#54
The Death of Art
By Simon Bucher-Jones
Well this is a fine Welcome
Back. Not that I’ve only just read The Death Of Art, of course: I started
it months ago, then mysteriously ran out of steam. Later I started again in case I’d forgotten
any of it, and... strangely stopped again.
Huh. Life intervened for a few
months until I finally decided to stick the landing on my third go, or perish
trying. In all fairness, it could just be a coincidence that I
struggled to finish it several times?
Sigh. Noooope.
The Death Of Art is another of
those first-time-author books that aren’t afraid to get weird, and aren’t too
bothered about the people reading the result.
There’s a certain spectrum for these which runs from “fires random words
for shock value” to “seems to know what they’re doing even if we don’t,” and
Simon Bucher-Jones lands at the smarter end.
I mean that: there’s promise here, and good ideas. (Plural makes a difference.) But unavoidably there are sections that read
like a fuse box, and the overall thing just sits there bubbling instead of
actually moving. And oh, it is work.
Some of this I’d point to the
editors at Virgin, who surely could have cracked the whip a bit more. Yes it’s interesting, but will anyone enjoy
it? Will anyone who isn’t the author
understand it? Fancy, idea-driven, heavily-stylised,
showy-offy prose is all well and good (okay, I mostly hate it) but there’s also
a lot to be said for knowing what the hell is going on.
So about the plot. (I almost had to Google it.) Following a brief cameo from Ace (hi and
bye!), the TARDIS crashes (again) in France circa 1897. This is after an odd bit about Charles
Dickens some time earlier, which had something to do with a monstrous possessed
doll house that sure sounds like a badass setting for a Doctor Who story. On
arrival, the TARDIS promptly begins morphing internally into a replica of
France. The Doctor, Chris and Roz go
investigating because they believe a proliferation of psychic powers will cause
a disaster in time, which in turn is what summoned them here. If you’ve read my reviews post-Original Sin,
you’ll know I love it when these three are on the case.
Roz befriends a psychically
talented American; Chris joins the local gendarmes; the Doctor tries to get
himself committed to an insane asylum with a surprising lack of success. All fun scenarios, by the way. Roz’s eye-rolling interaction with the
impressionable Daniel is fun, if tragically short-lived; Chris’s easy
application of his talents to 1897 police-work is brilliant (his effortless
memory skills in particular); and the Doctor stuff… eh, that doesn’t come to
much. I think we get one amusing scene
involving grapes, but that’s it.
Boo. More importantly we have the
Family and the Brotherhood, warring (?) factions who can transform themselves
as well as swap bodies. There’s a
seriously cool bit where one character is run over by a horse and carriage, and
his consciousness leaps straight into the cab driver who murdered him. On the flipside, some characters body-swap to
the point where I don’t know who they are any more. And some of them just never distinguish themselves in the first place. When the
last act rolls around it’s probably quite dramatic, but it would be more so if
I wasn’t still playing catch-up.
In amongst all this (or between
it, under it, who knows etc.) are the Quoth.
They are… something, and they are doing… something. A direct explanation arrives literally three
pages before the book is over, but suffice to say, the Quoth are a really cool
idea. Put through a mangler. Then translated into Japanese. And back again. And finally juggled over an open bin. Seriously, who is reading the Quoth bits for
fun? Were you retaining any information
at the end of each paragraph? No
fibbing. The Death of Art isn’t the first New Adventure to unload random
jargon on us, and at least it’s not as sustained as the fever dreams of Time’s Crucible or Strange England, but I still tuned out every time the Quoth heaved into
view. And every time the book dipped
into poetry, which I admit is purely a pet hate. (Yes, I know I’m
a philistine.)
The writing in this is,
charitably, all over the place. For
every paragraph rambling on about the Quoth and their pattern-lifetimes, there’s
a sentence like: “It was starting to look
as if she would not always have Paris”, or “Mirakle’s blonde receptionist was not enjoying her introduction to the
Roz Forrester closet experience”.
For every bit that takes the plot’s transmogrifications a little too far
and just generates random words at us, there’s something pithy like: “For once in his lives, he needed to
sleep. Besides, it was the quickest way
he knew to make the phone ring, aside from getting into the bath”, or “There was an indescribable noise that was not
like TARDIS materialisation. That was
because the TARDIS was not materialising.
Then there was a noise like everyone in the TARDIS screaming. That was because they were.” And Bucher-Jones has a real knack for ending
his paragraphs or chapters with a shock, like “Mon Dieu. This future, then, you
have come to prevent it?” The Doctor
smiled. “No, to make certain of it”,
or “As he turned he saw the first of the
dolls crawling towards him.” Hell
yeah! Conversely, The Death of Art indulges in one of my biggest pet hates in
literature: frequent, short sections. I
can hardly think of anything more annoying than settling down to a scene and then
being somewhere else already, sometimes up to five or six times across over two
open pages. Mate, it’s a novel. Relax.
We’re invested. There’s a cup of
tea next to us. We can stand to read
about something for more than a page without reaching for the TV remote. (Unless it’s the Quoth. DEAR GOD, WHAT ELSE IS ON.) All this kind of fidgety nonsense does is
remind me regularly that I could stop reading.
It’s frustrating, because it
really feels like a good idea is in here, and a good writer is working on it,
and just… stuff got in the way. You could pare down the Family and the
Brotherhood, make it clearer who’s doing what.
You could stick with the characters we get attached to, like
Daniel. You could sprinkle some plot
developments earlier in the story, or just plain kick it up the arse a bit
sooner. For all the ballyhoo about
Psi-Powers arc, you could make more of actual psychic powers in this, since the
plot is really more focused on physical transformation. You could edit the Quoth to within a quark of
their lives, so those bits actually say something in human terms rather than
halting whatever momentum you’ve got going.
Certainly you could give the Doctor more to do, and treat Roz a little
better – she’s forcibly disrobed at least twice, in that New-Adventures-at-their-sleaziest
way. Chris has a few solid laughs
pretending to be the Doctor, which makes good use of Cold Fusion, but the
book’s rampant “AND THEN THIS HAPPENED, THEN THAT HAPPENED” cutting makes it
just some more noise in the mix. Ace
impinges cleverly on the story a little more later on, thanks to a link back to
Christmas On A Rational Planet – but that’s not the happiest link for me, as
that was another book I struggled with.
I was reminded of it often.
Another one joins the “Huh?” club.
The Death of Art isn’t a complete wash-out, but it is what it is:
slow, practically static for the most part, waking up long enough to be
thoroughly unpleasant or unexpectedly witty.
Poor Daniel does not wake up in the Epilogue to realise it was all an
absinthe nightmare, but you might.
4/10
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