posted on 11 Aug 2022

The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd

Siobhan Dowd’s legacy is really remarkable. She died tragically young in 2007 at the age of just 40 from an aggressive form of breast cancer and for her final novel, Bog Child she was awarded the Carnegie medal posthumously. Great writer though she certainly was, she was so much more than that – she was a political activist who won admiration from all those she worked with. I can’t do better in describing her commitment than to reproduce the excellent profile from Wikipedia:

“In 1984, she joined the writer's organisation International PEN, initially as a researcher for its Writers in Prison Committee and later as Program Director of PEN American Center's Freedom-to-Write Committee in New York City. Her work there included founding and leading the Rushdie Defense Committee (USA) and travelling to Indonesia and Guatemala to investigate local human rights conditions for writers. During her seven-year stay in New York, Dowd was named one of the "top 100 Irish-Americans" by Irish-America Magazine and Aer Lingus for her global anti-censorship work.[2]

On her return to the UK, Dowd co-founded, with Rachel Billington, English PEN's readers and writers program. The program takes authors into schools in socially deprived areas, as well as prisons, young offender's institutions and community projects. During 2004, Dowd served as Deputy Commissioner for Children's Rights in Oxfordshire, working with local government to ensure that statutory services affecting children's lives conform with UN protocols.[2]

Before her death from breast cancer, the Siobhan Dowd Trust,[6] a registered charity,[7] was established, wherein the proceeds from her literary work will be used to assist disadvantaged children with their reading skills.”

The London Eye Mystery was Dowd’s second novel, published in 2007 and uses a young narrator with autism ( possibly Asperger’s Syndrome)  – something Mark Haddon had pioneered three or four years earlier in his ground-breaking, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. But that aside, the story is a straight-forward, engaging mystery romp that you will find yourself unable to put down.

Twelve-year old Ted, our narrator, and his older sister, Kat are thrown head-first into a mystery when their cousin Salim comes with his mother to visit them prior to relocating to New York. The family go on a trip to The London Eye and Salim seems to simply disappear. They watch him get onto the ride but then he never gets off – he seems to have simply evaporated.

What has happened to Salim? What role in all of this has the mystery man with a free ticket got to play and will Ted’s eight or nine possible scenarios/solutions turn out to hold the key to the mystery?

There are plenty of twists and turns and Ted finds himself being put in some unfamiliar and uncomfortable situations – he also discovers he has a surprising facility to tell fibs!

The story resolves itself very satisfactorily because it never lets go of all the different threads that Dowd weaves into the fabric of the book with you necessarily noticing – the clues are all there but they don’t come with bells and whistles and you’ll curse yourself at the end for not putting two and two together yourself.

Copies of the book in both hardback and paperback are pretty easy to get hold of and, on the second-hand market they come cheap. If you like young adult fiction, this really is a must read.

 

Terry Potter

August 2022