#1
Oh No It Isn't!
By Paul Cornell
NB: This isn't a Doctor Who book obviously, so it's weird to review it (and the series) under that banner. But it's the world of Doctor Who and stars characters from it; in a sense this is the story continuing. So, meh, I'll review them under the "Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels" label. I'm sure it won't break the universe.
Well I asked for it and here it
is: Bernice, the whole Bernice and nothing but Bernice. Under the circumstances Virgin
couldn’t have hoped for a better protagonist.
That said, it’s a weird prospect.
What are these books going to be? What standard do you hold them to? What is
the proverbial Good Bernice Summerfield story? It’s too early to tell; maybe just
don’t worry about it. Oh No It Isn’t!
has so much to do in the meantime that if you make it out having enjoyed
yourself, that’s probably all that matters.
Following her job offer in The Dying Days, Bernice Summerfield has a teaching post in St. Oscar’s University
on Dellah. The early parts of the book are where range editor Rebecca Levene’s “shopping
list” is most evident: it must set up Dellah, the university, Bernice’s
lodgings and how she fits in there, the teachers, the students, an antagonist
for later, various races, the fact that somehow Dellah has kept awfully quiet
through all the Doctor Who books, and
latterly what Bernice will get up to in the series besides teaching. Paul Cornell
notes in Bernice Summerfield: The Inside
Story that he loves a shopping list (preferring it, if nothing else, to a
blank page) and he relates most of this stuff organically and beautifully. I
can totally picture the jar-shaped, red-brick university; the society on Dellah
is diverse and interesting; it’s even fun to read about how the religions work. I don’t know if he (or
Levene) was influenced by Terry Pratchett, but there’s a definite Discworld
feel to the place. (If you somehow manage not to think of Unseen University there
are a gaggle of professors later on who will surely evoke its wizards.)
Holding it together is Bernice
Summerfield, around whom prose tends to hum contentedly, and who better to
launch her new series than her creator. Oh
No It Isn’t! is a good introduction to her various foibles, particularly
her awareness (perhaps carried over from being one Doctor Who companion of several) that she’s not as young as she
used to be. Being surrounded by younger students gives opportunities for
awkwardness and great gags, such as this excellent car crash: “‘I wanted to lend you a book.’ ‘Couldn’t you
have done that at the tutorial?’ ‘What? Oh no no no no no!’ Bernice randomly
plucked another book from the shelf, flapping her arms to try to appear even
more wilfully eccentric and hide her own fluster. ‘Too many books in the bag
already, young man. I’d like you to study this in detail, and tell me what you
think.’ She pressed the book into his hand. He looked at the title page for a
moment. ‘Make Dangerous Love to Me – The Erotic Poetry Of Carla Tsampiras.’
Bernice bit her bottom lip. ‘There are bits about archaeology.’” Bernice is
smart and fun and a university can be both those things, so without selling the
series too short, I’d be more than happy for her to get into embarrassing
situations and wander between bookshelves and that be it. (The Dimension Riders, Theatre Of War and Shakedown
all made gains by putting her in that context.) I’m just saying, I’m an easy
mark, you had me at Bernice. Don’t mess it up.
Her ex-husband Jason is on her
mind for some of this, which is probably going to be a theme in the books. This
both makes sense to me and doesn’t at all. Their relationship was so rushed in
the first place that only suspension of disbelief ever made it work, which,
fine, but then it suddenly collapsed as if to suggest you were wrong for
thinking it did. Huh? The whole thing still makes me wince, but after all that we
can probably agree it’s something she should put behind her – except she still pines
for him at her lowest ebb, because love and matrimony are “still a dream she had”. It just about works because people are
contradictory and Bernice is no exception: she can think he’s a dick and still miss their potential happiness.
(Bernice herself notes that “it didn’t
change how she felt about him.”) We’ll see where it goes. Right now I’m not
sure where “people are messy” ends and “we made a mess” begins.
That’s enough about setup and
themes. What about the plot? Well, there’s not much of it, probably because
there’s so much to set up. Bernice and co. are off to survey Perfecton, an
ancient and seemingly abandoned planet blockaded until now. It’s all going
swimmingly until a platoon of information-obsessed Grel arrive to stake their
own claim. And if you’ve ever read any sci-fi you can probably guess there’s no
such thing as a dead planet: sure enough a missile launches from the surface
and hits the Dellahan ship. The result is not so much an explosion as a panto. With
songs.
If you’ve read all of Paul
Cornell’s stuff for Virgin you’ll have noticed a creeping fascination with that
terminally cheerful brand of theatre. No Future cracked a suspicious number of
fourth wall jokes for an epic finale; the short story The Trials Of Tara
blurred Shakespeare with Christopher Biggins, making notable use of Bernice in
that context; and Happy Endings was, in the best possible sense, a novel-length
panto walk down. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cornell’s one condition for making another
trip to Who-land was “let me do a
panto.” And he throws himself (or rather Bernice) into it, creating a mish-mash
of panto plots and characters from which they must escape, and leaving no stone
unturned for a bawdy Dick (Whittington) joke. Songs include an improvised
distraction to the tune of Common People, jokes include preferring “a blur to an oasis”. Having previously worked
in a theatre for several years, nothing says “panto” to me quite as accurately
as jokes now well beyond their sell-by date, but you laugh anyway.
