#58
Eternity Weeps
By Jim Mortimore
First-person Bernice? Shut up and
take my money. Chopping back and forth with first-person Jason? I could be
persuaded to read it, I suppose. By Jim Mortimore? Heck, he’s always great
value. Let’s see, a Bernice and Jason story by Jim Mortimore... why does that
strike me as an odd prospect?
Ah yes. Happy Endings, and Sir
Not Appearing In This Chapter – if memory serves, because he wasn’t too keen on
the Bernice and Jason relationship. Even if you didn’t know, you can probably
guess where this is going.
It makes a kind of sense to hand
their breakup to one of their critics. And it makes sense to break them up,
especially if you’re going to write a series of solo Bernice novels which were
peeking over the horizon at this point. Even without those the relationship has
been a hard sell, frogmarching Bernice and Jason through a romance in Death And Diplomacy to their wedding in the next book, and on to relative retirement away
from scrutiny. We got a little camaraderie in Return Of The Living Dad and a
(now rather apocryphal) slice of domestic normalcy in So Vile A Sin, but of
substance the twosome had little. There hasn’t been time; there’s about as much
evidence. The only real question is, how was this ever supposed to work?
We know Bernice back to front. We
know Jason was hurt by his dad and shags about, 50% of which is just a less charming
version of Chris. Mortimore giving him half a book to speak for himself is an
absolute boon but, whether by accident or design, Jason still can’t escape the
binary stars of his family abuse and wandering libido. So it’s not really
revelatory to say his marriage is in trouble because he can’t keep his eyes off
other women, or that his actions are driven by the trauma of his past, but
these are the main Jason lessons I took from Eternity Weeps. That and he means well, as evidenced by a
disastrous attempt to alter the past and a moment when he realises he loves his
wife because she’s in mortal peril. The big, uh, softie?
Bernice naturally comes out of
this better as we know her better, but she starts the book furious and upset
and her mood doesn’t really improve. The funk is quite justified, what with the
almost constant procession of killings that escalate into a grisly global
pandemic. I remember thinking Damaged Goods was senselessly over the top with
its kill count. Bless! There is a thrilling and horrifying moment here when
Bernice, moments from certain death, escapes only by plunging a paintbrush
through her attacker’s eye. This is followed by a reaction of, firstly, wow,
and then thank goodness THAT’s over. Oh, honey.
For a while it’s quite jaunty,
all things considered: it starts more or less as a travelogue with an odd
fixation on warm cans of Pepsi. An expedition to Turkey in search of Noah’s Ark
is manna for Benny, who is smarting from an apparently disastrous honeymoon. (I
am struggling to square the dates with other books.) Jason arrives, unwelcome,
and coincidentally the expedition is split in two to search different
mountains. By this point the narrative has already made clear that most of the
(numerous) archaeologists will not be coming back, and I think I responded to
this by not getting attached. There are two psychotic military commanders, one
to attack each group, believing that the Ark is actually a repository of
uranium. The jumps from Bernice to Jason are like frying pan and fire.
It’s around here you start to
notice the Doctor’s absence. There’s a practical purpose to this, with Eternity Weeps being a backdoor pilot
for the Benny New Adventures. And it’s functionally a good one, showing that
you can tell a compelling story without him, or without much of him. Bernice is
certainly strong enough to shoulder a book. But bad things happen in the
Doctor’s absence. Good grief, do they ever.
If I seem a little punch drunk
about it, well, that’s Eternity Weeps.
The pace of this thing is furious and most of the things happening very fast
are horrible. Occasionally, bizarrely, they are also light-hearted. Jason’s
aforementioned trip through time is to see the Cthalctose, an ancient
sea-dwelling race who scratch a little of Mortimore’s world-building itch. (And
are responsible for the whole mess.) While Jason is in their past, pleading
with them not to doom Earth in his present, the tone becomes rather jaunty. The
Astronomer Royal is a grand, pompous figure who mistakes Jason for a fan, then
flies into a rage at the thought of his plagiarising the work. (Think the
Maitre’d in The Crystal Bucephalus, or anyone from a Gareth Roberts book.)
Jason promptly spends a thousand years incarcerated and semi-aware as the race
considers methods of avoiding extinction, only to comically end up back at the
Earthy-doomy one anyway. All of this quite enjoyably silly stuff happens after
the many murders in Turkey and the outbreak of Agent Yellow, which causes
bodily fluids to turn to acid. The whole time travelling jaunt is a bit of a
side-note and it’s over quick smart. Huh? It’s one thing to be all but hurled
through a story by your ankles – which believe me, is still preferable to
struggling to turn the pages – but it’s another to find yourself constantly
going, hang on, sorry, what?
And what better reaction to the
return of Liz Shaw. How do I not spoil what happens here? Typical of the book’s
whirligig pace, Liz is unexpectedly found by Bernice working on an alien
installation on the moon. She’s working with Silurians, which is a nice nod to
Blood Heat and also, harmlessly and neatly, The Scales Of Injustice. Only then
she catches Agent Yellow. And inadvertently helps spread it on Earth. And then
proceeds to die, slowly and agonisingly, after what looks like a reprieve.
