Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #118 – Beige Planet Mars by Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham

The New Adventures
#16
Beige Planet Mars
By Lance Parkin and Mark Clapham

Honestly, what are these books?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with unconnected adventures (say, have you ever heard of Doctor Who?) but, perhaps because I’ve read all those earlier, Doctor-ier New Adventures, I can’t help expecting this series to have a destination in mind. So far it’s mostly been a lot of monkeying about with murder mysteries. Lance Parkin co-writes this latest entry; if I know anything about him it’s that one of his earlier books, The One With The Nazi Interrogation, still resonates for Bernice Summerfield. Destination, here we come?

Not quite. Beige Planet Mars seems acutely interested in the “where are we going” question, but it’s more into wry asides than actual answers. Surprisingly for Parkin, it’s almost aggressively irreverent.

Bernice goes to Mars. About time, right? It’s her specialist subject! She is there to give a lecture which, naturally, she has barely started writing. She gazes about the buildings with awe, undeterred by the planet’s status as a giant retirement home.

This all feels like a treat, and the pacing would seem to reflect that, dithering wittily on subjects such as Earth’s attitude to Mars: “If [mankind] thought of Mars at all, they did so only in daydreams and stories: idle fancies allowing an escape from the real world, that brightened the time between renewing their car insurance via direct debit, arranging to open a current account with a building society or fretting about the rising price of unleaded petrol.” Much mirth is also had at the expense of the ageing Earth ex-pats. Old people in Bernice’s way are “a conspiracy of duffers”; she at one point waits for some turnstiles to “process their elderly blockage.” Perhaps these thoughts are there because Bernice, like Doctor Who at the time, is turning 35.

But she’s not the only one fixating on wrinkles, as several youthful, low-paid Welcomers to Mars comment internally on the incoming clientele: “[Bernice] was also the first woman through here for a week who could be described without using the word ‘sagging’ somewhere.” There’s a certain male-oriented humour to parts of the book which gets a little irksome. See also a propensity for squarely 1990s references that make very little sense in this context. (Parkin has owned up to these, at least. For good measure there are also more “okay, yes, we get it” references to Daleks than you can shake a plunger at, and a couple of carefully vague allusions to people who might star in a popular BBC sci-fi series.)

The oddly noticeable horniness on display does at least go both ways, with a randy female Pakhar (large rodent) also on the prowl; she is roundly mocked in the prose for her appearance and species, so I wouldn’t exactly call it feminism. Better is Bernice’s guilty gawping at young men on Mars, and her guttural hankering for Jason Kane who is also in this book. Hooray, etc. Is it my imagination or has he mellowed? He seems less of an outright wanker in this one, internally and openly professing his wish to have Bernice back. He’s an author now, albeit of autobiographical erotica. (Side note: the reminder of his gigolo past upsets Bernice, despite her enlightened attitude to future sexuality and sex-work in Walking To Babylon. An annoying incongruity or just people containing multitudes? I wonder.) He’s rather haplessly pathetic at times, which goes some way to making him more tolerable. I still don’t much see the appeal here, or what Benny sees: they fancy each other, they’re bad for each other, rinse, repeat. Can it really change? I doubt it. I doubt Jason even realises he’s sleeping with the Pakhar lady while he’s trying to win Bernice back.

But bumping into Jason, and then doing all sorts of other things with Jason, is just sort of normal for Bernice, isn’t it? And Beige Planet Mars will be damned if it’s the book to break the cycle. So we acknowledge the ongoing thing they have, indulge it, sidestep – almost for the entire book – Jason’s almost genetic inability to keep it in the pants and then just sort of move on. Bernice never seems seriously to entertain the idea of getting back together, just as she mostly doesn’t entertain engaging with the mystery going on around her. Because ah yes, the plot.

