#6
Deadfall
By Gary Russell
I might as well rip off the plaster: I’m not a fan of Gary Russell’s books.
The writing that came out of the Virgin stable was admirably varied, with a few obvious major talents and a lot of very enjoyable, if not particularly ground-breaking reads. Some of the “bad” novels were still interesting, even promising. Some weren’t.
Gary Russell sat somewhere in the middle of all that, turning out sometimes decent adventures that you mainly remember for being massively, massively fannish. And look, he wasn’t the first or last Who writer to cram in too many references to things. That’s not even a bar to creativity: look at Conundrum, or Return Of The Living Dad! Better yet, listen to all the things he oversaw at Big Finish. Some classic stuff there, and it matters that he thought it passed muster.
His actual books, though. You really can have fun with all the – let’s be nice – intertextuality, keeping a running tally of the crazy connections. But when the Who trivia falls away, what’s the rest of it? How does he handle character and plot? The clearest answer is probably Deadfall.
It’s a novel assignment, literally: before it was a book, Deadfall was an Audio Visuals drama, also by Russell. AV was the world of audio Doctor Who before there was a Big Finish. (There is unsurprisingly a lot of crossover between the two companies, some of it still going.) I have heard all the AVs including Deadfall, but I don’t remember much about them besides their ambition being generally quite high. For whatever reason, Russell repurposed this one as a book, transposing the AV characters for Virgin ones.
Due to those wonderful license issues he has to keep his Doctor Who brain on a leash this time. There are still nods, but mainly sideways ones like a reference to the star-liner Hyperion II. (Somewhere, a Pip and Jane Baker fan just clapped.) On the plus side he can pig out on Virgin-created canon all he likes, so we’re returning to an ongoing plot about the Knights of Jeneve (set up in Dragons’ Wrath), as well as teens Emile and (briefly) Tameka (from Beyond The Sun). I was only just complaining that these books haven’t settled on a regular cast, so – although I hope they can come up with better than Emile and Tameka, who aren’t exactly scintillating so far – that’s something to celebrate. Jason Kane is here also, and though I stand by my previous description of him (What If Chris Cwej Was More Of A Prick) I’m willing to accept that he holds an appeal for some people. Bernice, for starters.
So then: an archaeological dig on an infamous planet goes horribly wrong. (The quintessential setup for a Benny book, let’s face it.) Rushing off to investigate is… Jason Kane, with a recently returned Emile in tow. Also heading for the strangely blue world of Ardethe – or is it? – is a scavenger ship staffed with female convicts and a dreadful, equally incriminated governor. They are after metal salvage, or so most of them think. Jason is after something else. A third and much more dangerous something is after something else altogether.
If I’m sounding vague, it’s because the plot is awfully coy for most of the book, spilling its beans only in the final 50-odd pages and about as inelegantly as it can, with an amnesiac character suddenly remembering that he knows it all and helpfully blurting it out. I still didn’t entirely follow it, but suffice to say we haven’t heard the last of those pesky Knights, whose long game continues to get people killed in the hopes of setting up a bright new future. They have also ensnared (holy heck there’s a guest star in this?!) one Chris Cwej! About which I was very happy at first, except that he’s the amnesiac I mentioned. And if you like that, he spends the first half unconscious. Anyone hoping to revel in Chris’s somewhat innocent yet colourful charms is out of luck. (Of course the role was somebody else’s in the original audio, and according to Bernice Summerfield – The Inside Story and TERMINUS Reviews Gary Russell didn’t much like Chris to begin with. Which, y’know, great. At least we got to spend a whole novel with Jason, and he’s fascinating.)
So most of the book is, frankly, low on plot. This isn't entirely surprising since this is a less than 90 minute play suddenly becoming a 200+ page book. (Look how much material Terrance Dicks had to invent for Shakedown to work a second time.) It’s about going to a planet (did they ever confirm what the deal was with the mysterious planet and its underground city? Did I doze off and miss it?) and then leaving it again. We fill the time – no doubt making up those useful extra pages – getting to know many, many, many characters, and not very well. Although to be fair, most of them are destined to die anyway.
