Gareth Rafferty's Blog, page 9

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #119 – Where Angels Fear by Rebecca Levene and Simon Winstone

The New Adventures
#17
Where Angels Fear
By Rebecca Levene and Simon Winstone

I’ve only myself to blame, really. I’ve complained a few times that the New Adventures aren’t going anywhere, preferring to play their meagre hits (mainly murder mysteries) instead – a problem cheerfully underlined and to be honest, exacerbated in Beige Planet Mars. And though I am 20+ years late, I feel like someone out there has heard me. A monkey’s paw has clenched a finger.

Where Angels Fear starts with a flash-forward: St. Oscar’s University is in ruins. Implicitly Dellah as a whole is in the same situation, but it is the Uni – Benny’s sanctum sanctorum, the heart of the series – that best symbolises the planet’s ruin. This is before we even get to the prologue. They might as well have put “certain doom” in the Acknowledgements.

The prologue is heartily grizzled as well, with an as-yet-undetermined number of random slayings committed on a spaceship. Chapter One then includes a random death by traffic accident. Things, once-editor Rebecca Levene and now-editor Simon Winstone (co-writers) seem overjoyed to tell us, are not okay. And from the first page alone, we know things will not improve.

That flash-forward fascinates me because apart from that, and despite those other early deaths, Where Angels Fear is not a gloomy book – or at least it’s one that takes its time getting there. Clearly a situation is happening on Dellah with all the planet’s religions, specifically the gods, suddenly coming to life. An influential Sultan is creating rules to enforce religion – of any sort – and discourage “immoral” behaviour, which at one point involves scaring a couple of stoners straight. It all seems faintly silly, with Bernice jetting off to investigate a local god with the aid of some Grel – readers will automatically know them as Funny Aliens, obsessed with facts. Irving Braxiatel, of all people, seems to be living through a comedy of errors as he dodges the affections of a voluptuous fellow professor. And that’s after he tells Bernice that his people (the you-know-what Lords) have run away and raised the draw-bridges, evidently terrified of an imminent threat. The book seems slightly crazed in tone, being upfront about a catastrophe and then insisting on playing as the Titanic goes down, entirely unaware.

That dissonance made it a bit hard for me to invest in the story. Well, is it a big deal or not? But I appreciated the idea behind it: religious fanaticism, which is surely the only way things can go when gods legit walk among us, probably would start small. Dangerous beliefs can take hold in little ways that may be easy to laugh off at first, and the gentle absurdity of Where Angels Fear, with New Moral Army soldiers wagging their fingers at non-believers who then end up at faith boot camp, makes it all the more horrifying when you realise there is no way to stop it escalating and – for this book at least – no coming back. Take the god Bernice goes to investigate, Maa’lon, who seems quite charming at first, until a local historical conflict flares up and then he leads a holy war. It is made very clear that Bernice isn’t going to snark her way out of this one, particularly in a creepy scene where she sees Maa’lon smiling on the battlefield and, despite being observed through binoculars, he turns to look at her.

Probably a bigger issue for me was the writing style – or to be more specific, that old favourite of mine, short sections. To be fair, it would be difficult to imagine Where Angels Fear without them as there is so much ground to cover. We’ve got Bernice and the Grel investigating Maa’lon, and then following (and hopefully surviving) his crusade. Emile, tasked by Bernice with investigating those prologue murders by inveigling his way into a local cult, at great personal risk. Renée, a music tutor at St. Oscar’s and a believer in a rather low-key religion, being drafted into the New Moral Army while orbiting the machinations of Braxiatel and a shadowy figure known only as John. A couple of medics/stoners, Fec and Kalten, also getting drafted. James, a Maa’lon preacher, going along with Bernice while terrified that his lapsed faith will be found out. And Clarence, angelic figure from the Worldsphere and friend of Bernice, whose people – like Braxiatel’s – have retreated from all this for reasons that can’t be good. He agonises throughout the book about what to do (still haunted by his significant inaction re Bernice in Walking To Babylon), not to mention his own mysterious past which God, aka the Worldsphere computer, keeps from him.

It’d be a very long novel if you didn’t chop and change between that lot, but all the same, changing the channel up to twice per page is hell for my attention span. And in amongst all of that, inevitably, Where Angels Fear doesn’t really have a protagonist. All of it just happens to everybody. It’s arguable whether this is A Bad Thing, but it’s puzzling for a series that revolves around a familiar character. One of the authors (Levene) purposefully didn’t write any of the Benny bits, as she didn’t feel she could capture her voice. This gives you some idea how regularly Bernice “The Reason We Are All Here” Summerfield is in it.

In some ways this is a nice problem to have, as it means any character can be granted depth as if they were the main focus. Braxiatel has never seemed more down to Earth, being almost frenziedly interested in Renée and passionately committed to staying on Dellah, his adopted home. He almost dies for it. (He refuses the call to we-legally-can’t-name-his-planet and his spaceship-you-might-know-the-name-of is taken away.) Emile – still a wearyingly self-deprecating teen riddled with familial psychological abuse – jumps through his usual gay panics, but also knowingly engages with fundamentalism while knowing the risks only too well. (And he dies! Or he doesn’t. I’m hoping further books will explain the ending.) James, the preacher, gives perhaps the best boots-on-the-ground view of the bubbling zealotry on Dellah, as his sense of guilt allows Maa’lon to flip his mind entirely to his cause, with murderous results. Renée, conversely, goes from a figure of fun caught in an absurd military role to someone who can seriously look Braxiatel in the eye. Even the silly old Grel come out of this richer and more real, from an amusing vignette about the birth of their fact-based society to what happens when they are confronted with proof of divinity – which isn’t even the same for every Grel.

It is perhaps Clarence, though, that comes closest to protagonist if-not-Bernice. He quests for knowledge, goes against his programming, confronts his feelings for Bernice and then rescues her, ending up in exile. (Though that may have been what God intended all along.) Bernice, it must be said, needs rescuing in this fashion twice, which I’m not too thrilled about. But then it’s a book determined to tell us the rules have changed, and there’s hardly a clearer way to do that than to have Benny out of her depth. (Blowing up the main hub of the New Adventures will admittedly also suffice.)

Where does this leave the New Adventures? Well, somewhere else, at the very least. (Which is a pity as I thought more books should have been set on Dellah.) There’s some significant arc stuff in Where Angels Fear, giving Clarence plenty to chew on about his past, and spelling out for us the working relationship between Bernice and God – which puts all those adventures with the Worldsphere in a new light. It’s what I wanted, at least on a moving-the-series-along level, and it’s undeniably very interesting when you dig into all the moving parts. (Some of which are still not entirely clear. See, what happened to Emile. And the strange murderer from Tyler’s Folly. And to be frank, what’s going on in general. Bernice only really vocalises the problem around Page 193.)

Where Angels Fear was still not the most readable book for me, for a couple of fairly semantic reasons, and it’s definitely a bummer overall. But perhaps that’s why they put the flash-forward in there: rip off the plaster right away so you can focus on the rest of it. I have no idea what the series will look like after this point, which is automatically an improvement. Hopefully it can answer my next question: is there a middle ground between bubbly mysteries of the week and Armageddon?

7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #118 – Beige Planet Mars by Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham

The New Adventures
#16
Beige Planet Mars
By Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham

Honestly, what are these books?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with unconnected adventures (say, have you ever heard of Doctor Who?) but, perhaps because I’ve read all those earlier, Doctor-ier New Adventures, I can’t help expecting this series to have a destination in mind. So far it’s mostly been a lot of monkeying about with murder mysteries. Lance Parkin co-writes this latest entry; if I know anything about him it’s that one of his earlier books, The One With The Nazi Interrogation, still resonates for Bernice Summerfield. Destination, here we come?

Not quite. Beige Planet Mars seems acutely interested in the “where are we going” question, but it’s more into wry asides than actual answers. Surprisingly for Parkin, it’s almost aggressively irreverent.

