#32
Falls The Shadow
By Daniel O'Mahony
Time for one of those New Adventures I knew nothing about beforehand. I look forward to those: no reviews on my radar, no expectations, anything could happen. But, once again, there's a reason I never came across this one on my research rounds.
And some of the book’s ideas are
intriguing, though as it often the case, more so in theory. That other realm is “interstitial time”,
which is never really explained; it’s something to do with how time travel
causes other realities to wink out of being, and the book is what happens when
that comes back to bite you. In
practice: beings from outside time are manipulating people, who are themselves
composites of might-have-beens from other timelines. (One of them is from a timeline where we’re
all giant insects!) Needless to say,
these people are varying degrees of nuts, which can become monotonous. Still, you can visit interstitial time via a
wardrobe, which is pleasantly wacky and TARDIS-esque. The house itself can shift and grow seemingly
at random, which is a neat idea and would look great in a film, though it
really doesn’t achieve very much here. We
also visit a mysterious city/alt-universe called Cathedral that’s ruled by the
grey guy and is linked to the house, which is pretty neat. It’s not a very interesting place to visit,
but it was a nice break from the house.
The grey guy is about as successful as South Park's Kenny for most of
it, which makes him oddly comical to behold, and we never really know what he is, but there's definitely something
interesting there. I could live to regret it, but... I think I'd want to read
about him again.
Alas, we’ve been down this road
before: ideas are great, actually they're essential, but they’re not the whole show. Put them to one side and Falls The Shadow doesn’t have much story to tell. Our heroes bumble around a madhouse where troubled people come and go. The sadistic and all-powerful villains, Gabriel
and Tanith, manipulate events and make bad things happen just for
the hell of it. Realities bump into each other.
We may delve into the psyches and histories of the house’s inhabitants
at intervals, but they’re all disposed of with varying degrees of shrug. A lot of it is disposable and forgettable;
there were many moments where the remaining pages seemed to expand ad infinitum,
like the corridors of the house. At 356
pages (uh oh, he’s counting), it’s morbidly long.
But the writing is mostly... sort of
good, if I’m honest, particularly the characterisation. Bernice is a pleasure, which I refuse to take
for granted. Such a relentlessly witty character could easily become
nauseating. (There’s a bit where the
Doctor notes “‘We’d be worse off without
your sense of humour, Benny.’” Not half.) Ace seems fleshed-out (oo-er
– actually, she remains fully clothed!), the narrative adopting her mannerisms
with sweary ease. She’s a lot more
believable without the artificial “Toe-rag!”s and “Bilge-breath!”s; it’s
surprising what a difference actual
swearing makes, while her natural violence takes on a very human fury near
the end. I prefer that to Ace The Cold
Soldier. With Benny and Ace, Daniel
O’Mahony has a natty gift for shifting into the second person for a character’s
inner thoughts, something he rather oddly drops later on. I liked it while it lasted. It certainly
helps with the occasionally cartoonish Ace.
Less good is his Doctor. There’s a portion of the story where it
appears one of his friends has died (funny, this also happened in Strange
England), and he becomes defeatist and melancholy because it’s seemingly the
past repeating itself. Fair enough,
right? Except he’s out of sorts from the moment he first appears. The TARDIS is malfunctioning (trope!), hence
its arrival in the house, and the Doctor becomes visibly weakened. “‘Ace,
I’m sorry if I’ve seemed a bit brusque,’ the Doctor said softly, close to her
ear. ‘It’s just I’m very worried about
the TARDIS.’” It’s not like him to
be so demonstrative, or so easily shaken. The reader can’t be the only one to
think “Here we go again” at the TARDIS breaking down, so why the doom and gloom? Then things go from not-great to bad when,
after allowing Bernice to wander off by herself (!), the Doctor and Ace decide to
search an enormous and likely dangerous house from opposite ends! Surprise, they wind up in separate baskets of
trouble. And near the end he goes a bit mad
and hides in the TARDIS. What the heck
is up with him? (Another serendipitous
own goal: “Ace had gone through patches
of depression in the past, but she’d been a kid and she’d grown out of it. Watching a grown man endure the same was
embarrassing.” Yup.)
It’s hard not to suspect “We all
go a little mad sometimes” is the excuse for a lot of this, and as bracing
as that might be (at least the first time – which this isn't), it’s no replacement for
real motivation. Certainly it’s the best Gabriel
and Tanith can come up with: pointless, proud sadists, they introduce an
assassin and a pissed-off bug person into the mix just to liven things up, torturing and killing just to see what it feels like. You can be as clever and meta as you like,
and Falls The Shadow is occasionally
both, but it’s hard to come up with compelling motives, and sadism is a lame
replacement. The book does eventually
try to make sense of them beyond that, but said effort is not only muddled by
all that universe-bothering weirdness that comes as standard now (they want to
do what with the universe?), it’s
also just too late to take either of them seriously as people who want something.
A first-time novelist, O’Mahony’s
prose dips between careful, deliberate oddness (like much of the character
introspection, and a mad character conversing with an icon around another’s
neck) and sheer waffle. There’s a
tendency, especially near the start, to over-describe the hell out of things:
“He was grey. Grey coat over a grey shirt and
trousers. Grey shoes with loosely tied
grey laces that never came undone. His hat:
casual, wide-brimmed, grey. Even his
skin: paper-thin, cold and bloodless, tinged grey by the cold daylight. His hair, though, was white, but streaked
with lines of pure black. Almost grey.” So… he’s grey, then?
“It was large, grey and ugly. It
squatted in the corner of the room daring anyone to come near it. It was, simply, a wardrobe.” How is that “simply”? And later that paragraph: “Wardrobe was too weak a term for the sombre
artefact. It was a sarcophagus.” So it wasn’t
simply a wardrobe, then?
It can affect the dialogue, too:
“‘You’re mad,’ she said simply. There was no point in adding anything
else. Mad said it all.” Well yes, it did, two sentences ago! And occasionally characters will ponder
things in a circle. The first line of
the book is “Qxeleq would have screamed,
had she a mouth,” and then, near the end of the Prologue, “Qxeleq tried to scream. She discovered that she no longer had a mouth.” What, again?
I know this sort of thing is picky. Perhaps I wouldn't be stuck on it if I was swept
along by the story.
O’Mahony is skilled enough
elsewhere for one to suspect this is all carefully constructed. I can imagine
an editor not knowing where, or even if to start, as this guy seems to know what he’s
on about even if it’s a opaque to us.
But there still must come a point where a story is either moving or it
isn’t, and for great slabs of Falls The
Shadow, that’s simply a negative.
What enjoyment can you derive
from it? Well, there are the ideas, but
that’s almost a back-handed insult, since I feel like there must be a more
compelling story to be told about worlds that never got a chance to exist,
blaming the Doctor for leaving his TARDIS-shaped footprint where they
could have been. There’s the
characterisation, which works very well indeed sometimes. The supporting characters wobble in and out of the
narrative, always with the clever-clever air of “Ah yes, I meant to do that,”
which isn’t a substitute for giving a hoot about them, or in some cases,
telling them apart. There’s some neat-o
imagery, but file that next to the ideas.
The prose is promising, but all told, it would work better if there was less of
it.
I went into it with an open mind
and I didn’t exactly hate it. Unless you're hell-bent on reading absolutely every one of these things, however, it's one to skip.
4/10
