Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #115 – Dry Pilgrimage by Paul Leonard and Nick Walter

The New Adventures
#13
Dry Pilgrimage
By Paul Leonard and Nick Walters

New writer alert! And, just sayin’, 13 books into the even newer New Adventures, a fresh face feels a wee bit overdue. (The previous new novelist was Matt Jones with Bad Therapy, back when all this was Doctor Who. He’s had a second book out since then!)

The funny thing about trying to make an initial assessment of Nick Walters, who shares the writer credit here with Paul Leonard (who reportedly just edited the book) is that Dry Pilgrimage feels so much like a Paul Leonard book. There are ideas that hew close enough to Leonard’s Venusian Lullaby in particular to feel like Paul’s really pushing his luck. But if it’s actually Nick then we can perhaps put that down to the latter being a fan of the former, and then putting his own spin on it – or just happening to be a similar sort of writer. Dry Pilgrimage doesn’t feel rippy-offy at all, it just seems to ride similar trains of thought to the ones in Lullaby, Dancing The Code, Toy Soldiers and Speed Of Flight. Or maybe I’m just projecting because I saw “Paul Leonard” on the cover. Either way, it’s a nice problem to have since it makes for interesting books.

Okay, let’s be more specific: it seems like a very Leonard thing to show not just alien characters, but characters whose life cycles are completely alien. Lullaby and Flight go to great pains to show different ways of living and evolving; the short lifespan of Dry Pilgrimage’s Saraani (10 years) is certainly memorable, and the passing down of memories to their young via “holy transference” is a lot like Venusian “remembering,” only minus the cannibalism. They don’t have different sexes (although they are all gendered as “he/him” which seems odd) and they all reproduce without, you know, help. They’re a striking bunch.

But further down the sounds-a-bit-like-Leonard-but-let’s-just-call-it-interesting rabbit hole we go: it’s not just about weird aliens, it’s about people within the same groups having different perspectives. This goes back, Doctor Who-wise, to Malcolm Hulke and the Silurians, with good ones and bad ones all trying their best for their people. (It probably goes back earlier too but that’s a good example.) The Saraani are slavish about their religion, but a schism on their home-world has turned them into refugees, with the “Renaissants” wanting to ditch the old ways. One of their number, Mirrium, is a staunch traditionalist, but the dubious actions of their leader cause him to rethink the whole Saraani way of life. Said leader, the Khulayn, is working with outsiders on a decidedly dodgy project, but he believes he’s doing the right thing. Vilbian, a Saraani befriended by Bernice, has different allegiances altogether and doesn’t know where he fits in. None of these are even Renaissants, although one of those is squirrelled away too. Bottom line, there’s enough here to suggest a race with more ups and downs than the average funny-forehead gang in Star Trek.

And then there are the more recognisable “people”. The Saraani have booked the cruise ship Lady Of Lorelai to take them to some islands on Dellah, hoping to find a new home; on board to study all of this are Bernice and other professors, including Maeve Ruthven, a religious fundamentalist who went against her faith to marry Brion, a geneticist, with whom she has fallen out but who is on board as well. And Brion has his own tortured allegiances. Of the other assorted academics, Professor Smith has a dispassionate anthropological interest in stirring up trouble and observing the results: he feels like a perverse reflection of the author(s), trying to see things from all sides and remain objective. Smith is, of course, no such thing, as shown in a very funny scene where his temper gets the better of him: “He picked up his cup of coffee, spilling it all over his papers. His hands were shaking. Interesting.” Smith, like any good character, thaws as the story goes along.

This it does at a gentle pace, at least to begin with, as Bernice acclimatises to what should be a nice time on a cruise ship. Yeah, right: anyone who’s ever encountered Doctor Who media knows that even for a moment thinking you’re on holiday means you’re about to have a more than usually dangerous time, but the writing of these early chapters is as enjoyable as putting your feet up on deck. Bernice, it turns out, gets terribly seasick, which brings into sharp relief the fact that somehow this is the first Benny New Adventure set on yer actual seafaring boat. (We’ve already had two “cruise ships in space” and a train going across a dangerous planet. Along with Dry Pilgrimage’s best-days-are-behind-her cruise ship, these all essentially occupy the “murders on holiday” genre.) It’s also the first book to stick with Dellah, where Bernice works, as a location. It seems crazy to me that we haven’t explored the planet more, so I’m all for that.