Does knowing that help? Hmm. The book’s insistence on killing bit parts (or just parts) as casually as possible is… maybe?… intended to show some kind of authorial confidence, and amid the usual Gary Russell-ian flippant tone you could argue it’s all done for black comedy, but it has the result of seeing no reason why I should be upset that characters are dead or invest in them in the first place. What, apart from a daft laugh, is the correct response to this character’s exit? “[She] just sat there and sighed quietly. Then her head exploded, showering everyone in blood and tissue.” RIPLOL, I guess?
The character writing is just not very good. Too many people is one issue – and when clusters of them have names like Hurwitz, Harries and Harper, you immediately know it’s going to get confusing. Everyone in this has a bad habit of addressing whoever they’re talking to by name, which may be intended to fix the over-population issue, or it might be a leftover from when this was an audio script. (It would sure help with crowd scenes.) Either way, it stinks of artificiality written down. People just don’t say “Hi Character Name, what’s shaking?” “Well Character Name I’m fine thanks.” It’s even more ridiculous when they’re the only two people in the room. Why does one guy need to remind the only other guy what his name is?
The writing makes occasional random, slightly inexplicable recces to make things more interesting, like “Blummer exclaimed esoterically” (?!) or “Emile had asked what the problem was, only to have his head metaphorically bitten off by Jason, who had pointed at the seat belt, ordered Emile to strap his body down and his mouth with it.” (“Bit my head off” is a well-known saying. Pausing to explain it's a metaphor takes me out of it, sort of defeating the point of using the metaphor as shorthand.) There are other more consistent affectations thrown in to make people stand out, such as a ship’s navigator (who is getting on in years) calling everybody “lad.” Which is fine, except he does it in virtually every line he gets, often multiple times in the same conversation. We get it! You’re old! You say “lad”!
The worst, though, is a downright Gary Russell staple: everyone in this finds everyone else utterly irritating. Every single conversation bubbles along at a low level of lame sarcasm, and it’s just wearying after a while. Responding to every prompt with “Gee, that’ll help” or “Wow, why didn’t I think of that” just isn’t automatically funny. It’s like once upon a time he watched a Robert Holmes double act bitch at each other and thought the sheer fact of their annoyance was the reason they went on to be popular characters.
The sad thing is, sarcasm seems to be the defining feature of Jason in this, but it’s utterly drowned out by everyone else doing it as well – particularly the (what seemed like) dozens of totally interchangeable convicts we spend so many long chapters with. At one point Jason muses: “What would Benny do if she were here, apart from annoy the hell out of everyone?” And, well, how could she, when it’s already the most popular pastime in the book?
Ah yes. There is an elephant in the room, isn’t there? I’ll just say it: who writes a Bernice Summerfield book and doesn’t go out of their way to put her in it? (Emile is the closest thing we have to a protagonist, more's the pity: all he does is mope.) Aside from a few cursory “sorry, there was nowhere in the audio version we could put her, here’s an interlude” bits, Bernice is AWOL. Worse than that, she knows there’s a weird shitstorm happening on a strange planet somewhere and decides not to go. I mean, as well as cutting out a walking generator for what are always the best lines in any book she’s in, which is just demented, this absolutely stinks as a character choice for Bernice. Come off it: Bernice, as established, would absolutely go and get involved even if it was a bad idea. It’s Benny! And well, that’s what adventures are. (Wider point: six novels into this range of Bernice Summerfield books, it's feeling uncannily like nobody wants to write about Bernice Summerfield. Honestly, what gives?)
I can feel my past self reaching through time to hate me for saying this, but: I wish this was Gary on full Doctor Who reference crack. It’s more fun, and perhaps it’s essential, to be distracted from his rather odd handle on character interplay by things like “how all of this connects to Mavic Chen in a few easy steps”. Deadfall isn’t dreadful, but it’s certainly a long time spent in the company of a lot of bitchy bores who are just waiting around to get killed off. What a pity there wasn’t a more fun protagonist we could have gone with instead.
4/10
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