#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
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