Bernice goes to Mars. About time, right? It’s her specialist subject! She is there to give a lecture which, naturally, she has barely started writing. She gazes about the buildings with awe, undeterred by the planet’s status as a giant retirement home.

This all feels like a treat, and the pacing would seem to reflect that, dithering wittily on subjects such as Earth’s attitude to Mars: “If [mankind] thought of Mars at all, they did so only in daydreams and stories: idle fancies allowing an escape from the real world, that brightened the time between renewing their car insurance via direct debit, arranging to open a current account with a building society or fretting about the rising price of unleaded petrol.” Much mirth is also had at the expense of the ageing Earth ex-pats. Old people in Bernice’s way are “a conspiracy of duffers”; she at one point waits for some turnstiles to “process their elderly blockage.” Perhaps these thoughts are there because Bernice, like Doctor Who at the time, is turning 35.

But she’s not the only one fixating on wrinkles, as several youthful, low-paid Welcomers to Mars comment internally on the incoming clientele: “[Bernice] was also the first woman through here for a week who could be described without using the word ‘sagging’ somewhere.” There’s a certain male-oriented humour to parts of the book which gets a little irksome. See also a propensity for squarely 1990s references that make very little sense in this context. (Parkin has owned up to these, at least. For good measure there are also more “okay, yes, we get it” references to Daleks than you can shake a plunger at, and a couple of carefully vague allusions to people who might star in a popular BBC sci-fi series.)

The oddly noticeable horniness on display does at least go both ways, with a randy female Pakhar (large rodent) also on the prowl; she is roundly mocked in the prose for her appearance and species, so I wouldn’t exactly call it feminism. Better is Bernice’s guilty gawping at young men on Mars, and her guttural hankering for Jason Kane who is also in this book. Hooray, etc. Is it my imagination or has he mellowed? He seems less of an outright wanker in this one, internally and openly professing his wish to have Bernice back. He’s an author now, albeit of autobiographical erotica. (Side note: the reminder of his gigolo past upsets Bernice, despite her enlightened attitude to future sexuality and sex-work in Walking To Babylon. An annoying incongruity or just people containing multitudes? I wonder.) He’s rather haplessly pathetic at times, which goes some way to making him more tolerable. I still don’t much see the appeal here, or what Benny sees: they fancy each other, they’re bad for each other, rinse, repeat. Can it really change? I doubt it. I doubt Jason even realises he’s sleeping with the Pakhar lady while he’s trying to win Bernice back.

But bumping into Jason, and then doing all sorts of other things with Jason, is just sort of normal for Bernice, isn’t it? And Beige Planet Mars will be damned if it’s the book to break the cycle. So we acknowledge the ongoing thing they have, indulge it, sidestep – almost for the entire book – Jason’s almost genetic inability to keep it in the pants and then just sort of move on. Bernice never seems seriously to entertain the idea of getting back together, just as she mostly doesn’t entertain engaging with the mystery going on around her. Because ah yes, the plot.

This, too, comes with a lampshade attachment, as a Welcomer with the hots for Benny makes her aware that danger follows in her wake and (as the back cover describes) “[her] very presence here has raised this hotel’s insurance premiums by seven point two per cent.” We glance wryly at her recent adventures, noting that “other details, such as that business with the Bane Corporation, had actually been toned down for the sake of plausibility.” He speaks for us all when he asks “What type of jaunt do you reckon this is going to be, then?” Another one seems inevitable since “it’s the classic set-up. Professor Bernice Summerfield arrives intending to have a quiet couple of days in which she can finally do some academic work, and she finds herself in a luxurious and glamorous setting … The question is… who is going to be the first guest to get murdered?”

Sure enough, here be murders – or a murder at least, that of a likeable old war vet Benny meets hours before his death. The official investigation seems determined to end before it begins, which saves us the usual tired suspicions fired at our hero, and also hints at the book’s general shrugging attitude. Bernice is determined to help, but she is marginally more determined to write that bloody speech, instead palming the murder work onto a lethargic Jason and two jolly odd-job slackers, Seez and Soaz. (I hate the names.) Trying to wriggle out of the rigidly familiar Benny structure is the closest the book comes to not just shoving a lampshade on it, but it’s amusing (and yes, meta) to note that the plot doesn’t truly kick off, taking the pace with it, until Bernice makes a critical leap during her eventual off-the-cuff speech and finally abandons academia for plot instead. (Deciding once and for all, you might say, what type of jaunt this is.)

The last chunk of Beige Planet Mars is breathlessly exciting, opting for planet-shaking chaos and a countdown to destruction. But is it all just a big concession to formula, since messrs Parkin and Clapham apparently didn’t know the ending when they started writing? Indeed, I’m not sure they even got it all down, since one character – key to the human history of Mars and with a complicated past – slips through the final pages unnoticed, possibly forgotten. The motive of the villains, hastily retrofitted to seem not so bad after all, is about as convincing as Bernice when she gets to the end of the week and hastily pulls a speech out of her bum. And really, after all the prose about humans and what they’ve done to Mars and was it a good thing or a bad thing – a seemingly central conflict set up early when Bernice befriends a rival scholar – there are no prominent Martian characters to have their say. They don’t even lampshade their absence! Bizarre.

If my train of thought has been a little all over the place, that’s largely down to the book. Beige Planet Mars isn’t The Sword Of Forever weird, but it’s weird, delighting in mockery of local tropes and keen to play with the idea of escaping them, but not having anything concrete to say about where we are, whether that’s any good, where to next, or if it has any better ideas about all of the above. Still, it’s undeniably funny and exciting – with the one giving way rather bluntly to the other by the end, before the book inevitably shrugs and buggers off to the pub.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #117 – Another Girl, Another Planet by Martin Day and Len Beech

