#53
Return Of The Living Dad
By Kate Orman
NB: I’ve owned Return Of The Living Dad for at least twenty years (and never read it, etc. etc.). I guess it always seemed like a strange place to jump on board, with even the title shouting “Ongoing Plot Ahoy!”, so I didn’t. Better late than never. This is the last of my Who Books I Own But Mysteriously Haven’t Read: Virgin Edition, but don’t panic, I’ve got a few BBC ones that still fit the bill…
She’s baaaaaaaaaaaack! As in Bernice, obviously, though a returning Kate Orman is also cause for a little happiness boogie. There’s been a good-book drought since Happy Endings, for me at least, and I could do with a pick-me-up. What’s that you say? A solid lump of character development for
Bernice? That will do nicely, thank you.
Working at an archaeological dig
with Jason, Bernice randomly meets someone who knew her father. Suddenly there’s a chance to find out what
really happened at the fateful battle that left Isaac Summerfield branded a
coward. Bernice contacts the Doctor to
take her back for a look. This isn’t her
first rodeo, so she knows she’s not allowed to interfere: it will be enough to know.
Of course it doesn’t go as
planned, and in a style that may be permanent following the earlier, whip-cracking
SLEEPY, Orman has it going almost
immediately. Bernice meets her father’s
old colleague three pages in. She meets
her dad (spoiler alert?) on Page 28.
Five pages later, the entire landscape of the story transforms on the
spot. Return Of The Living Dad is another absolute belter from Orman, as full of
good ideas as the denouement of a Paul Cornell novel and arguably as high on
sugar. In all honesty the approach gives
up mixed rewards, but whatever else happens, it may not be possible to be bored reading a Kate Orman book.
Plot-wise, this isn’t
SLEEPY. Return is about character
work (to a point), so we get the same kinetic whoosh in a story that prizes stillness, smallness, focus. The vast majority of it is set in a small
English town where Bernice figures out her relationship with a man who went
missing. Before that, the Doctor, Chris
and Roz are having a quiet time in Sydney.
The Doctor works in a hospice, trying to do some good on a different
scale. Roz questions his motives, but I
think the Doctor is, at this point in the New Adventures, trying to be a better
person. The sequence seeds the idea of
the future and how you can shape it, whether or not you’re around to see
it. “‘When you phoned,’ said Chris, ‘you said there was someone you wanted us
to meet.’ ‘There was,’ sighed the
Doctor. ‘There was.’” Later there are visions of the future for
most of the cast – including a premonition of the Seventh Doctor’s lonely,
purposeless death – and fear for the future is ultimately what drives the plot. It’s an interesting direction for a story
literally about catching up with the past.
I love a story that focuses on
what’s important, and there are loads of rich, telling moments in this
one. Bernice tries to juggle her father,
Jason and the Doctor, naturally expecting them not to get along and quietly
believing they’ll abandon her. Her
feelings about the Doctor follow on nicely from Continuity Errors – as does the
surprisingly apt “Fixing history used to
be my job”. When he seems to have
hyperthermia, Bernice immediately snuggles up shirtless to give him some body
warmth. Apart from the inevitable Jason
remark afterwards, this gives us: “Benny
burst into tears. ‘I can’t think of
anything clever to say,’ she whispered.
‘Please don’t die.’” It’s so
refreshing to have a character not necessarily like the way the Doctor operates, but understand why he does that
and know he’s trying to be better. She
loves him with a lot less sturm und drang than it took to get Ace to the same
place. And he feels the same, openly
telling her he misses her and how nice this is, and in the first place being so
quick to say yes to this trip through time.
There’s a running thread of his not understanding why humans do things
like reunite with an estranged father, and I’m not sure it’s entirely justified
– he does spend a lot of time around us, just sayin’ – but it’s all worth it for the glorious awkwardness of their
parting: “The Doctor looked at his feet,
looked up at Benny, hesitated, folded his arms, unfolded them and put his hands
in his pockets, looked up at the sky, took his hands back out of his pockets,
stepped through the speckles of light and leant up and kissed Benny on the
cheek. She looked at him in
astonishment, breaking into a beautiful smile.
And vanished.”
Meanwhile, Chris and Roz fumble
through a growing attraction, and worry about whether any kind of relationship
could work with the Doctor in their lives – out of practicality rather than
bitterness. Their respective
personalities have loads of room to work in lovely passages like: “‘I had this dream,’ said Chris. I don’t think I wanna hear this, said Roz’s
expression”, and “‘We’re not in love,
are we?’ Chris murmured. ‘No,’ said Roz.
‘You can keep nibbling on my neck if you want, though.’” (Bonus points for “You love everybody ... You fall in love on every planet we visit.” Bang to bloody rights, Squire Cwej.) It’s not exactly their story, but there’s a
real arc going on between them, in between all the other stuff, and it’s
totally plausible to push them in this direction.
When it comes to Isaac
Summerfield the book is up against expectations. Make him too nice and it’s boring, make him a
disappointment and it’s obvious. I don’t
think it’s too great a spoiler to say that we get a little from both columns, but
the emphasis is mostly on his not being the coward he’s painted as. There is a slightly worthy air to The
Admiral, as he’s generally called, as well as a stiffness and a general
foreknowledge that make his scenes with Bernice pretty one-sided emotionally. It’s still rewarding to read, but there are
so many secondary characters buzzing around him, and he’s just so busy that the book never approaches the
“exceptionally dull slice-of-life novel”
Bernice at one point wishes it was. Plot-wise
it’s an intriguing setup: arriving twenty years prior to the TARDIS, Isaac and
his crew use the town of Little Caldwell as a base / haven for aliens and
castaways, all of them displaced by UNIT and sundry invasions. They mop up the Doctor’s leftovers, in other
words, sending aliens home or otherwise helping them out. It’s another clever, albeit very fannish
bolt-on in the same vein as the Glasshouse.
