Tuesday 21 January 2020

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #82 – Return Of The Living Dad by Kate Orman

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#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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