The New Adventures
#15
Another Girl, Another Planet
By Martin Day and Len Beech
Sort of a prophetic title, really. Another Girl, Another Planet. This latest Bernice Summerfield New Adventure is definitely… another one.
I only know Martin Day from The Menagerie, which had some astute character writing embedded in some generic fantasy mulch. It was his first novel; since then he’s landed the inaugural Past Doctor Adventure with BBC Books, plus a further entry in that range. Both were co-written, so he’s no doubt gained a few experience points there. With him this time is Len Beech, aka Stephen Bowkett, whose only Who work so far appears to be in Decalog 3; however, he is a seasoned author. (The blurb says this is his twentieth novel.) Between them, I had no idea what to expect, but I think with a combined back catalogue of 23 novels it ought to be pretty good.
It doesn’t have the most auspicious start. Bernice is “getting tired of Dellah, resentful of the grinding routine of seminars and tutorials.” And I mean – really? That’s perhaps a reasonable view in itself, but at this point it really ought to be held in the context of the series, which is notably not named Bernice Summerfield: Exam Marker. The last three books alone have seen her dice with death, lose new but meaningful friends and then actually die herself – twice! – one time on yer actual crucifixion cross. It would give you an unusual perspective on the monotony of academia, would it not? I appreciate that the communication wasn’t perfect between these disparate authors and the range editors (although given how long Virgin had been publishing books at this point, why is that?) but it too often feels like a novelist (or duo) turns up and acts like this is Benny’s first exciting trip off world. Such inattention to Benny’s ongoing life makes it feel like an elastic band that will always snap back. We’re 15 books in. Are we building something or not?*
Sorry – it’s a bit irrational to be pissed off about something that is, if I’m honest, endemic of the series as a whole and not the fault of messrs Day or Beech. (Jim Mortimore has also said that nobody told him the continuity ins and outs, which is probably why The Sword Of Forever is an acid trip.) But I’m reviewing the series as well as the books here, and it adds to that “another” feeling right from the get go: here is a book that isn’t going to buck trends.
Bernice is enticed off world by a note of alarm from a friend. Lizbeth Fulgate is really more of a pen pal/archaeology acquaintance, despite Benny being her emergency contact, and of course this is the first we’re hearing of her. The authors never quite nail the incongruity there, as Bernice herself notes that she hardly knows Lizbeth, yet Lizbeth feels very close to Bernice and even “loves” her, hence – presumably – trusting her with this. As a series reader it’s hard to suddenly invest in an ongoing friendship. (See the long lost heartbreak in Sword Of Forever.) Perhaps the wobbly friendship level is the authors trying to convince us, but not fully comparing each other’s notes first.
Lizbeth, herself, hardly seems worth the effort. Bernice makes occasional note of her attractiveness and thinks she has the gumption of a younger Benny, but in practice she’s a wet lettuce. Lizbeth doesn’t have a lot of agency: her thoughts mostly seem to revolve around her ex, and latterly she commits the awful trope of dating a villain and, when his honour is questioned by her dearest friends, siding with the new beau. Oh, Lizzy, no.
The authors (and Bernice) seem much more interested in her ex. Alex Mphahlele is a striking, attractive, seemingly-good-at-everything sort of chap and is soon chaperoning Bernice on her investigations. A romance is hinted at between the two, and of course there’s still the question of reconciliation with Lizbeth, but none of that is resolved. (Ordinarily I wouldn’t mind – I’m not normally one for seeking out romance in novels – but if you’re going to bang on about it, even to the extent of a mildly racist comment on the size of his manhood, then you’ve obviously got it on the brain so might as well reach some conclusion with it.)
Alex, or Mphahlele, or Alex Mphahlele – the prose is annoyingly inconsistent on what to call him, as if there are lots of Alexes running about on this alien world, and it’s not helped by a frankly amateurish reliance on characters repeating the name of the person they’re speaking to just like nobody does in real life – is at least more of a presence than Lizbeth, but he’s similarly thin on dimensions. Even his longing for Lizbeth isn’t terribly convincing, with such heart-rending dialogue as “The bitch was always headstrong” and “That’s twice I’ve tried to save your beautiful ass in as many hours.” Aww! But the really important thing here is how smokin’ hot the guy is, although you’ll have to squint to pick up on it in subtle lines like “[he] scanned the distance, looking tall and strong, like some magnificent antelope gazing over the plains.”
The investigation is the crux of the novel, not that dizzy Lizbeth has noticed, so what about that? Well, Lizbeth is on a dig on the planet Dimetos and she’s being stalked. Not, you might think, something a pen pal can do much about, but on arrival it turns out the dig is in trouble too: Lizbeth is receiving threats about accidents. Pretty soon somebody literally fills in the dig, burying the digging machines. Something sinister is afoot in Dimetos all right.
We don’t have much basis for comparison. The authors seem fascinated by Dimetos, particularly all the hover cars, but there’s nothing here you haven’t come across in the Roz and Chris novels (Original Sin) or the Benny ones (Mean Streets). A mix of glamour and squalor, some of it futuristic and some not, dodgy government types and shady business dealings. Mean Streets was one of the few Bernice books Martin Day had read and you can tell, what with the streets – though sadly not the parody – bleeding through here. There isn’t enough actual intrigue to make hanging around in Dimetos worth the page count, with the default level of excitement being: that hover car is chasing us! (What, another one?)
As for what’s going on, I had to read page 147 twice to be sure I’d read correctly: some land is being built on, but it’s actually unsafe and improperly catalogued; however some crooked types really want that development dollah so they’re hushing it up. I mean, it’s not much is it? Smacks of a daytime detective mystery, with your Poirot of choice being brought in when people start to die on a seemingly unassuming golf course.
There’s a bit more to it – a shapeshifting character with confused race memories is part of a weapons deal, and what’s underground is evidence of a heinous crime the dodgy types would also like to keep quiet – but by the time these bits are clarified, you’ve already spent too much book traipsing around a dreary land scandal that’s arguably less notable than Benny’s term papers.
Which brings us to Bernice, the linchpin. On the surface they do a good job here, with plenty of diary entries and some withering sarcasm. Tick! However, I’m not altogether convinced. That is-she-or-isn’t-she bond with Lizbeth sets the whole thing off on a wobbly footing; the diary entries often seem arbitrary and interchangeable with the third person prose; and the writing is of a generally flat standard which doesn’t bring out her best. One critical flashback is followed by “The symbolism of her memory had dropped like a jigsaw puzzle piece with uncanny precision into the current events of her life.” Oof. She is gifted with natty, definitely-Benny-ish-I-swear thoughts like “she was pleased to be able to agree unequivocally. It helped salve the effects of her earlier musings.” And quite often her feelings – and those of others – come out in great lumpy lists: “Bernice felt dreadfully sorry for all this … She was saddened by the fact that her own assistance had been anything but effective.” Eugh. Needs more zing, and needs a lot less of the rest of it. (If you’ve read this far, you’ve unlocked a bonus gripe: Benny continuity! There’s a surprising callback to her Nazi torturer in Just War, but the direct comparison drawn between that incident and being chased by some heavies here is downright laughable. Really, this is the worst thing that’s happened to her since then? Come on. If you’re going to pull triggers like that, you’d better not miss.)
You’ll have no difficulty following the action, at least. Once again Bernice gets sick of marking, answers a distress call, is embroiled in a sinister plot, gets in a few car chases and goes home. I might not mind a less funny retread of Mean Streets if it was at least well executed, but this is altogether fizzle-free stuff. It would be unlikely to hook a visiting reader. Regulars, at least, know (or may be unsurprised by) what they’re getting: another book, another runaround.
4/10
*Disclaimer: there are hints in the epilogue towards an over-arching threat that I believe we’ll see in future books. But I know this because I read about Another Girl, Another Planet afterwards – in context, it seems self-contained.

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #116 – The Sword Of Forever by Jim Mortimore

The New Adventures
#14
The Sword Of Forever
By Jim Mortimore

Oooookay then.

I’m tempted to say you never know what you’re getting with a Jim Mortimore book, but that wouldn’t be accurate. You know you’ll get something spectacular. There will be memorable, perhaps gut-wrenching set pieces and there will be world building. It will be eloquently written and, like certain really cool but slightly odd bands – Super Furry Animals come to mind – you’ll sense that, if they do something you don’t entirely get, hard luck, but they meant to do that.

I have no doubt that Jim Mortimore meant to do The Sword Of Forever, so to speak. I’m sure it was worked out within an inch of its life. But I’m nevertheless in the camp of people who put the book down only to gaze into space afterwards and go… you wha’?

A certain feeling of “normal service has been interrupted” occurs early on during a prequel chapter about a young Benny Summerfield. (Sidebar: that combination looks wrong, doesn’t it? Benny and Summerfield, both fine, but together: yuck. Still, it’s a useful way to tell us it’s a different version of the character.) Benny is on a dig with her current love, a man who will haunt her future: Daniel. And because this guy is brand new information, I immediately assumed something was deliberately and cleverly amiss. If Bernice had had a tragic love affair – or rather, had had another one – she’d have said, right? Not famously tight-lipped is our erstwhile archaeologist.

Something else seems to be up with the dates, which start us off with a 22-year-old Benny and then resume 30+ years later. Present day Bernice isn’t in her 50s, is she? Is this all a time-jump? Is it future Bernice? (Mind you, some of this might be editorial error. There’s one chapter that kills off Daniel 2 years before his arrival. On Terminus Reviews, Mortimore seems to suggest that an editor placed a gap here to suggest the time spent travelling with the Doctor, which of course we can’t speak of, and if so that’s got me thinking along the lines of bloody UNIT Dating. Sort of wish there were no dates, it might be neater.)

This feeling was compounded by the situation on Earth, where much of the action takes place. It’s riddled with radioactive fallout from a war (do we know which?) and all life is at constant risk of mutation. There are tree-people, mutant animals, you name it. Reading this I realised how few Benny books had actually visited Earth (wait, is it none?) and, to be fair, maybe Mortimore is just setting a new (horrid) status quo here since no one else has. But equally, what with the Daniel thing, and what with me being a softie who wants nicer things for Earth, on some level I was thinking: don’t worry, this isn’t really happening, wait for it, wait for iiiit. (I mean, I know it isn’t really happening, but… you know what I mean.)