This, too, comes with a lampshade attachment, as a Welcomer with the hots for Benny makes her aware that danger follows in her wake and (as the back cover describes) “[her] very presence here has raised this hotel’s insurance premiums by seven point two per cent.” We glance wryly at her recent adventures, noting that “other details, such as that business with the Bane Corporation, had actually been toned down for the sake of plausibility.” He speaks for us all when he asks “What type of jaunt do you reckon this is going to be, then?” Another one seems inevitable since “it’s the classic set-up. Professor Bernice Summerfield arrives intending to have a quiet couple of days in which she can finally do some academic work, and she finds herself in a luxurious and glamorous setting … The question is… who is going to be the first guest to get murdered?”

Sure enough, here be murders – or a murder at least, that of a likeable old war vet Benny meets hours before his death. The official investigation seems determined to end before it begins, which saves us the usual tired suspicions fired at our hero, and also hints at the book’s general shrugging attitude. Bernice is determined to help, but she is marginally more determined to write that bloody speech, instead palming the murder work onto a lethargic Jason and two jolly odd-job slackers, Seez and Soaz. (I hate the names.) Trying to wriggle out of the rigidly familiar Benny structure is the closest the book comes to not just shoving a lampshade on it, but it’s amusing (and yes, meta) to note that the plot doesn’t truly kick off, taking the pace with it, until Bernice makes a critical leap during her eventual off-the-cuff speech and finally abandons academia for plot instead. (Deciding once and for all, you might say, what type of jaunt this is.)

The last chunk of Beige Planet Mars is breathlessly exciting, opting for planet-shaking chaos and a countdown to destruction. But is it all just a big concession to formula, since messrs Parkin and Clapham apparently didn’t know the ending when they started writing? Indeed, I’m not sure they even got it all down, since one character – key to the human history of Mars and with a complicated past – slips through the final pages unnoticed, possibly forgotten. The motive of the villains, hastily retrofitted to seem not so bad after all, is about as convincing as Bernice when she gets to the end of the week and hastily pulls a speech out of her bum. And really, after all the prose about humans and what they’ve done to Mars and was it a good thing or a bad thing – a seemingly central conflict set up early when Bernice befriends a rival scholar – there are no prominent Martian characters to have their say. They don’t even lampshade their absence! Bizarre.

If my train of thought has been a little all over the place, that’s largely down to the book. Beige Planet Mars isn’t The Sword Of Forever weird, but it’s weird, delighting in mockery of local tropes and keen to play with the idea of escaping them, but not having anything concrete to say about where we are, whether that’s any good, where to next, or if it has any better ideas about all of the above. Still, it’s undeniably funny and exciting – with the one giving way rather bluntly to the other by the end, before the book inevitably shrugs and buggers off to the pub.

6/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #117 – Another Girl, Another Planet by Martin Day and Len Beech

The New Adventures
#15
Another Girl, Another Planet
By Martin Day and Len Beech

Sort of a prophetic title, really. Another Girl, Another Planet. This latest Bernice Summerfield New Adventure is definitely… another one.

I only know Martin Day from The Menagerie, which had some astute character writing embedded in some generic fantasy mulch. It was his first novel; since then he’s landed the inaugural Past Doctor Adventure with BBC Books, plus a further entry in that range. Both were co-written, so he’s no doubt gained a few experience points there. With him this time is Len Beech, aka Stephen Bowkett, whose only Who work so far appears to be in Decalog 3; however, he is a seasoned author. (The blurb says this is his twentieth novel.) Between them, I had no idea what to expect, but I think with a combined back catalogue of 23 novels it ought to be pretty good.

