SOURCE: “A Detective Deconstructs,” in Times Literary Supplement, April 3, 1992, p. 10.

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...