Long story short, whether I’m right or wrong, I think the best way to enjoy The Sword Of Forever is to ignore that thought and just embrace the thing that it is, because if Bernice isn’t actively saying “This isn’t right” then no one is likely to. You might as well settle in. Then again, the book backs up that nagging Elseworlds feeling to an extent. (By which I mean, that’s literally the plot of the book, but… well you know, how much of it is this thing and how much is that thing?) The titular sword is a means to create time, and life, and hence reboot the world. And this happens, after Bernice is crucified. (Hold that thought.) So there’s a good chance this whole time we’ve been reading about an alternate Earth. But how much of it is supposed to be alternate, given the lack of an objective observer, I don’t know, so now I’m not sure all over again.

(Release that thought.) As in literally crucified. There’s a ton of biblical mythology in this, some of which could turn heads more sharply than The Da Vinci Code, and none of it, in my opinion, really makes it make sense to do this to Bernice. It’s… a lot, you know? The fact that she goes along with this, and her “friends” (Patience at least) help, and then in the Epilogue she has successfully been recreated and is satisfied that The Important Thing Has Been Done and then the book ends – is almost, but not quite as bizarre as doing it in the first place. Like I said, she is as enmeshed in the slightly off kilter atmosphere of this book as anyone else in it. For better or worse. (Which again makes me wonder how much of this is supposed to ring false.)

There is much violence and body horror in The Sword Of Forever, and to be fair, plenty of excitement and a couple of car chases as well. It is a RIDE. There is also the aforementioned eloquent prose, as the action chops between different times such as post-Crusades France, 80 million BC and then, right at the end, probably all of human history for the second (third?) time. I’m not sure the breadth of scope here really helped me follow along, though. At one point I was distracted from reading for more than a day and when I started the next chapter, I had no idea how we’d got there. There are basic pieces of information that I just felt too stupid to grasp, like why we discovered adult Bernice in media res, nearly frozen to death clutching the remains of a dinosaur. (The importance of the dinosaur is made clear soon after, but that still didn’t quite loop back and explain the original situation to me. I’ve probably missed a bit. Was she doing it all over again? Christ, I feel thick.)

Said dinosaur – Patience, a Utah raptor who reincarnates, meets Bernice and learns sign language – features in some of the book’s best bits, as she and other unnaturally intelligent dinosaurs deal with some nearby humans, probably on one of (?) humanity’s subsequent run-throughs but this time with dinos, and this time they’re smarter etc. The end of the book suggests she could return, which I’m all for. (I’m still not 100% sure the book justifies having an intelligent dinosaur in the cast, but be honest, it wouldn’t hurt most books, would it?)

It’s tough to review a book or even say anything useful about it when you’re struggling to get two and two to meet at a nice coffee shop. It’s really hot this week, maybe my brain just didn’t engage like it should have. To keep my critical hat affixed, then, I’m fairly certain that (time loops or ersatz Earths or no) introducing a brand new old heartbreak for Bernice is at best a risky move, and mining it for emotion is like drilling for oil in a crash mat. Also, the basic design of the book – already complex and reticent with answers even before you chop it up – worked against it, for me. Again, maybe it’s the heat. Something about the whole atmosphere of this book, though, just did not work for me.

I know others really enjoyed it, some of whom even with that sense of bafflement. The Sword Of Forever may well be your thing, just as previous Mortimores have been mine, and if so: brilliant! It contains thrills and wonders, but for me the lasting effect was of climbing out of an uncanny valley and feeling well out of there.

5/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #115 – Dry Pilgrimage by Paul Leonard and Nick Walter

The New Adventures
#13
Dry Pilgrimage
By Paul Leonard and Nick Walters

New writer alert! And, just sayin’, 13 books into the even newer New Adventures, a fresh face feels a wee bit overdue. (The previous new novelist was Matt Jones with Bad Therapy, back when all this was Doctor Who. He’s had a second book out since then!)

The funny thing about trying to make an initial assessment of Nick Walters, who shares the writer credit here with Paul Leonard (who reportedly just edited the book) is that Dry Pilgrimage feels so much like a Paul Leonard book. There are ideas that hew close enough to Leonard’s Venusian Lullaby in particular to feel like Paul’s really pushing his luck. But if it’s actually Nick then we can perhaps put that down to the latter being a fan of the former, and then putting his own spin on it – or just happening to be a similar sort of writer. Dry Pilgrimage doesn’t feel rippy-offy at all, it just seems to ride similar trains of thought to the ones in Lullaby, Dancing The Code, Toy Soldiers and Speed Of Flight. Or maybe I’m just projecting because I saw “Paul Leonard” on the cover. Either way, it’s a nice problem to have since it makes for interesting books.

Okay, let’s be more specific: it seems like a very Leonard thing to show not just alien characters, but characters whose life cycles are completely alien. Lullaby and Flight go to great pains to show different ways of living and evolving; the short lifespan of Dry Pilgrimage’s Saraani (10 years) is certainly memorable, and the passing down of memories to their young via “holy transference” is a lot like Venusian “remembering,” only minus the cannibalism. They don’t have different sexes (although they are all gendered as “he/him” which seems odd) and they all reproduce without, you know, help. They’re a striking bunch.

But further down the sounds-a-bit-like-Leonard-but-let’s-just-call-it-interesting rabbit hole we go: it’s not just about weird aliens, it’s about people within the same groups having different perspectives. This goes back, Doctor Who-wise, to Malcolm Hulke and the Silurians, with good ones and bad ones all trying their best for their people. (It probably goes back earlier too but that’s a good example.) The Saraani are slavish about their religion, but a schism on their home-world has turned them into refugees, with the “Renaissants” wanting to ditch the old ways. One of their number, Mirrium, is a staunch traditionalist, but the dubious actions of their leader cause him to rethink the whole Saraani way of life. Said leader, the Khulayn, is working with outsiders on a decidedly dodgy project, but he believes he’s doing the right thing. Vilbian, a Saraani befriended by Bernice, has different allegiances altogether and doesn’t know where he fits in. None of these are even Renaissants, although one of those is squirrelled away too. Bottom line, there’s enough here to suggest a race with more ups and downs than the average funny-forehead gang in Star Trek.

And then there are the more recognisable “people”. The Saraani have booked the cruise ship Lady Of Lorelai to take them to some islands on Dellah, hoping to find a new home; on board to study all of this are Bernice and other professors, including Maeve Ruthven, a religious fundamentalist who went against her faith to marry Brion, a geneticist, with whom she has fallen out but who is on board as well. And Brion has his own tortured allegiances. Of the other assorted academics, Professor Smith has a dispassionate anthropological interest in stirring up trouble and observing the results: he feels like a perverse reflection of the author(s), trying to see things from all sides and remain objective. Smith is, of course, no such thing, as shown in a very funny scene where his temper gets the better of him: “He picked up his cup of coffee, spilling it all over his papers. His hands were shaking. Interesting.” Smith, like any good character, thaws as the story goes along.

This it does at a gentle pace, at least to begin with, as Bernice acclimatises to what should be a nice time on a cruise ship. Yeah, right: anyone who’s ever encountered Doctor Who media knows that even for a moment thinking you’re on holiday means you’re about to have a more than usually dangerous time, but the writing of these early chapters is as enjoyable as putting your feet up on deck. Bernice, it turns out, gets terribly seasick, which brings into sharp relief the fact that somehow this is the first Benny New Adventure set on yer actual seafaring boat. (We’ve already had two “cruise ships in space” and a train going across a dangerous planet. Along with Dry Pilgrimage’s best-days-are-behind-her cruise ship, these all essentially occupy the “murders on holiday” genre.) It’s also the first book to stick with Dellah, where Bernice works, as a location. It seems crazy to me that we haven’t explored the planet more, so I’m all for that.

