The Dying Game

Catherine Johnson

Oxford University Press

019275498X

Apr 2007

Cultural expectations and prejudices are brought to the fore in Catherine Johnson’s pithy new novel ‘The Dying Game’. Shehana makes a promise to a dying prostitute that she will contact the girls brother, a decision that exposes her to a sinister underbelly of drugs, lies and the abusage of trust.
Against this backdrop, Shehana herself, a Londoner with Bangladeshi family ties, rallies against the fast-approaching marriage that her family feel is so timely but that represent a very real blockade to the future she herself aspires towards and her desire to enter higher education.
Race assumptions are constantly subverted and just what it means to belong to a particular group and to identify ourselves within a specific set of cultural and social ideologies is probed incisively with by Johnson. This is a gripping thriller, with rich writing that envelops and engages from start to finish and that reveals the dehumanising influences of viewing the body as object, distinct from mind and personality. In parts dark, in parts disturbing, this is a smart and sassy novel with a strongly defined sense of pace and of purpose. A relevant and resonant novel that is well worthy of promotion.