And if you like fannish ideas, hoo boy.
We’ve got aliens aplenty, running
the gamut from cheeky mentions to full-blown characters. Ogrons, Ogri, Chameleons, a Vardan, a Sea
Devil, a Navarino (the Delta And The Bannerman blobs – I had to look them up), a
bit of an Auton, Daleks by proxy – so that’s another book giving a jolly “Do
your worst!” V-sign to the Nation Estate.
Speaking of pepperpots, one of their early televised stories is hugely
vital to the plot. (You can probably guess
which one.) So is the plot of an
otherwise unconnected Tom Baker story. The
Doctor is what indirectly triggers Isaac’s operation in the first place, and
there is some in-universe nerddom with Joel, a time-displaced lad who discusses
the Doctor and his antics online, gently ribbing real Who fans and getting in there way before LINDA. (“They
figure [the Doctor]’s a code name, and they’re having this big flame war about
whether he could ever be a woman. Same
old debates.” Too sodding true.)
The longer it goes on, the nearer
it gets to fanwank. That’s not
necessarily a bad thing depending on how well you execute it: I was swept up enough
in Happy Endings that I didn’t mind the book-length love letter, and Return Of The Living Dad very much
feels like it’s showing up to the same party, giddy to unload its own car boot full
of references. The setting is eerily
similar to Cornell’s (and to several of his other books – he loves a little
village) and there’s a shared enthusiasm for Virgin canon, which is pretty much
my complaint Kryptonite. There are aliens from First Frontier,
somebody mentions a Fortean Flicker, traumatic events from several books are remembered
in the form of scars, and there’s even a loose end tied up from bloomin’ Witch Mark! (I had heard about that one in
advance, but it still blind-sided me.
I’ll bet Cornell wish he ticked that off.) At one point somebody mentions Isis, and I
honestly thought the Timewyrm would rock up too.
Particular attention is paid to
Orman’s The Left-Handed Hummingbird, and one of its settings is reused. I had largely forgotten the segment where the
Doctor was tortured by Hamlet Macbeth, and going back to my review the 1968
portion of Hummingbird didn’t do a lot for me at the time. Literally returning to the scene of the crime
is a good enough reason to dredge it up again, although there is a general
feeling of “Well, why haven’t you been thinking about The Left-Handed
Hummingbird all along?” C19 and the like
(ticking off the Missing Adventures and Who Killed Kennedy) are important here,
with the xenophobic Woodworth forming a paranoid alternative to Isaac’s
commune. The curse of Hummingbird
strikes again, however, as Woodworth’s character becomes more shouty and less
interesting (also dropping the interesting relationship with the Doctor en route),
and this portion of the story is ultimately something of a red herring anyway. I suspect that in time it’ll slip my mind in
favour of other, more colourful bits on offer.
But gosh, there are a lot of
bits. Isaac’s crew includes aliens who
wear holographic disguises and sometimes use different names; there’s a women’s
group camped nearby; an active weapons facility as well; the old house from
Hummingbird, with attendant morally dubious staff; various sinister figures
hovering around with their own agendas; the TARDIS crew, plus Benny and Jason;
plus a ghost. The sections are kept
short and kinetic, and the writing often makes very amusing light of its own
pace – Chapter 5, in its entirety, reads: “And
they landed in December, outside a post office.” As well as the title, there are jolly puns to
be found in chapter headings, my favourite being Chris Chris, Bang Bang. The writing is thoughtful and often
hilarious, what with it being a Bernice book and everything. So much good stuff, like “Believe it or not, this is the source of the
transponder signal.’ ‘The Tisiphone,
said Benny, ‘is conspicuous by its absence.” / “[The Doctor] looked ordinary until your invasion
fleet unexpectedly dropped into the sun.”
/ “Most planets look like quarries. Earth is precious.” / The
Doctor describing his adventures: “Hours
of tedium followed by moments of sheer terror.” / A
returning alien on seeing the Doctor: “One
six-foot, fur-covered humanoid ran away waving its three arms and yelling, and
drove off in its Mini.” All that and
Graeme, the friendly lump of Auton shaped like a spatula, conspire to make Return Of The Living Dad almost
aggressively loveable.
I’m not sure if I love it, exactly. The setting is my bread and butter: small
town, creepy goings on, character interaction high on the agenda, “monsters”
shown in a more sympathetic, even heroic light.
It has that kinetic excitement that is becoming one of Orman’s
trademarks, along with well-observed character writing. It takes an “important” event in the New
Adventures canon and takes the pressure off, adding a casual ease to the
reunion that forces your expectations to reboot. It’s excellent in many ways, but the central
sugar rush makes some of the supporting cast a little difficult to hear above
the din, and I’m still umming and ahhing about the plot’s reliance on
established canon. It would be an
interesting one to read again, knowing what to expect, and it’s certainly rewarding
enough to look forward to a second time. Okay,
so gift horse, mouth – caveats aside it’s a sweet and fun book, and it was worth
the wait.
7/10
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