It can’t all be a lovely holiday, of course, and there’s plenty of darkness in Dry Pilgrimage, beginning with the apparent murder of a student at St. Oscar’s. We start off in his perspective as he tries to chat up Bernice, which makes for an interestingly offbeat way to introduce her to the narrative. The dead don’t always stay dead, it seems, and poor Theo finds himself reincarnated – sort of – as a murderous android. Someone else suffers the same fate later, and we get a lot of pathos out of the horrors of being forced to do things in another body. This also leads to Bernice sustaining a significant injury that bothers her for the rest of the novel.

Because, oh yes, Bernice has a horrible time in this. She makes friends and then loses them (sometimes without knowing it, as with Theo), and her grief often takes a while to hit, which rings truer than always bursting into tears on cue. She tries to do the right thing and rescue people, even when it seems hopeless and in the short term might actually endanger her. I think at times this can be a little much – there are quite a few cliff-hangers where she only survives because someone obligingly saves her – but the overall effect is one of humanising her.

Walters and/or Leonard still keeps track of Bernice’s lighter side, or it wouldn’t be much fun to read. Whilst trying to blend in with some bad guys she takes stock of “the eternal still point within her that was forever Bernice: tea. Interesting people. Cats. Fine wine. Vinyl records. Tennis. Justice. Frocks.” Moments later, “however hard she tried, she couldn’t keep time with the military step. This pleased her in a very fundamental way.” She’s hilarious, in that thankfully understated way that the better Bernice writers get, and at one point when needing to say something about a daunting spacecraft, the best she can manage is “Big, isn’t it?” (Whether that’s a deliberate callback to Walking To Babylon I don’t know, but it’s perfectly on brand.) She’s never so amusing that she’s a caricature, or so distraught that this feels like punishment. It reminds me of certain earlier New Adventures that really got the Doctor right. It should be noted when it happens.

I’ve rhapsodised about it so far. Any niggles? Well, as often happens – Lucifer Rising comes to mind – you’ve got all sorts of depth and interesting stuff going on but then the bad guys show up and it gets a bit bland. The villain (“Violaine,” which even looks like “villain”) at least puts some effort into her megalomania – with an outfit that would have had your eye out if they’d put it on the front cover – but her commitment to fnar fnar evilness is still disappointing in amongst all those shades of grey. Then again, her evil plan to create hordes of killing machines requires elderly volunteers who genuinely think this all sounds smashing, and they’re sort of interesting. But then again again, her actual soldiery workforce are as bog standard unpleasant as they come. Still though. If we’re honest, some people are, aren’t they?

By that point I think Nick Walters and Paul Leonard (in that order) have generated enough goodwill for us to remember the hits more than the misses. Dry Pilgrimage just feels substantial in a way that more New Adventures should. Not bad for a first timer doing another dusty old Murder On A Cruise Ship.

8/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #114 – The Medusa Effect by Justin Richards

The New Adventures
#12
The Medusa Effect
By Justin Richards
Something, something, snappy opening line.
Hey, it can be difficult knowing where to start, or what to even say about books that aren’t trying to do anything world-breaking and are pretty much fine at that. The Medusa Effect is the latest from Justin Richards, certified Safe Pair Of Hands, and it is (reassuringly?) unlikely to frighten the horses.
It quickly settles down into a familiar pattern: a bunch of characters investigate a spooky old ship that has unexpectedly reappeared after its doomed maiden voyage. Before long they start to see things – the old crew and passengers, times past – and they find themselves remembering those other people’s experiences, then reliving them. Will they escape the calamity that befell the ship the first time?
Richards has a lot of fun in the ghost story portion of the book (which is most of it), sliding Bernice and her co-investigators in and out of a gleaming past and the dusty present. The prose can be sharp: “The furniture looked like it had arrived in the cobwebs and had not yet been unpacked.” “The cry echoed down the passageway, muffled as it went by the layers of dust that ate the sound.” There’s a whole scene, so I can’t write it out, where a character picks up a shiny apple from a banquet only to find it dedicated after a bite. That one will stick in my memory.
It’s good, evocative stuff, but – I’m still thinking about that apple – maybe it’s low hanging fruit of a sort? There’s not a lot to unpack as, inevitably, the characters on a spooky old cruise ship begin creepily adopting the hairstyles and bad habits of the dead. For plot reasons, everyone is a bit too out of it to really register the horror, which lends the whole thing a sort of unreal quality that perhaps takes some of the edge off. It is for instance suggested that Bernice will share the fate of a truly unfortunate passenger and be sealed in a coffin alive, and sure enough we get there, but too soon for it to feel all that climactic, and then we move on. It’s all a bit like, well yeah, you get on a spooky old boat, what did you expect? Similarly when almost all of them – spoilers I guess? – relive their deaths down to the last detail, it is difficult to be upset so much as just mildly disappointed for them.
It might be easier to dig in and care if the characters were stronger, but right out of the gate The Medusa Effect seems (deliberately?) to make that a challenge. There are far too many names thrown around too soon (just as we also set foot on the Medusa quicker than I expected – was it a boring ride over?), and while I’m failing to tell apart Chomsky and Hoyt and Gyles I’m also having to contend with the names of the dead crew and passengers. This pretty much tells you that’ll you’ll be making their acquaintance somehow, so the whole “re-live the past” bit does not come as a shock. But then, for plot reasons, it turns out all these names who-are-now-behaving-like-some-other-names have specifically been picked because they are “archetypal”. And that was the point where I wondered if I wasn’t even meant to grab hold of anyone here. Which I mean, if so, clever and all that, but to quote another voice from the past… do you think that’s wise?
I’m just theorising here, but I suspect the “spooky space mystery” part of The Medusa Effect came to Richards very independently from the explanation for it. (Indeed, he was inspired by – and I am not making this up – a book called Ghost Boat.) He really does have a ball in the dusty old fun house he’s created, extending the otherworldly weirdness to some kooky imagery such as life forms growing in and then bursting out of wooden pillars. (Which makes me think, on some level, he was inspired by Earthshock.) But you do have to explain stuff eventually, and hoo boy, does he make me reconsider asking.
It turns out the (already not to be trusted) Advanced Research Department on Dellah wanted to create easily controlled soldier clones, but it was for some reason difficult to do this in a lab (?), so they used the launch of a remote control space cruiser as cover and filled it with people that have archetypal personalities (?) so some psychic clone matter could absorb just the right mental mix to aid… being controlled, I guess? But then it all went wrong because an escaped convict got aboard and made them all murder each other. When the same shadowy forces engineer it so the same thing can happen again on the Medusa’s return, and it does, including the bits that went wrong, you’ve got to wonder if Big Mad Science could use the occasional boring normal person in the room to say “nope, next.”
I didn’t dislike this just because it’s bonkers: more so that it means unmasking the villain, and they do that “drop any pretence of not being a cartoonish megalomaniac” thing about as bluntly as I’ve ever seen it. I’m amazed Richards kept them from smoking one of those long cigarettes and laughing maniacally – they seem less real than the ghosts. Things culminate in a literal countdown to an explosion and it all begins feeling like he’s trying to wrap this thing up before the car pulls up outside. But I must admit it was a bit exciting. Again, though, with the low hanging fruit.
Bernice is well served here, at least insofar as Richards seems keenly aware of the facets that make up Bernice Summerfield, and puts them to work. This is surprisingly not the first time that her fondness for booze has kept her out of trouble; her fixation with keeping a diary causes lines to blur between herself and one of the ship’s passengers; and Richards even revisits the idea of her higgledy-piggledy bicycle from Mean Streets. (As well as making the plot of Mean Streets, of all things, crucial to this one. Hey, man, you are what you eat.) As often seems to happen, Bernice isn’t quite herself for a chunk of this, but when she is there’s a good amount of wit and intelligence, albeit not nearly enough freaking out for me to get seriously unnerved by the story. She develops a close bond with someone on board and, as also often seems to happen, events conspire so that they’re unlikely to bump into each other again. (Well, it’s not The Bernice And Her New Best Mate Adventures, is it?) She leaves the story disappointed and perhaps a bit heartbroken, but as – apparently – Richards wrote the final post-explosion chapter rather late in the process, any examination of that will fall to later authors. (Or quite possibly him again, having glanced at my bookshelf.)
You have, in all likelihood, heard better versions of this ghost story, but The Medusa Effect knows the ropes well enough not to send you away completely disappointed. The prose comes to its rescue quite often, but then again things happen suddenly and unexpectedly so often that it feels like it’s not just that ill-fated voyage being recreated in vain, but its inspirations too.
6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #113 – Oblivion by Dave Stone

