[In the following review, Clute offers a positive assessment of The Investigation.]

The England which features in Stanislaw Lem's The Investigation resembles the real England of 1959 about as closely as Franz Kafka's Amerika does Kansas. Ice, fog, incessant snow and a cold wind from the steppes routinely scour the Home Counties in Lem's vision of a storm-racked, Central European United Kingdom whose populace huddles over tiny fires in vast cluttered baroque flats in the labyrinthine hearts of intensely urban, feverishly ornate apartment blocks. It is in this echoing dreamland that young “Lieutenant” Gregory of Scotland Yard is assigned the task of solving a series of mysteries which may not be crimes, may not be solvable and may indeed represent an intrusion of the supernatural into human affairs.

In a geographical pattern which roughly resembles an expanding spiral, late at night, someone is absconding with newly dead bodies from local mortuaries and, on each occasion, near the scene of the crime, a dead or dying animal, usually a pet, is discovered. Hurtling through Wimbledon at 110 mph in his trusty Oldsmobile towards the latest crime, Gregory may very superficially resemble the protagonist of an English detective story of the early 1950s; but the resemblance, as one might suspect, is a front.

Like his science fiction of the 1950s and 1960s—the very similar Eden was also first published in Poland in 1959, and Lem's most famous single novel, Solaris, appeared two years later—The Investigation conceals within the clarity and narrative high spirits of the story it seems to tell a dark, deconstructive counter-tale. The surface story is, of course, that of Lieutenant Gregory's search for a perpetrator, couched by Lem in a perfectly competent police-procedural style. After finishing his high-speed trip in the film-noir Yankee car, Gregory conducts a long and lucid examination of the most serious episode, and in the expanding chain of mysterious events, his impeccable technique induces in the reader (as it always does in detective fiction) a sense of mild peril, combined with a knowledge of ultimate security. Detective novels, after all, are set in worlds about which questions can be asked by authorized persons, worlds which provide answers.

But after the police scientist, Scics, has (in a wicked parody of scientific method) provided him with a “map” of the relationships among the various factors discernible in the corpse thefts, Gregory finds himself in a part of East London he does not know—it rather resembles the Prater in Vienna; it is very unlike Tower Hamlets—and ambles into a darkened arcade. A man approaches him, stepping with caution down the echoing hall. Gregory cannot decipher the stranger's intentions or his bleak shrouded face, which might well conceal the criminal mind capable of stealing corpses in a mathematically predictable spiral around London. He steps closer, and bumps into a floor-to-ceiling mirror. The man he could not understand was himself. The detective's search for truth casts light on a void.

Like Solaris, The Investigation is an exploratory probe into unknowability. In the former, what cannot ultimately be understood is an alien sentience on the planet, whose only mode of communication is the mocking flattery of absolute imitation: by creating exact images of figures in the protagonists’ lives, it demonstrates (perhaps unknowingly) that the letter kills. In The Investigation, the world throws back similar mirror-images to the driven lieutenant, as police procedures, scientific method, the ontological disquisitions of his bizarrely un-English Chief Inspector, all drive him further into the chaos of a real world whose plenitude is infinite, and being infinite allows all answers to any questions.

In the end, an explanation is offered, for Lem plays the game of detection down to the last move. But the answer is a tiny spasm of light in the welcoming darkness, which snuffs it out. Gregory himself has gained enough wisdom, however, to retain his post, to continue in the world of story. Being a detective in a tale may have little to do with the nature of truth, but it lightens his day.