It doesn’t have the most auspicious start. Bernice is “getting tired of Dellah, resentful of the grinding routine of seminars and tutorials.” And I mean – really? That’s perhaps a reasonable view in itself, but at this point it really ought to be held in the context of the series, which is notably not named Bernice Summerfield: Exam Marker. The last three books alone have seen her dice with death, lose new but meaningful friends and then actually die herself – twice! – one time on yer actual crucifixion cross. It would give you an unusual perspective on the monotony of academia, would it not? I appreciate that the communication wasn’t perfect between these disparate authors and the range editors (although given how long Virgin had been publishing books at this point, why is that?) but it too often feels like a novelist (or duo) turns up and acts like this is Benny’s first exciting trip off world. Such inattention to Benny’s ongoing life makes it feel like an elastic band that will always snap back. We’re 15 books in. Are we building something or not?*

Sorry – it’s a bit irrational to be pissed off about something that is, if I’m honest, endemic of the series as a whole and not the fault of messrs Day or Beech. (Jim Mortimore has also said that nobody told him the continuity ins and outs, which is probably why The Sword Of Forever is an acid trip.) But I’m reviewing the series as well as the books here, and it adds to that “another” feeling right from the get go: here is a book that isn’t going to buck trends.

Bernice is enticed off world by a note of alarm from a friend. Lizbeth Fulgate is really more of a pen pal/archaeology acquaintance, despite Benny being her emergency contact, and of course this is the first we’re hearing of her. The authors never quite nail the incongruity there, as Bernice herself notes that she hardly knows Lizbeth, yet Lizbeth feels very close to Bernice and even “loves” her, hence – presumably – trusting her with this. As a series reader it’s hard to suddenly invest in an ongoing friendship. (See the long lost heartbreak in Sword Of Forever.) Perhaps the wobbly friendship level is the authors trying to convince us, but not fully comparing each other’s notes first.

Lizbeth, herself, hardly seems worth the effort. Bernice makes occasional note of her attractiveness and thinks she has the gumption of a younger Benny, but in practice she’s a wet lettuce. Lizbeth doesn’t have a lot of agency: her thoughts mostly seem to revolve around her ex, and latterly she commits the awful trope of dating a villain and, when his honour is questioned by her dearest friends, siding with the new beau. Oh, Lizzy, no.

The authors (and Bernice) seem much more interested in her ex. Alex Mphahlele is a striking, attractive, seemingly-good-at-everything sort of chap and is soon chaperoning Bernice on her investigations. A romance is hinted at between the two, and of course there’s still the question of reconciliation with Lizbeth, but none of that is resolved. (Ordinarily I wouldn’t mind – I’m not normally one for seeking out romance in novels – but if you’re going to bang on about it, even to the extent of a mildly racist comment on the size of his manhood, then you’ve obviously got it on the brain so might as well reach some conclusion with it.)

Alex, or Mphahlele, or Alex Mphahlele – the prose is annoyingly inconsistent on what to call him, as if there are lots of Alexes running about on this alien world, and it’s not helped by a frankly amateurish reliance on characters repeating the name of the person they’re speaking to just like nobody does in real life – is at least more of a presence than Lizbeth, but he’s similarly thin on dimensions. Even his longing for Lizbeth isn’t terribly convincing, with such heart-rending dialogue as “The bitch was always headstrong” and “That’s twice I’ve tried to save your beautiful ass in as many hours.” Aww! But the really important thing here is how smokin’ hot the guy is, although you’ll have to squint to pick up on it in subtle lines like “[he] scanned the distance, looking tall and strong, like some magnificent antelope gazing over the plains.”

The investigation is the crux of the novel, not that dizzy Lizbeth has noticed, so what about that? Well, Lizbeth is on a dig on the planet Dimetos and she’s being stalked. Not, you might think, something a pen pal can do much about, but on arrival it turns out the dig is in trouble too: Lizbeth is receiving threats about accidents. Pretty soon somebody literally fills in the dig, burying the digging machines. Something sinister is afoot in Dimetos all right.

We don’t have much basis for comparison. The authors seem fascinated by Dimetos, particularly all the hover cars, but there’s nothing here you haven’t come across in the Roz and Chris novels (Original Sin) or the Benny ones (Mean Streets). A mix of glamour and squalor, some of it futuristic and some not, dodgy government types and shady business dealings. Mean Streets was one of the few Bernice books Martin Day had read and you can tell, what with the streets – though sadly not the parody – bleeding through here. There isn’t enough actual intrigue to make hanging around in Dimetos worth the page count, with the default level of excitement being: that hover car is chasing us! (What, another one?)