(Nope, she dead; afterwards the site is nuked.) Jason’s trip back is logically
doomed from the outset, but there’s still something cruel about introducing a
potential reset after such a horrible, random tragedy. And what does it add?
She’s not in the book long enough (30 pages on the dot) for it to make an
emotional difference, although in the end, her knowledge helps. Presumably it’s
to signify that all bets are off, but didn’t the random executions in Turkey
(and Bernice’s revenge ala paintbrush) already make that clear?
The Doctor is so lite that he
never reacts to her loss. After two books (one post-written) poignantly facing
the Doctor’s grief, to completely hopscotch over the brutal and surprising
death of a friend seems bizarre. The Doctor is just his usual cheerful, busy
self on the periphery, at best so distracted by the scale of danger that he
hasn’t time to notice. (To be fair, a tenth of Earth’s population does die as
well. A gay old time, is this one.) And it’s wrong. Sorry. I’m not normally one
to argue with author intent or label things canon and not canon, and obviously
this is just my experience and you’re welcome to your own. But, up with this I
will not put. Liz didn’t deserve this abrupt, busy death or the Doctor’s lack
of a reaction to it. Not canon, get in the bin.
(Seriously, what is with the
Virgin books and old companions? First Dodo and now this? Plus Mel hating the
Doctor in Head Games, and Peri venting at him in Bad Therapy. What next? Is
Leela going to make a surprise novel appearance and commit seppuku?)
The book’s horrors might not seem
so arbitrary if the pace wasn’t such a flighty rampage. I don’t know why it’s
written that way. It’s tempting to think the removal of the license was an
incentive, but that doesn’t explain the odd, almost Russell T Davies-esque
juxtaposition of brutality and whimsy here. Perhaps making it first person(s)
naturally gave it an anecdotal air. I’m not saying I’d rather Eternity Weeps was even more
miseryfying – both narrators are already pissed off for most of it – but when millions
of people get killed more or less off-screen, and Bernice and Jason’s divorce
gets quickly summarised in the epilogue with only one of their input, it starts
to feel like there should simply be more book to cover it all.
In world building terms, the end
of the relationship is more important than the appalling body count – which is
so high, you’d think the Doctor would know about it from history books. But the
break up still seems a little... easy. They’re already fighting and separated when we
get here. They spend swathes of the book apart, not talking. Bernice’s thoughts
on Jason are constantly, wearyingly negative (“Why the hell had I married this
cretin anyway?”) and Jason spends most of his time trying to justify other
women being objectively more attractive and interesting to him than Bernice
("Sex with Bernice was boring"), until he just flips the other way.
It’s a bit like shooting fish in a barrel to show no apparent evidence of
attraction or love, then treat the divorce as inevitable. Based on the evidence,
of course it is, but presumably there was more to them or they wouldn’t have
got married? I don’t pretend to understand or even like the relationship as
it’s been handled so far, and god knows what I’d do if it were me, but the
approach here smacks of unfairness. That said, Jason’s been in several books
and the prospect of not seeing him again is fine by me. So mission
accomplished, I guess.
The Doctor is deliberately kept
in the background, but – apart from being so busy he can’t grieve, which don’t
even get me started DAMN IT I’M MAD AGAIN – he’s delightful. There’s his
memorable introduction, when he stares danger down in a helicopter; there’s his
strange knack for pottering in and out of rooms without disturbing things that
speaks to the odd intangibility of the Doctor that often crops up in Mortimore’s
books; and there’s the whimsical rescue attempt where he enlarges the TARDIS to
fit a crashing helicopter inside. Out of context, he’s great – it’s just the
violently odd tone mix I don’t care for. (I’m negotiable when he gets lines as
good as “‘But paradoxes are impossible.’ ‘I prefer to use the word
embarrassing.’”) Chris seems to have relapsed a little on the closure he got in
Bad Therapy, which may be down to authors not comparing notes: multiple times
he calls people Roz, almost to the point of annoying everyone else. But good prose
clings to Bernice like a lovely hug, and as per, her gallows humour is tinged
with humanity. See the bit where she deliberately doesn’t get on the Doctor’s
helicopter because a young man has been left behind. He’s dead, she quickly
realises, but there’s no apparent regret in going back for him. That said, the
marital moaning gets a little much even for her.
It sounds like I spent most of Eternity Weeps absolutely raging, but
that’s not right. It’s a compelling and fast read, which simply isn’t the case
when you hate a book. As ever with Mortimore, it’s colourfully and occasionally
beautifully written, and stuffed with ideas. It’s just that, whether he meant
to go that way or whether it was mandated, there isn’t time to justify their
impact, so it all feels a little disposable. Then again, sometimes life is just
one damn thing after another, and you could argue this one is true to that.
6/10
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