It can’t all be a lovely holiday, of course, and there’s plenty of darkness in Dry Pilgrimage, beginning with the apparent murder of a student at St. Oscar’s. We start off in his perspective as he tries to chat up Bernice, which makes for an interestingly offbeat way to introduce her to the narrative. The dead don’t always stay dead, it seems, and poor Theo finds himself reincarnated – sort of – as a murderous android. Someone else suffers the same fate later, and we get a lot of pathos out of the horrors of being forced to do things in another body. This also leads to Bernice sustaining a significant injury that bothers her for the rest of the novel.

Because, oh yes, Bernice has a horrible time in this. She makes friends and then loses them (sometimes without knowing it, as with Theo), and her grief often takes a while to hit, which rings truer than always bursting into tears on cue. She tries to do the right thing and rescue people, even when it seems hopeless and in the short term might actually endanger her. I think at times this can be a little much – there are quite a few cliff-hangers where she only survives because someone obligingly saves her – but the overall effect is one of humanising her.

Walters and/or Leonard still keeps track of Bernice’s lighter side, or it wouldn’t be much fun to read. Whilst trying to blend in with some bad guys she takes stock of “the eternal still point within her that was forever Bernice: tea. Interesting people. Cats. Fine wine. Vinyl records. Tennis. Justice. Frocks.” Moments later, “however hard she tried, she couldn’t keep time with the military step. This pleased her in a very fundamental way.” She’s hilarious, in that thankfully understated way that the better Bernice writers get, and at one point when needing to say something about a daunting spacecraft, the best she can manage is “Big, isn’t it?” (Whether that’s a deliberate callback to Walking To Babylon I don’t know, but it’s perfectly on brand.) She’s never so amusing that she’s a caricature, or so distraught that this feels like punishment. It reminds me of certain earlier New Adventures that really got the Doctor right. It should be noted when it happens.

I’ve rhapsodised about it so far. Any niggles? Well, as often happens – Lucifer Rising comes to mind – you’ve got all sorts of depth and interesting stuff going on but then the bad guys show up and it gets a bit bland. The villain (“Violaine,” which even looks like “villain”) at least puts some effort into her megalomania – with an outfit that would have had your eye out if they’d put it on the front cover – but her commitment to fnar fnar evilness is still disappointing in amongst all those shades of grey. Then again, her evil plan to create hordes of killing machines requires elderly volunteers who genuinely think this all sounds smashing, and they’re sort of interesting. But then again again, her actual soldiery workforce are as bog standard unpleasant as they come. Still though. If we’re honest, some people are, aren’t they?

By that point I think Nick Walters and Paul Leonard (in that order) have generated enough goodwill for us to remember the hits more than the misses. Dry Pilgrimage just feels substantial in a way that more New Adventures should. Not bad for a first timer doing another dusty old Murder On A Cruise Ship.

8/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #114 – The Medusa Effect by Justin Richards

The New Adventures
#12
The Medusa Effect
By Justin Richards

Something, something, snappy opening line.

Hey, it can be difficult knowing where to start, or what to even say about books that aren’t trying to do anything world-breaking and are pretty much fine at that. The Medusa Effect is the latest from Justin Richards, certified Safe Pair Of Hands, and it is (reassuringly?) unlikely to frighten the horses.

It quickly settles down into a familiar pattern: a bunch of characters investigate a spooky old ship that has unexpectedly reappeared after its doomed maiden voyage. Before long they start to see things – the old crew and passengers, times past – and they find themselves remembering those other people’s experiences, then reliving them. Will they escape the calamity that befell the ship the first time?

Richards has a lot of fun in the ghost story portion of the book (which is most of it), sliding Bernice and her co-investigators in and out of a gleaming past and the dusty present. The prose can be sharp: “The furniture looked like it had arrived in the cobwebs and had not yet been unpacked.” “The cry echoed down the passageway, muffled as it went by the layers of dust that ate the sound.” There’s a whole scene, so I can’t write it out, where a character picks up a shiny apple from a banquet only to find it dedicated after a bite. That one will stick in my memory.