As for what’s going on, I had to read page 147 twice to be sure I’d read correctly: some land is being built on, but it’s actually unsafe and improperly catalogued; however some crooked types really want that development dollah so they’re hushing it up. I mean, it’s not much is it? Smacks of a daytime detective mystery, with your Poirot of choice being brought in when people start to die on a seemingly unassuming golf course.

There’s a bit more to it – a shapeshifting character with confused race memories is part of a weapons deal, and what’s underground is evidence of a heinous crime the dodgy types would also like to keep quiet – but by the time these bits are clarified, you’ve already spent too much book traipsing around a dreary land scandal that’s arguably less notable than Benny’s term papers.

Which brings us to Bernice, the linchpin. On the surface they do a good job here, with plenty of diary entries and some withering sarcasm. Tick! However, I’m not altogether convinced. That is-she-or-isn’t-she bond with Lizbeth sets the whole thing off on a wobbly footing; the diary entries often seem arbitrary and interchangeable with the third person prose; and the writing is of a generally flat standard which doesn’t bring out her best. One critical flashback is followed by “The symbolism of her memory had dropped like a jigsaw puzzle piece with uncanny precision into the current events of her life.” Oof. She is gifted with natty, definitely-Benny-ish-I-swear thoughts like “she was pleased to be able to agree unequivocally. It helped salve the effects of her earlier musings.” And quite often her feelings – and those of others – come out in great lumpy lists: “Bernice felt dreadfully sorry for all this … She was saddened by the fact that her own assistance had been anything but effective.” Eugh. Needs more zing, and needs a lot less of the rest of it. (If you’ve read this far, you’ve unlocked a bonus gripe: Benny continuity! There’s a surprising callback to her Nazi torturer in Just War, but the direct comparison drawn between that incident and being chased by some heavies here is downright laughable. Really, this is the worst thing that’s happened to her since then? Come on. If you’re going to pull triggers like that, you’d better not miss.)

You’ll have no difficulty following the action, at least. Once again Bernice gets sick of marking, answers a distress call, is embroiled in a sinister plot, gets in a few car chases and goes home. I might not mind a less funny retread of Mean Streets if it was at least well executed, but this is altogether fizzle-free stuff. It would be unlikely to hook a visiting reader. Regulars, at least, know (or may be unsurprised by) what they’re getting: another book, another runaround.

4/10

*Disclaimer: there are hints in the epilogue towards an over-arching threat that I believe we’ll see in future books. But I know this because I read about Another Girl, Another Planet afterwards – in context, it seems self-contained.

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #116 – The Sword Of Forever by Jim Mortimore

The New Adventures
#14
The Sword Of Forever
By Jim Mortimore

Oooookay then.

I’m tempted to say you never know what you’re getting with a Jim Mortimore book, but that wouldn’t be accurate. You know you’ll get something spectacular. There will be memorable, perhaps gut-wrenching set pieces and there will be world building. It will be eloquently written and, like certain really cool but slightly odd bands – Super Furry Animals come to mind – you’ll sense that, if they do something you don’t entirely get, hard luck, but they meant to do that.

I have no doubt that Jim Mortimore meant to do The Sword Of Forever, so to speak. I’m sure it was worked out within an inch of its life. But I’m nevertheless in the camp of people who put the book down only to gaze into space afterwards and go… you wha’?

A certain feeling of “normal service has been interrupted” occurs early on during a prequel chapter about a young Benny Summerfield. (Sidebar: that combination looks wrong, doesn’t it? Benny and Summerfield, both fine, but together: yuck. Still, it’s a useful way to tell us it’s a different version of the character.) Benny is on a dig with her current love, a man who will haunt her future: Daniel. And because this guy is brand new information, I immediately assumed something was deliberately and cleverly amiss. If Bernice had had a tragic love affair – or rather, had had another one – she’d have said, right? Not famously tight-lipped is our erstwhile archaeologist.

