The New Adventures
#2
Dragons' Wrath
By Justin Richards
The dust has settled. The situation has been... sat. It’s time for our first “proper” Bernice novel where she just gets on with the business of having adventures. What’s it like?
Well it’s Justin Richards, so you’re in safe hands. I think he shares a certain reliability with Terrance Dicks: at worst, his books tick along without frightening the horses. Often he manages to work his interests in there as well, like the stage in Theatre Of War or programming in System Shock. It seems like you can tell when he’s engaged.
I say this because I never quite felt that in Dragons’ Wrath, which does enough to qualify as an archaeologist adventure novel (in space) but still somehow lands on the wrong side of dull.
The title refers to the Gamalian Dragon, an artefact once captured by the legendary warrior Gamaliel. A shady deal is underway to copy the artefact; in an opening straight out of Hitchcock, the forger is on his way to a rendez-vous when he is killed – but not before mixing his bags with Bernice Summerfield and inadvertently giving her the Dragon. (Or is it a copy?) She coincidentally is tasked with investigating the planet Stanturus Three for signs that Gamaliel woz there; the warlord Nusek has a vested interest in this, as he has ties to Gamaliel and finding evidence of his ancestor will give him a claim to the planet. (And parts beyond.)
Bernice and a team including Nicholas Clyde, a historian with a curious lack of interest in field work, set out for Stanturus but not before stopping at Nusek’s palace atop a glacier and a volcano. (!) Here Bernice finds the real Dragon (or so it is assumed) and swaps it for hers. Before long another Dragon is found on Stanturus, along with sinister evidence of Gamaliel’s history. An enquiry is to be held, chaired by one Irving Braxiatel, to once and for all confirm if Nusek has a claim to this world. Nusek is undoubtedly up to no good, aided by whoever committed the murder at the start, and he will want his claim confirmed either way.
There’s plenty of plot here and it captures quite a few flavours along the way. There’s your Man Who Knew Too Much inciting incident, a suspiciously Bond villain-esque lair with that fire-and-ice palace, some Indiana Jones hijinks on Stanturus Three with artefacts and attacking animals (why’d it have to be rats?), then a televised courtroom finale as the case for Gamaliel is made, and finally more Bond stuff as a literal countdown threatens to erupt a volcano. Despite the histrionics it’s hard to disagree that all of this pivots on archaeology, which is what you want in a Bernice Summerfield novel. And yet, despite heaps of incident and a bread-and-butter problem for Bernice to sort out, Dragons’ Wrath simply never engaged with me as a reader.
Bernice herself is unaware of all things Gamaliel, which right away chucks some cold water on all that. She’s intrigued by the murder (although we depart from Hitchcock in that there are scarcely any further attempts on her life), and the Dragon she now possesses, but it’s mostly out of academic interest. Discoveries on Stanturus are disproportionately shared with Clyde, who gets a little too much of the action (and that off-screen). What with his vested interest in Gamaliel, and later Braxiatel pushing for the truth in the enquiry, it rarely feels like a story that could only work if Bernice is taking part in it. Even the device that starts the countdown, which will sort out Nusek one way or another, is Clyde’s. Bernice seems to be along for the ride. As a reader I felt the same thing, only at a greater distance.
On a prose note, Dragons’ Wrath never quite meshes with Bernice in the way that the best books about her have done before, including Doctor Who ones that also had other main characters to cater for, but more notably Oh No It Isn’t! which came directly before this. Benny and prose just go together, it’s a given that we get in her head and it’s a colourful space, but Dragons’ Wrath seems to maintain a polite, almost dull distance. She has enough wit in the dialogue, but she often sounds a bit dispassionate in third person. (“Intellectually, she did not believe the supposition for a moment.” Zing?) All this is quite disappointing when Richards’ own Theatre Of War wrote Bernice so well, including not only an archaeological dig gone wrong and some ancient history everyone remembers incorrectly, but Bernice’s first meeting with Braxiatel.
One of the best things here is that Brax joins the character roster, and thanks to time travel we get to see his first meeting with her. Through sheer force of personality Bernice convinces him that they’re going to be friends, so that’s the footing they are on from the start. It’s a delightful way to get on with it without cheating. Brax is delightful, it probably goes without saying, although a) he isn’t in the book as much as I’d like and b) it’s difficult to shake the idea that his mentor-like role was by necessity inherited from the Doctor.
The other characters pale in comparison. Nusek is a thoroughly bland villain, even with his ridiculous palace, and it never quite comes across why his victory would be so terrible. Even his fellow warlords seem apathetic: “They were pretty much resigned to following Nusek, whom they each privately considered to be less objectionable than at least two of the other candidates.” (Feel the tension.) Attempts to stir some sort of rivalry between his two lieutenants – Webbe, methodical and fair, vs. Mastrov the no-nonsense heavy – never quite convince as Nusek’s such an obvious bastard that I never believed he’d side with the “nice” one. Their conversations are desperately lacking in spark: “‘So close now, Webbe. So close.’ Nusek slapped his commander on the back, and continued down the corridor. ‘I know you have reservations about the methods we have used, but the goal is almost achieved now. An honourable goal.’” Plenty of the dialogue is as dry as an archaeological find, including this one I had to take a few runs at: “We’re expecting soon to receive the video images from the shuttle that the cruiser dispatched to investigate.” Woof.
There’s certainly imagination on display, some of it executed very well. There are several natty moments where a pivotal action or sound is omitted and we focus on the aftermath. “Mastrov took the two halves of the mould from Rappare, lifting them with care from his slightly trembling hands … Rappare actually jumped. Not so much at the sound, but in sheer disbelief and horror.” Omission is almost a theme, with some of Bernice’s fellow (alien) tutors described in the lightest strokes, one who “wheezed and slushed along the corridor,” another who “shrugged with what passed for his shoulders” and held a small box “surprisingly delicately between talons.” Lack of detail, or allowing for the reader to fill in the blanks? I don’t entirely mind the ambiguity there. I’m not sure how I feel about a character being deliberately non-gendered for most of it in order to protect a subsequent switcheroo, their gender being present and correct from then on, but maybe I’m just annoyed with myself for not spotting it until afterwards. It’s funny what you just assume, given a sinister character acting sinisterly; hats off to Richards, this was subtle.
Some of his ideas don’t entirely work, like the race of primitive aliens who are (somewhat comically) a mix of Neanderthal and anteater, and named steggodons. (Good luck not imagining dinosaurs every single time they are mentioned. Call them something else!) They have an odd habit of dismembering the nearly dead, which they are said to all look forward to, but then that doesn’t quite square with the apparent pain and horror of the ones having it done to them. A random archaeologist is named Bjork for some reason – oh come on, we all know loads of Bjorks, you could be imagining anyone! – and in other news, have I mentioned Nusek’s lair is a bit silly?
It’s entirely possible that for someone other than me, Dragons’ Wrath will whizz along. It has all the hallmarks of an exciting narrative: it cribs from different genres, the action moves from one locale to another, we open with a murder and there’s a literal countdown to an explosion at the end. For me though, it felt like a bunch of bits that Bernice wanders through out of mild curiosity. Her level of involvement is a key ingredient for me. It’s harmless reading, anyway, but I’d just as soon dig up Theatre Of War again.
6/10
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