It’s good, evocative stuff, but – I’m still thinking about that apple – maybe it’s low hanging fruit of a sort? There’s not a lot to unpack as, inevitably, the characters on a spooky old cruise ship begin creepily adopting the hairstyles and bad habits of the dead. For plot reasons, everyone is a bit too out of it to really register the horror, which lends the whole thing a sort of unreal quality that perhaps takes some of the edge off. It is for instance suggested that Bernice will share the fate of a truly unfortunate passenger and be sealed in a coffin alive, and sure enough we get there, but too soon for it to feel all that climactic, and then we move on. It’s all a bit like, well yeah, you get on a spooky old boat, what did you expect? Similarly when almost all of them – spoilers I guess? – relive their deaths down to the last detail, it is difficult to be upset so much as just mildly disappointed for them.

It might be easier to dig in and care if the characters were stronger, but right out of the gate The Medusa Effect seems (deliberately?) to make that a challenge. There are far too many names thrown around too soon (just as we also set foot on the Medusa quicker than I expected – was it a boring ride over?), and while I’m failing to tell apart Chomsky and Hoyt and Gyles I’m also having to contend with the names of the dead crew and passengers. This pretty much tells you that’ll you’ll be making their acquaintance somehow, so the whole “re-live the past” bit does not come as a shock. But then, for plot reasons, it turns out all these names who-are-now-behaving-like-some-other-names have specifically been picked because they are “archetypal”. And that was the point where I wondered if I wasn’t even meant to grab hold of anyone here. Which I mean, if so, clever and all that, but to quote another voice from the past… do you think that’s wise?

I’m just theorising here, but I suspect the “spooky space mystery” part of The Medusa Effect came to Richards very independently from the explanation for it. (Indeed, he was inspired by – and I am not making this up – a book called Ghost Boat.) He really does have a ball in the dusty old fun house he’s created, extending the otherworldly weirdness to some kooky imagery such as life forms growing in and then bursting out of wooden pillars. (Which makes me think, on some level, he was inspired by Earthshock.) But you do have to explain stuff eventually, and hoo boy, does he make me reconsider asking.

It turns out the (already not to be trusted) Advanced Research Department on Dellah wanted to create easily controlled soldier clones, but it was for some reason difficult to do this in a lab (?), so they used the launch of a remote control space cruiser as cover and filled it with people that have archetypal personalities (?) so some psychic clone matter could absorb just the right mental mix to aid… being controlled, I guess? But then it all went wrong because an escaped convict got aboard and made them all murder each other. When the same shadowy forces engineer it so the same thing can happen again on the Medusa’s return, and it does, including the bits that went wrong, you’ve got to wonder if Big Mad Science could use the occasional boring normal person in the room to say “nope, next.”

I didn’t dislike this just because it’s bonkers: more so that it means unmasking the villain, and they do that “drop any pretence of not being a cartoonish megalomaniac” thing about as bluntly as I’ve ever seen it. I’m amazed Richards kept them from smoking one of those long cigarettes and laughing maniacally – they seem less real than the ghosts. Things culminate in a literal countdown to an explosion and it all begins feeling like he’s trying to wrap this thing up before the car pulls up outside. But I must admit it was a bit exciting. Again, though, with the low hanging fruit.

Bernice is well served here, at least insofar as Richards seems keenly aware of the facets that make up Bernice Summerfield, and puts them to work. This is surprisingly not the first time that her fondness for booze has kept her out of trouble; her fixation with keeping a diary causes lines to blur between herself and one of the ship’s passengers; and Richards even revisits the idea of her higgledy-piggledy bicycle from Mean Streets. (As well as making the plot of Mean Streets, of all things, crucial to this one. Hey, man, you are what you eat.) As often seems to happen, Bernice isn’t quite herself for a chunk of this, but when she is there’s a good amount of wit and intelligence, albeit not nearly enough freaking out for me to get seriously unnerved by the story. She develops a close bond with someone on board and, as also often seems to happen, events conspire so that they’re unlikely to bump into each other again. (Well, it’s not The Bernice And Her New Best Mate Adventures, is it?) She leaves the story disappointed and perhaps a bit heartbroken, but as – apparently – Richards wrote the final post-explosion chapter rather late in the process, any examination of that will fall to later authors. (Or quite possibly him again, having glanced at my bookshelf.)