The trouble with going all-in
with an idea like this (which you must, as there’s really no subtle way to set a story inside a panto)
is that you may not find panto as fascinating as Cornell does. And that’s me,
really. It’s still a great opportunity for jokes, particularly the kind you don’t
normally hear in sci-fi. (The innuendoes are too numerous to list, so let’s just
stick with “The King’s balls get bigger
every year!” from the back cover.) And there is something interesting to be
said about the quasi-fairytale world where all pantos are set, and the strange
leaps of logic we make to enjoy them, but given the confused nature of most of
the characters there isn’t really anyone “from” this world to comment on that. What
we get instead is largely just panto business, which either you’ll love or you won’t.
Tinkering with the fourth wall is
difficult, and done well it can make something really special. Oh No It Isn’t! literally jumps through
the fourth wall at points, but all it finds is a dark theatre full of silent
aliens before hopping back in. Conundrum it isn’t, though it does get some of
its biggest laughs by goading the police box in the room. Bernice’s next book has
the working title So Vast A Pile, and
she notes that “if the publishers got too
concerned she’d just tell them she’d had a system crash and lost the
manuscript. Or something.” Even more directly: “‘You planned to reactualize that ship into a vessel for the whole
Perfecton culture, a vessel that would actually be bigger on the inside than
the outside–’ She stopped and glanced at Wolsey, as if to make sure that
everything was OK. He nodded impatiently. ‘I think you got away with it.’”
There’s more honest fun to be had in Bernice going out of her way to disrupt
the strange, fluid narrative she finds herself in, vaguely hoping that will get
her out of it – for instance, going to a ball and deliberately getting engaged
to everyone – but there’s something prolonged
and irritating about taking such a long time to figure out it’s a panto. It’s like
replacing the Starship Enterprise with a bouncy castle and taking several
episodes to work out why the crew keep falling over. (This is covered by
Bernice’s spotty knowledge of Earth history, but that’s never been her most consistent aspect.)
I’m not a fan of “Hang on, is this
real or isn’t it?” narratives as you need industrial strength suspension of
disbelief to give it a chance, and Oh No
It Isn’t! becomes a finger-drumming wait for that penny to drop. It’s made more
difficult by cutting back to the group of professors stuck on Perfecton, who
(like Bernice) are menaced by the Grel. If the intention was to make us wonder
what the hell is happening and what is real, pulling us out of there detracts
from that, reminding us that there is a real world where things are still happening,
so the other thing just needs to run its course. Even worse, the explanation for
what’s really going on (involving the virtual reality world of “the green”) takes
far too much explaining and takes away from the fun.
The real world stuff is an area where
the book struggles with its shopping list: there are just too many professors.
(Equally there are too many crewmen and students with Bernice, though some of
that is needed to make the Seven Dwarves possible.) Maybe it was a mistake to
throw them all in the mix on the first go. It should help that we have a
recognisable figure in Menlove Stokes, whose inclusion in these books completely
blindsided me, but there’s something a little off about him here. Gareth
Roberts notes (again in Bernice
Summerfield: The Inside Story) that Stokes is “just completely wrong” in this; I wouldn’t go that far, though I’m
pretty sure he used to be bald and so didn’t have “a mop of brown hair”. (Wig?) Stokes is still cowardly, still
unquestionably a bad artist enjoying the ersatz success from his bargain with the Black Guardian. So what is it? Cornell notes that “Menlove Stokes knew who he was, and was content, no matter what his
bluster said, to be that”, which seems apt enough. Other characters find
him annoying which is a definite bullseye. Maybe it’s just the fact that he’s
not a complete figure of fun, as he (sometimes
monotonously) was in his Missing Adventures. He has quiet, serious moments,
like his conversations with a friendly Perfecton. This was not a character known
for scrutiny or depth, and it’s weird to see writers other than Gareth Roberts begin
to apply that. Again, we’ll see how it goes.
In some ways the series has
landed, with a lovely setting and a promising intergalactic career for Bernice
(loosely working for The People who you may remember from The Also People,
which is a great wagon to hitch onto). In other ways this is a jolly and random
adventure that (defiantly?) does not
set out a template for further adventures. Bernice’s “companion” is Wolsey, the
cat loitering in the background since Human Nature, here anthropomorphised as a
panto character with opposable thumbs; we probably won’t see that again. Wolsey and the panto backdrop seem to address that sense of weirdness of having New
Adventures paraphernalia to hand and not yet knowing what to do with it. Or perhaps
providing such an out-of-body version of these elements and characters is a roundabout
way to crystallise them, like providing a negative – you learn what the
students are like because the dwarves parody those aspects. Or perhaps it’s all just a laugh. I
think it’s fair to Oh No It Isn’t!
to say I don’t bloody know, and maybe it’s not sure either. Oh yes it is! And
so on.
7/10
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