The New Adventures
#11
Oblivion
By Dave Stone
Looks like it’s Dave Stone o’clock already. Doesn’t the day fly by?
Not that I dread his books. (Sky Pirates! remains a favourite of mine.) But his work, always wordy and generally funny, is variable - as I suppose anyone’s will be if they keep submitting it.
I think the issue, if there is one, is how he presents his ideas, which tend to be fruitsome and strange and involve a lot of loopy verbiage. Sky Pirates! is mad and ridiculous – but it’s also an adventure story that sweeps you along. More recently there was Ship Of Fools, which had significant elements of reality-bothering strangeness – but first and foremost it was a jolly pisstake of Agatha Christie. They’ve got a solid structure to help sell the Dave Stone-ness of it all.
Oblivion, not so much. There’s a big idea, yes siree: due to villainous machinations we’ll get into shortly, the universe is changing tracks, throwing out other lives and experiences at random. (So, the multiverse.) It is also falling apart. The only people immune to this are time travellers, plus those of an other-universe persuasion, which means that Bernice, Chris Cwej and Jason Kane are swept up by Sgloomi Po and some of the crew of the Schirron Dream (see Sky Pirates!) to hopefully do something about it.
Sounds big, sounds cool, but on a page-by-page level there’s not much actually happening. Our heroes are making their way to Earth, aka the source of the trouble. While they’re doing that, we cut back to Earth in its various multiverses as Nathan li Shao, Kiru and Leetha (Sky Pirates! alumni, same as Sgloomi) are bumping from life to life, name to name, more or less heading in a direction to achieve a thing but out of their minds while doing so. And I’ve got to say it: I liked Sky Pirates! I am here for more Sky Pirates! But that was dozens of novels ago and you are seriously overestimating my investment in these characters. A good 30-40% of Oblivion is these guys pottering about, not knowing who they are. (Insert joke here.) If the aim was to deconstruct characters, fine, but it would make a lot more sense to deconstruct ones we already understand, or might at least know from Adam. As it is, variations on this theme amount to lots of words that just aren’t getting us anywhere. This version of what’s-his-name is different from the last chapter, is he? Just as that one was different from the one before? Fab. So, when are we advancing the plot? The eyes did begin to glaze over, fun as the individual worlds often are.
Back on the Schirron Dream, nothing much happens for a while apart from Benny and Jason arguing. (I’ll say my piece real quick here because it’s the same as ever: I don’t get Jason. He’s usually a bit of a wanker and Benny doesn’t enjoy his company, leftover having-the-hots-for-him aside, so bringing him back just seems like masochism to me. Fair enough if he brings something meaningful to other readers. Wish I was among them.) Then, due to Sgloomi Po misreading the situation due to their past experiences, Roz Forrester joins the action, plucked out of time in her early 20s. This leads to some understandably heated reactions from Chris and Bernice, viz the timelines not being broken. There is also a good bit where Roz, who is not yet entirely immune, begins flipping through lives; suddenly we’re seeing it from an outside perspective, which works a lot better than being stuck inside it. (As a bonus, you know who Roz is and can spot when she has changed.)
It’s interesting bringing Roz back, but the overall spine of Oblivion doesn’t really allow that to develop, so I don’t know if it was worth pulling that trigger. She ends up working with Sgloomi while the rest of the gang go through the multiverse motions, each trapped in their personal hell. (Could this part only be assigned to Roz, and not Bernice? I wonder.) By the end, she’s back in her timeline and doesn’t remember any of it. Chris (who in Mean Streets was still rocked to his core by her death) doesn’t have much space here to respond to her return or her departure. And after she goes home even we’re robbed of letting that sit by a very Dave Stone appendix featuring some sort of amalgam of Jason and Nathan having an adventure, by which time good grief, Dave, it’s home time.
I said before it’s a big idea, and I meant it: the multiverse has been doing numbers in movies to the point of exhaustion these past few years, and there’s bags you could do with these characters in that context. My problem is mostly, which characters. The “personal hells” bit is interesting – again, perhaps because it’s people we know to a reasonable extent – but it’s very late in the proceedings if you’re wanting to mull it over in any detail. (Bernice becomes a monstrous warmonger. Chris, adorably, becomes Not A Good Person.) Otherwise there’s very little solid matter attached to this idea. Barely anyone else seems to exist in the book, which is perhaps for the best given the size of the main cast, but this then makes it difficult to grasp the scale of the problem. And by the time we find out what’s really going on it’s sadly all too pedestrian: a bad guy wants to live forever so he’s changing the universe until that’s possible. That was it? All this for a nutter in an evil lair?
It’s Dave Stone, so it’s often very funny. This early bit about a sinister child reads like Inside No. 9: “The man in the hat was quite obviously a pervert, and Simon recalled the single salient point that his parents had made in all their comments about perverts. ‘Where’s my sweet?’ he said.” Sgloomi Po, a shapeshifting oddball with wacky speech patterns to match, is as loveable as ever. (He/they stick in the memory.) And there are actually ideas to spare: look at the reset when the pieces are put back together at the end. (I wonder if anyone thought, we should have done that at the start of the range to explain where the Doctor went…)
In the end, though, Oblivion doesn’t marry its ideas to a sense of urgency, tending to fill time with them instead, intentionally or otherwise. It’s interesting. And that’s not always enough.
5/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #112 – Walking To Babylon by Kate Orman