You have, in all likelihood, heard better versions of this ghost story, but The Medusa Effect knows the ropes well enough not to send you away completely disappointed. The prose comes to its rescue quite often, but then again things happen suddenly and unexpectedly so often that it feels like it’s not just that ill-fated voyage being recreated in vain, but its inspirations too.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #113 – Oblivion by Dave Stone

The New Adventures
#11
Oblivion
By Dave Stone

Looks like it’s Dave Stone o’clock already. Doesn’t the day fly by?

Not that I dread his books. (Sky Pirates! remains a favourite of mine.) But his work, always wordy and generally funny, is variable - as I suppose anyone’s will be if they keep submitting it.

I think the issue, if there is one, is how he presents his ideas, which tend to be fruitsome and strange and involve a lot of loopy verbiage. Sky Pirates! is mad and ridiculous – but it’s also an adventure story that sweeps you along. More recently there was Ship Of Fools, which had significant elements of reality-bothering strangeness – but first and foremost it was a jolly pisstake of Agatha Christie. They’ve got a solid structure to help sell the Dave Stone-ness of it all.

Oblivion, not so much. There’s a big idea, yes siree: due to villainous machinations we’ll get into shortly, the universe is changing tracks, throwing out other lives and experiences at random. (So, the multiverse.) It is also falling apart. The only people immune to this are time travellers, plus those of an other-universe persuasion, which means that Bernice, Chris Cwej and Jason Kane are swept up by Sgloomi Po and some of the crew of the Schirron Dream (see Sky Pirates!) to hopefully do something about it.

Sounds big, sounds cool, but on a page-by-page level there’s not much actually happening. Our heroes are making their way to Earth, aka the source of the trouble. While they’re doing that, we cut back to Earth in its various multiverses as Nathan li Shao, Kiru and Leetha (Sky Pirates! alumni, same as Sgloomi) are bumping from life to life, name to name, more or less heading in a direction to achieve a thing but out of their minds while doing so. And I’ve got to say it: I liked Sky Pirates! I am here for more Sky Pirates! But that was dozens of novels ago and you are seriously overestimating my investment in these characters. A good 30-40% of Oblivion is these guys pottering about, not knowing who they are. (Insert joke here.) If the aim was to deconstruct characters, fine, but it would make a lot more sense to deconstruct ones we already understand, or might at least know from Adam. As it is, variations on this theme amount to lots of words that just aren’t getting us anywhere. This version of what’s-his-name is different from the last chapter, is he? Just as that one was different from the one before? Fab. So, when are we advancing the plot? The eyes did begin to glaze over, fun as the individual worlds often are.

Back on the Schirron Dream, nothing much happens for a while apart from Benny and Jason arguing. (I’ll say my piece real quick here because it’s the same as ever: I don’t get Jason. He’s usually a bit of a wanker and Benny doesn’t enjoy his company, leftover having-the-hots-for-him aside, so bringing him back just seems like masochism to me. Fair enough if he brings something meaningful to other readers. Wish I was among them.) Then, due to Sgloomi Po misreading the situation due to their past experiences, Roz Forrester joins the action, plucked out of time in her early 20s. This leads to some understandably heated reactions from Chris and Bernice, viz the timelines not being broken. There is also a good bit where Roz, who is not yet entirely immune, begins flipping through lives; suddenly we’re seeing it from an outside perspective, which works a lot better than being stuck inside it. (As a bonus, you know who Roz is and can spot when she has changed.)

It’s interesting bringing Roz back, but the overall spine of Oblivion doesn’t really allow that to develop, so I don’t know if it was worth pulling that trigger. She ends up working with Sgloomi while the rest of the gang go through the multiverse motions, each trapped in their personal hell. (Could this part only be assigned to Roz, and not Bernice? I wonder.) By the end, she’s back in her timeline and doesn’t remember any of it. Chris (who in Mean Streets was still rocked to his core by her death) doesn’t have much space here to respond to her return or her departure. And after she goes home even we’re robbed of letting that sit by a very Dave Stone appendix featuring some sort of amalgam of Jason and Nathan having an adventure, by which time good grief, Dave, it’s home time.

