManagers: Oh wonderful, an OBE! He really deserves it. Thank you for mentioning it.
Ursula: If you go to the main page and look at the list of bloggers and click on my name it shows you all my posts — well, not back to the dawn of Tor.com, but for quite a way.
I’m reluctant to ask about an index because I suspect it might mean a lot of work for someone.
I could tag them — I mean I am not going back and re-tagging, but I could start tagging them from now on. What would be good?
For me it was his DEATH OF A UNICORN, which had the same squee-inducing feel for me as reading I CAPTURE THE CASTLE.
KING AND JOKER is actually at the top of my to-read pile (I just finished his SLEEP AND HIS BROTHER) so after reading this I think I’ll turn the computer off and start it now.
Since you meantion it — I imprinted early on Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day. I think my mother got it accidentally as a book club selection and handed it over to me because it was Not Her Thing. I can still recite AnnaSG’s nameber.
If you liked it, I’d be interested in seeing your take on it here.
Alas, I am compelled to point out that the George in question here was George V, not George VI. The problem with George VI’s older brother was not that he was dead, but that he wanted to marry Wallis Simpson.
I first read King and Joker within the past couple of years, and I concur that it is wonderful. Alas, I found the sequel somewhat disappointing. I have several more of his books on my to-read shelf, but overdosed on mysteries for a while, so they’re waiting til I hext hit a mystery phase.
I love this one too!
As a counter-thought to the idea that individuals don’t matter, Edward VIII, after he abdicated, certainly looked rather more friendly with Hitler than his brother was. Andrew Marr, in The Making of Modern Britain, suggested that Wallis Simpson may have saved Britain by getting him out of the way.
On the other hand, he also suggested that uniformed fascism was fated to fail because the English were too inclined to snigger, and I’m not sure I’d agree about that.
This sounds fascinating, and I was going to check it out from the library, but as with all books recommended by Jo Walton on tor.com, it is already out! Someone else in my library system is clearly also a dedicated follower.
I picked up a bunch of other Peter Dickinson instead, but with such a prolific author it’s hard to know where to start. Any suggestions, Jo?
CJShields: My favourites among his mysteries are The Last Houseparty and Death of a Unicorn and Hindsight and Perfect Gallows. As far as his YA genre work goes, I really like Eva and The Blue Hawk.
What have you got?
One of my favorites of his YA books is Emma Tupper’s Diary – it made a huge impact on me when I found it just before I read Susan Cooper’s books.