The New Adventures
#10
Walking To Babylon
By Kate Orman
Oh, crumbs. For some reason I get a bit flustered reading (and especially reviewing) books that everyone likes. You know where you are with a stinker; you also might enjoy diving into a book that everyone sniffs at only to say no, you’re all mean, Tempest is fine actually. When it’s something like Love And War or The Also People, there is (in my stupid brain anyway) a feeling that there won’t be much to say, and anything you do say could have it all backwards.
All of which, fluster and bluster and blah, is to say that everyone likes Walking To Babylon, and they’re right. It’s great. So, thanks for coming.
Fine, I’ll try.
Walking To Babylon juggles a few elements that will be familiar to readers of the Benny NAs. Bernice is on a mission from (you could at least pretend to hold your breath) the People, more specifically God, and the only way to solve the crisis is to visit an archaeological dig. That is a slight fib: she must travel to Babylon in its heyday, before the conquering and the ruins. Having her marching around active history feels like a fresh way to handle a heroic archaeologist. (It is only a mild irritation that Lawrence Miles did this not long before as a short story, but then again even NA fans probably didn’t read the last Decalog.)
The problem is this: two of the People have built a time travelling path from their Worldsphere to Babylon, and they appear to have gone to live at other end, leaving the path open. No one knows why, but the People have a precarious treaty with a powerful force that shall remain nameless (okay, Time Lords, please don’t sue us) and if they find the People mucking about with time travel it would mean war. Specifically a Time War, which Kate Orman evokes with characteristic New Who prophecy at a few points. Bernice has five days to reason with the fugitives and shut down the path or Babylon, everyone in it and Earth’s history will be scuppered to prevent a larger crisis.
It sounds like a massive story, but Walking To Babylon approaches it with the same sort of human smallness (perhaps as a coping mechanism for big ideas) as The Also People. The majority of it is people talking to each other, trying to solve problems with civility. On the Worldsphere, Clarence (an angel, to all intents and purposes, Benny met in Down) is figuring out why the path was created and what they can do about it. In Babylon, Bernice is trying to find the fugitives (you’ll notice I haven’t included their names: typical People, they are unpronounceable) while also trying to support a fellow traveller, Edwardian linguist John Lafayette. He found the path, which shouldn’t be possible, and Bernice is the closest thing he has to a way home. Most of the book is their relationship.
And, oh right, yes, it’s a love story. Sort of. (When push comes to shove, John says that he is not in love with her, but it’s obviously something. Bernice feels a connection she hasn’t had in a while, but that doesn’t automatically make it more. It’s well handled, not unlike some of the ships-in-the-night dalliances of the Doctor Who NAs.) Walking To Babylon, despite the ticking clock, allows Bernice to slow down and feel things. The relative naivety of John, whose social mores can’t cope with Babylon, let alone the sexual politics of Benny’s time, allows for some thoughtful reflections on civilisation: ways in which the Babylonians are backward, but know what they want, and ways in which the People are hyper-advanced, but out of touch and easily self-deluded. (And probably ways in which John and Bernice emulate both those viewpoints, I suppose.) John’s out of place-ness doesn’t make him a figure of fun, as it could have, but it does increase his reliance on Bernice. Also his fascination: he’s as in awe of her as he is of Babylon, especially when a heated chase leads to some decidedly un-Edwardian sex. Bernice seems aware of her awkward duty of care for him, which perhaps contributes to this not becoming a relationship.
There aren’t many black and white characters here. Bernice and John meet a slave owner who comes to their rescue; a shady go-between has much to gain from aiding the fugitives, but ultimately he helps Bernice because it is more pragmatic to do so; the fugitives, despite their catastrophic lack of judgement, are damaged by war and believe what they’re doing will be good for their people in the end. Their whole society comes out of this feeling like a richer and more troubled bunch, which is a relief when these books are so determined to revisit them.
Despite its characterful smallness, there are moments of high drama and excitement. John comes close to death after an attempt to rescue Bernice from kidnappers (she thinks he was wrong to do so, but we know she was in much greater danger), and when medical aid arrives from an unlikely source I couldn’t disagree with Benny’s assessment: “…so relieved that it was almost a physical pain.” The sheer simplicity of the path, as a means for time travel, also allows for some striking imagery. The moment when it finally begins to break up, and Bernice and John literally run along it for their lives, is going to stick with me.
There is also, of course, a lot of great writing for Bernice. Trust Kate Orman to understand the assignment: not only placing Benny in living history, knowing how that will brighten her up, but displaying her frayed edges and imperfections as a character as well. Bernice relates to the (philosophical) youth of these renegade People – who already took direct inspiration from her life, though that is hardly her fault – telling them a story about a stupid decision that almost got her killed years ago. This ultimately, seamlessly sets up one of the key premises of her character: “I remembered those long nights in the Aurigan jungle, after a lip-smacking meal of night crawler, trying to keep myself from going mad. It would always take forever to go to sleep … I would talk to myself, encouraging words, badly constructed limericks, sometimes a wavering song. I told myself my life story. I made up the bits I couldn’t remember or didn’t like. After that, I started keeping a diary. And still made up the bits I couldn’t remember or didn’t like.” Orman also peppers Bernice’s ongoing memoir with footnotes, which are a perfect fit and work much better (in my opinion) than her original whimsical go-to of notes on top of notes to continually rewrite the moment. (Which is still a thing, admittedly.)
It’s Kate Orman, so the book feels breezy even when it’s brilliant, and much of it is set in the Worldsphere, which is as consistently fun to revisit as a cherished fairytale. There are delightful passages, like a chapter that’s a farce with Benny trying to grant a chain of wishes in order to find something out, or this gem when John encounters the Worldsphere: “The first thing he saw was Clarence … an angel, right out of a Bible illustration, naked as a jaybird and with a ten-foot wingspan. The next thing he saw was that the world went away for ever and curled to the sides and up over his head, past the sun and the smiling planet that circled it. A yellow-coloured drone floated up. ‘Hi,’ it said. ‘I’m God.’ I expected John to faint. Instead, he said, ‘Bernice, are you feeling all right?’ I would have answered, but I decided to fall over in the grass and have a little sleep instead.” You generally feel like a lot is being said, but also it’s okay just to enjoy the good company for 250 pages.
When something’s good it’s easy to get stuck just describing it. Walking To Babylon is a rare treat, though: quality time with Bernice in the hands of someone who gets her. (Footnote: what do you mean, she didn’t write another one? Cruk!)
9/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #111 – Tempest by Christopher Bulis

The New Adventures
#9
Tempest
By Christopher Bulis

Few writers are quite as ubiquitous in Doctor Who fiction as Christopher Bulis, who by this point had written for all but two of the Doctors for Virgin Publishing. (One of the “not”s was Paul McGann and that was probably just because Virgin lost the license. Bulis later rectified this at BBC Books.) It is fitting, then, or at least unsurprising that he should have a crack at the Bernice Summerfield range as well.

Tempest is a murder mystery on a train. So far, blah: it’s fair to say we’ve been there and done that in pop culture. Hell, this range of books has already plundered Agatha Christie for Ship Of Fools. Sometimes though, it’s how you do it, and Tempest… is also not the great brain-teaser of the century as far as murder mysteries go. Bugger. (Let’s just say it employs the old gambit of leaving an obvious suspect completely unremarked upon for some reason. I cheered smugly when I was right.)

There are other marks against it. Bulis has somewhat of a tin ear for names in this, with the action centring around a priceless statue called the Drell Imnulate (just reading it on the page makes my tongue twist), characters such as Lankril, Tralbet the Narg and briefly two completely unrelated people called Lin and Lyn.

Worse though, on a general level, is Bernice. She just doesn’t seem as witty as usual. I can’t help rating these books on how well they’ve captured her voice — it’s one of the only constants of the range — and with inner monologues as, ah, pithy as “The more I learn the more I realise I don’t have to look outside my own species to find behavioural quirks quite as strange as those of any alien society,” I’m unlikely to exceed 3 Paul Cornells out of a possible 5, am I?

And yet: after a while I realised I was haring through this at a good speed. Though I held a pretty firm suspicion throughout over whodunit, I was enjoying the process of uncovering it and how it was dun. Last — and best — of all? It’s bloody Bernice, who is good in this, actually, Mr Judgy Where-Are-My-Quips.

First off, we see Bernice in her element delivering a lecture to laughter and applause. Showing, not telling! Hooray! She’s a guest speaker in need of funds. (“It will be a novel sensation to be solvent for a while.” Wouldn’t you know it, the cushy status quo from Mean Streets hasn’t held up.) As far as she knows she hasn’t been tasked with finding an ancient artefact or even solving a mystery for once, she’s just here to do her job and the plot happens to her while she’s on the way home. I’ve moaned before about the level of contrivance needed to get her into plots sans TARDIS, and it’s nice to make it feel natural once in a while. (Of course it turns out her involvement is not a coincidence, but that reveal didn’t bother me. She manages to avoid being further ensnared, and hence keep her agency, just by getting drunk at the right time. So that’s a character foible becoming critical to the plot. Nice!)

Her (arguable) lack of spark could be attributed to the fact that she’s knackered, and quite simply not interested in cleaning up a mess she didn’t cause. Whatever the reason in-continuity (and outside continuity apparently Bulis wanted to write a very all-ages-accessible Bernice, which in practical terms meant fewer rude jokes, so that’s that mystery solved), the result is a more weathered but I think, not unbelievable Bernice Summerfield. She’s done this sort of thing before, literally: “If you’re volunteering to take charge, be my guest. I’ve played detective before and believe me it’s harder than it looks.” (I think that’s above being called lampshading: if you’re stuck with repetition in a series, say so, as long as you can build on it.) Whether she likes it or not, she fits the role of investigator and hero, and the other characters seem to insist on it.