I said before it’s a big idea, and I meant it: the multiverse has been doing numbers in movies to the point of exhaustion these past few years, and there’s bags you could do with these characters in that context. My problem is mostly, which characters. The “personal hells” bit is interesting – again, perhaps because it’s people we know to a reasonable extent – but it’s very late in the proceedings if you’re wanting to mull it over in any detail. (Bernice becomes a monstrous warmonger. Chris, adorably, becomes Not A Good Person.) Otherwise there’s very little solid matter attached to this idea. Barely anyone else seems to exist in the book, which is perhaps for the best given the size of the main cast, but this then makes it difficult to grasp the scale of the problem. And by the time we find out what’s really going on it’s sadly all too pedestrian: a bad guy wants to live forever so he’s changing the universe until that’s possible. That was it? All this for a nutter in an evil lair?

It’s Dave Stone, so it’s often very funny. This early bit about a sinister child reads like Inside No. 9: “The man in the hat was quite obviously a pervert, and Simon recalled the single salient point that his parents had made in all their comments about perverts. ‘Where’s my sweet?’ he said.” Sgloomi Po, a shapeshifting oddball with wacky speech patterns to match, is as loveable as ever. (He/they stick in the memory.) And there are actually ideas to spare: look at the reset when the pieces are put back together at the end. (I wonder if anyone thought, we should have done that at the start of the range to explain where the Doctor went…)

In the end, though, Oblivion doesn’t marry its ideas to a sense of urgency, tending to fill time with them instead, intentionally or otherwise. It’s interesting. And that’s not always enough.

5/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #112 – Walking To Babylon by Kate Orman

The New Adventures
#10
Walking To Babylon
By Kate Orman

Oh, crumbs. For some reason I get a bit flustered reading (and especially reviewing) books that everyone likes. You know where you are with a stinker; you also might enjoy diving into a book that everyone sniffs at only to say no, you’re all mean, Tempest is fine actually. When it’s something like Love And War or The Also People, there is (in my stupid brain anyway) a feeling that there won’t be much to say, and anything you do say could have it all backwards.

All of which, fluster and bluster and blah, is to say that everyone likes Walking To Babylon, and they’re right. It’s great. So, thanks for coming.

Fine, I’ll try.

Walking To Babylon juggles a few elements that will be familiar to readers of the Benny NAs. Bernice is on a mission from (you could at least pretend to hold your breath) the People, more specifically God, and the only way to solve the crisis is to visit an archaeological dig. That is a slight fib: she must travel to Babylon in its heyday, before the conquering and the ruins. Having her marching around active history feels like a fresh way to handle a heroic archaeologist. (It is only a mild irritation that Lawrence Miles did this not long before as a short story, but then again even NA fans probably didn’t read the last Decalog.)

The problem is this: two of the People have built a time travelling path from their Worldsphere to Babylon, and they appear to have gone to live at other end, leaving the path open. No one knows why, but the People have a precarious treaty with a powerful force that shall remain nameless (okay, Time Lords, please don’t sue us) and if they find the People mucking about with time travel it would mean war. Specifically a Time War, which Kate Orman evokes with characteristic New Who prophecy at a few points. Bernice has five days to reason with the fugitives and shut down the path or Babylon, everyone in it and Earth’s history will be scuppered to prevent a larger crisis.

It sounds like a massive story, but Walking To Babylon approaches it with the same sort of human smallness (perhaps as a coping mechanism for big ideas) as The Also People. The majority of it is people talking to each other, trying to solve problems with civility. On the Worldsphere, Clarence (an angel, to all intents and purposes, Benny met in Down) is figuring out why the path was created and what they can do about it. In Babylon, Bernice is trying to find the fugitives (you’ll notice I haven’t included their names: typical People, they are unpronounceable) while also trying to support a fellow traveller, Edwardian linguist John Lafayette. He found the path, which shouldn’t be possible, and Bernice is the closest thing he has to a way home. Most of the book is their relationship.

