‘I
want you to help me escape,’ Eric said quietly, holding the tuna-fish-salad
sandwich in his hands lightly, as if were delicate.
Surely this opening sentence of chapter
fifty-two in the 1994 Harper Collins paperback edition should say ‘as if it were delicate’?
Strangely, such careless proof-checking
is not the most annoying thing about The
Dice Man. The most annoying thing is that, thus far, he seems to me to be a
great big childish bell-end. I don’t use the word childish here in the sense of ‘open to the wonder of everything
that surrounds us and exquisitely devoid of the neuroses and inhibitions that tend
to accumulate with age.’ I use it in the sense of ‘does really fucking dumb
things.’ Bell-end is a less ambiguous
term, which I have never knowingly used as a compliment.
Maybe I’ll feel differently when I’ve
finished the book, but if I met Luke Rhinehart in real life I would just think
he’s an incredible arse. He seems led by
his cock like some shallow cliché of masculinity and some of the options he
gives the dice are the sort of thing you might only come up with at the messy
end of a drinking game. I say this as a largely post-sex old git. Maybe my younger
would have viewed him more positively? If so, that is just one more thing about
my younger self that, with hindsight, seems a little embarrassing.
I’ve got rather more time for LR as
a fictional character. I’m being entertained enjoyably by the story (though it’s
less of a page-turner than plenty of other books I’ve read), my curiosity about
his fate has been piqued, and I certainly owe him a debt of gratitude for invigorating
my urge to write.
Seriously though, I don’t know much
about the mechanics of publishing, but the book was first published in 1971.
If that proofing error was in the first edition, they had 23 years to spot it
before publishing my copy of the book. And if it wasn’t, well how hard can it
be to copy text from an earlier edition and paste it into a later one?
In.Ex.Fuqing.Cusable.
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