And why shouldn’t they? I’m probably projecting here – from the book’s general reputation it’s clear I’m quite generous about it too – but I like to think that’s just something characters pick up when they spend enough time with the Doctor. Bernice just seems like the one who’ll sort it out. She fits the mould of responsibility, particularly in a Doctor-ish moment where she consoles the survivors of a fight that, unlike the raiders who just attacked, their own lost lives were given for something that actually mattered. But she’s still not, and can’t be, the Doctor, hence joining in when a gun battle ensues and helping to engineer a fatal crash for some attackers. When we finally get to the accusing parlour scene, it doesn’t feel like a re-run of Ship Of Fools — firstly because this book isn’t so thoroughly arch about it, but mainly because she’s invested in this one, as mucked in as anyone else on this very unfortunate train.

Which is, by the way, another good thing about Tempest. The setting is both claustrophobic, rarely straying beyond the high speed train (which lets us focus on the plot and the characters), and interestingly sci-fi-ish, with the thoroughly inhospitable and weird planet frequently visible (and a frequent hindrance) just beyond the windows. The planet was the original impetus for the book, but I think it’s a smart move to keep it as an incredible thing we only get glimpses of. (You could come back to it and do more with it if you were so inclined, but I’m guessing they didn’t as Bulis didn’t return.) It’s a good way to keep the ho-hum setup from seeming too ho-hum while maintaining the essential “yeah but then what happens” of a murder mystery. That said, don’t panic, there’s plenty of action as well.

The mystery, which I’ve banged on about as being too simple, is at least more complicated in execution, with various red herrings and deliberate nefarious fake-outs. That process is fun, and the character relationships are fleshed out quite interestingly through the investigation. It all serves to get Bernice good and stuck into things, and make it feel as though these things can just happen to her, just as she can sort them out, quite naturally. Tempest isn’t especially bold or showy, but after multiple books where she felt like an afterthought in her own series, I can’t not appreciate that.

7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #110 – Mean Streets by Terrance Dicks

The New Adventures
#8
Mean Streets
By Terrance Dicks

Well, I wanted Bernice to get up to something different for a change, and here we are. There is no archeological dig in Mean Streets. After wittily griping about it in Ghost Devices, Bernice is now actually committing to her work on Dellah: she’s reasonably important and living on book royalties, in no mood for adventures, thank you very much. It takes a visit from Chris Cwej – which unwittingly triggers a Hitchocockian murder plot – to coax her into visiting an old haunt to solve a mystery. No trowel required.

Honestly, I’m not sure if this is a legit character choice for her eight books in or if Terrance just didn’t look at what she had already been doing (pretty consistently) up to now, vis-à-vis quite happily going on adventures, thank you very much. Like how Chris turns up entirely motivated by the death of Roz and determined to honour his friend. Okay, but why now? Has he been trapped in amber since So Vile A Sin? (We know he hasn’t: he’s been in five New Adventures since then.)

The reason for the (arguable) reset is probably the subject matter. You’ll have noticed a theme in some of Terry’s NAs, with the Al Capone era being visited in Blood Harvest and the futuristic crime haven of Megacity appearing in Shakedown. He loves noir and he’s not afraid to sprinkle some cheese on it. Well, it makes sense to dust off Megacity if he wants another go. The prologue is set during Shakedown and Mean Streets is a sequel to that book’s B-plot (which we’re only hearing about now). It’s a tenuous setup, and a fair amount of contrivance is needed so that Chris only has to mention a “Project” and “Megacity” in earshot to get Bernice involved, but it brings us back to prose like “The place was so corrupt that everyone had something to hide.” Ahhh: you can hear that boozy jazz already.

All of which is fair enough if you love that sort of thing. Unfortunately I have a pretty low tolerance for it. (Half of two novels was plenty, thanks.) More significantly, it’s not as if Mean Streets adds anything to the realm of cheesy noir that Terrance Dicks – not to mention the stuff he’s riffing on – hasn’t already done. (Literally, when it comes to sending our heroes undercover as criminals. See Blood Harvest.) He even makes efforts to rein in the futuristic elements that would otherwise make this different from yer average Raymond Chandler pisstake. Sure, there are aliens everywhere and there’s a sci-fi plot, but then Bernice goes shopping (in Megacity, on another planet, in the future) at a still thriving branch of Nieman-Marcus. One of the many crime syndicates in Megacity is noted for having “clung to the old Mafia terminology.” (Of course it has.) A resident of Megacity still refers to drugging people as a “Mickey Finn.” It’s all just a bit too comfortably Earth-like. We get it, Megacity is like old Earth Chicago. It doesn’t have to be old Earth Chicago, albeit with hovercars.

Take Garshak. He was an interesting character in Shakedown: an Ogron who thanks to genetic modification is not only not a brute but a genius. That’s basically Rocket Raccoon! Loads you could do with that! Last time he was an amusingly high cultured police captain in a lawless town; this time, long since out of the job, he’s a private eye. Okay, fair enough. But he’s only a private eye because he came across some old Earth pop culture and thought, why not. Really? He can’t arrive at that idea without some nudge-wink connection to the materials Terry based this on? It makes him consciously part of the pastiche; worse, now he’s like an idea in search of a personality. Still, it gets us to chapters written in first person as Garshak investigates, but they’re not really elevated by the fact that he’s an Ogron with a high IQ and not Humphrey Bogart. The only really notable thing about him is that he tends to win all his fights. I’m not sure that’s more interesting, especially after a while.

It’s not as if I spent the book rolling my eyes and soldiering on. After all, it’s Terrance Dicks, so the prose clicks along like a metronome. But this is not his sparkling best. Terry’s famously concise powers of description are a little lacking here: Chris is “big”; Bernice is “medium-sized” (!); Roz, who only appears in the prologue but is mentioned a lot, is “dark” – several times on a page at one point. I know he’s just being expedient but after a while that last one starts to feel a bit, really? That’s her defining feature, if you had to pick one out of a hat, on an alien planet full of random animal-shaped whatevers? (And about them: there is a crime boss called Lucifer who happens to be a tall, horned chap with wings and a tail. His species is “Demoniac”; apparently the name came from lazy Earth people and it stuck. Lampshading the obviousness of an idea doesn’t elevate it above obviousness.)

Bernice doesn’t come out of this brilliantly. I’ve got my issues with the setup – I think you could have her snap back to academia after those earlier books but this feels more like introducing a fake norm – but through the rest of the book, she doesn’t quite click like she usually does. She’s often a step behind Chris, such as not being able to guess how criminals at large could get to you in prison; worse, when they’re both posing as crime lords and a guy arrives who previously met Chris as an Adjudicator, Bernice says “Why does it matter if he knows who you are?” Gee, maybe because it would blow his cover? She normally has more imagination than that.

She at least enjoys herself posing as the “Dragon Lady,” complete with killer laser-lipstick, but plot-wise the whole “blend in” schtick is a bit of a dead end, and only serves to delay the meaning of the “Project” until the last fifth of the book – which does little to keep up the stakes earlier on. In terms of usefulness, she does get to storm into the proverbial accusing parlour at the end, but not because she has a particular stake in this: it’s because “as an academic, she was used to lecturing people.” Oh. (You would think Chris would want that job since it’s his quest, but I should probably just shut up and be grateful when Bernice has something to do.)

Her dialogue seems a little muted as well, which is a pity as it’s often the best thing about her, but that’s a common malaise in Mean Streets. Funny lines are all too often punctuated with exclamation marks, making characters sound like they’re in the Famous Five. It seems rather gauche for Bernice my-middle-name-might-as-well-be-Sarcasm Summerfield. It’s positively bizarre when Garshak does it.

I’ve done almost nothing but complain about Mean Streets, but I didn’t hate it. It’s as cheerily readable as anything by Terry, and the whole pastiche bit will be some folks’ bread and butter. I just found the story itself so thunderingly uninteresting and irrelevant to Benny that all I’m left with for a review is the ways in which it didn’t take advantage of this range of books so much as force them into a comfortable shape that the author likes.

5/10