The Dice Man

Sunday, September 09 2007 @ 03:46 PM GMT+4

The Dice Man, Luke Reinhardt. The 70s is perhaps the decade I know least of from cultural memory – I've been afforded ample schooling on the Cold War, the counter culture of the 50's and 60's, and even the wartime hardships of WWII. The 70's is mostly relegated in mind's eye to disco, punk, wife swapping and polyester. I mention this because The Dice Man is part of Penguin UK's 70s series. Like all such titles, the packaging is impeccable -its the sort of shiny object you covet in the bookshop – a faux-wood grain spine and a cover featuring translucent red dice spelling out the title in dots.

The book itself is about as simple as the title suggests. A psychiatrist, tired of everything else, hits upon a way to make life interesting by leaving everything to Chance; ie.e. - rolling dice. While Reinhardt's prose is eminently readable, the novel's major flaw is it's length for relative lack of plot; I was continually kept turning pages, but by the end I'd stopped bothering to care just what twisted and unlikely things the Dice would lead Luke to do. It seems a product of its times – hedonistic, empty, and, while horrifying in its implications, a reader in 2007 is not terribly surprised by any of it. It's almost certainly a commentary on our own culture that one can view 70s Dicelife with no more disgust than the opening of a newspaper. An interesting cultural artifact, but not one I would enshrine.

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