And, oh right, yes, it’s a love story. Sort of. (When push comes to shove, John says that he is not in love with her, but it’s obviously something. Bernice feels a connection she hasn’t had in a while, but that doesn’t automatically make it more. It’s well handled, not unlike some of the ships-in-the-night dalliances of the Doctor Who NAs.) Walking To Babylon, despite the ticking clock, allows Bernice to slow down and feel things. The relative naivety of John, whose social mores can’t cope with Babylon, let alone the sexual politics of Benny’s time, allows for some thoughtful reflections on civilisation: ways in which the Babylonians are backward, but know what they want, and ways in which the People are hyper-advanced, but out of touch and easily self-deluded. (And probably ways in which John and Bernice emulate both those viewpoints, I suppose.) John’s out of place-ness doesn’t make him a figure of fun, as it could have, but it does increase his reliance on Bernice. Also his fascination: he’s as in awe of her as he is of Babylon, especially when a heated chase leads to some decidedly un-Edwardian sex. Bernice seems aware of her awkward duty of care for him, which perhaps contributes to this not becoming a relationship.

There aren’t many black and white characters here. Bernice and John meet a slave owner who comes to their rescue; a shady go-between has much to gain from aiding the fugitives, but ultimately he helps Bernice because it is more pragmatic to do so; the fugitives, despite their catastrophic lack of judgement, are damaged by war and believe what they’re doing will be good for their people in the end. Their whole society comes out of this feeling like a richer and more troubled bunch, which is a relief when these books are so determined to revisit them.

Despite its characterful smallness, there are moments of high drama and excitement. John comes close to death after an attempt to rescue Bernice from kidnappers (she thinks he was wrong to do so, but we know she was in much greater danger), and when medical aid arrives from an unlikely source I couldn’t disagree with Benny’s assessment: “…so relieved that it was almost a physical pain.” The sheer simplicity of the path, as a means for time travel, also allows for some striking imagery. The moment when it finally begins to break up, and Bernice and John literally run along it for their lives, is going to stick with me.

There is also, of course, a lot of great writing for Bernice. Trust Kate Orman to understand the assignment: not only placing Benny in living history, knowing how that will brighten her up, but displaying her frayed edges and imperfections as a character as well. Bernice relates to the (philosophical) youth of these renegade People – who already took direct inspiration from her life, though that is hardly her fault – telling them a story about a stupid decision that almost got her killed years ago. This ultimately, seamlessly sets up one of the key premises of her character: “I remembered those long nights in the Aurigan jungle, after a lip-smacking meal of night crawler, trying to keep myself from going mad. It would always take forever to go to sleep … I would talk to myself, encouraging words, badly constructed limericks, sometimes a wavering song. I told myself my life story. I made up the bits I couldn’t remember or didn’t like. After that, I started keeping a diary. And still made up the bits I couldn’t remember or didn’t like.” Orman also peppers Bernice’s ongoing memoir with footnotes, which are a perfect fit and work much better (in my opinion) than her original whimsical go-to of notes on top of notes to continually rewrite the moment. (Which is still a thing, admittedly.)

It’s Kate Orman, so the book feels breezy even when it’s brilliant, and much of it is set in the Worldsphere, which is as consistently fun to revisit as a cherished fairytale. There are delightful passages, like a chapter that’s a farce with Benny trying to grant a chain of wishes in order to find something out, or this gem when John encounters the Worldsphere: “The first thing he saw was Clarence … an angel, right out of a Bible illustration, naked as a jaybird and with a ten-foot wingspan. The next thing he saw was that the world went away for ever and curled to the sides and up over his head, past the sun and the smiling planet that circled it. A yellow-coloured drone floated up. ‘Hi,’ it said. ‘I’m God.’ I expected John to faint. Instead, he said, ‘Bernice, are you feeling all right?’ I would have answered, but I decided to fall over in the grass and have a little sleep instead.” You generally feel like a lot is being said, but also it’s okay just to enjoy the good company for 250 pages.

When something’s good it’s easy to get stuck just describing it. Walking To Babylon is a rare treat, though: quality time with Bernice in the hands of someone who gets her. (Footnote: what do you mean, she didn’t write another one? Cruk!)

9/10