Something else seems to be up with the dates, which start us off with a 22-year-old Benny and then resume 30+ years later. Present day Bernice isn’t in her 50s, is she? Is this all a time-jump? Is it future Bernice? (Mind you, some of this might be editorial error. There’s one chapter that kills off Daniel 2 years before his arrival. On Terminus Reviews, Mortimore seems to suggest that an editor placed a gap here to suggest the time spent travelling with the Doctor, which of course we can’t speak of, and if so that’s got me thinking along the lines of bloody UNIT Dating. Sort of wish there were no dates, it might be neater.)

This feeling was compounded by the situation on Earth, where much of the action takes place. It’s riddled with radioactive fallout from a war (do we know which?) and all life is at constant risk of mutation. There are tree-people, mutant animals, you name it. Reading this I realised how few Benny books had actually visited Earth (wait, is it none?) and, to be fair, maybe Mortimore is just setting a new (horrid) status quo here since no one else has. But equally, what with the Daniel thing, and what with me being a softie who wants nicer things for Earth, on some level I was thinking: don’t worry, this isn’t really happening, wait for it, wait for iiiit. (I mean, I know it isn’t really happening, but… you know what I mean.)

Long story short, whether I’m right or wrong, I think the best way to enjoy The Sword Of Forever is to ignore that thought and just embrace the thing that it is, because if Bernice isn’t actively saying “This isn’t right” then no one is likely to. You might as well settle in. Then again, the book backs up that nagging Elseworlds feeling to an extent. (By which I mean, that’s literally the plot of the book, but… well you know, how much of it is this thing and how much is that thing?) The titular sword is a means to create time, and life, and hence reboot the world. And this happens, after Bernice is crucified. (Hold that thought.) So there’s a good chance this whole time we’ve been reading about an alternate Earth. But how much of it is supposed to be alternate, given the lack of an objective observer, I don’t know, so now I’m not sure all over again.

(Release that thought.) As in literally crucified. There’s a ton of biblical mythology in this, some of which could turn heads more sharply than The Da Vinci Code, and none of it, in my opinion, really makes it make sense to do this to Bernice. It’s… a lot, you know? The fact that she goes along with this, and her “friends” (Patience at least) help, and then in the Epilogue she has successfully been recreated and is satisfied that The Important Thing Has Been Done and then the book ends – is almost, but not quite as bizarre as doing it in the first place. Like I said, she is as enmeshed in the slightly off kilter atmosphere of this book as anyone else in it. For better or worse. (Which again makes me wonder how much of this is supposed to ring false.)

There is much violence and body horror in The Sword Of Forever, and to be fair, plenty of excitement and a couple of car chases as well. It is a RIDE. There is also the aforementioned eloquent prose, as the action chops between different times such as post-Crusades France, 80 million BC and then, right at the end, probably all of human history for the second (third?) time. I’m not sure the breadth of scope here really helped me follow along, though. At one point I was distracted from reading for more than a day and when I started the next chapter, I had no idea how we’d got there. There are basic pieces of information that I just felt too stupid to grasp, like why we discovered adult Bernice in media res, nearly frozen to death clutching the remains of a dinosaur. (The importance of the dinosaur is made clear soon after, but that still didn’t quite loop back and explain the original situation to me. I’ve probably missed a bit. Was she doing it all over again? Christ, I feel thick.)

Said dinosaur – Patience, a Utah raptor who reincarnates, meets Bernice and learns sign language – features in some of the book’s best bits, as she and other unnaturally intelligent dinosaurs deal with some nearby humans, probably on one of (?) humanity’s subsequent run-throughs but this time with dinos, and this time they’re smarter etc. The end of the book suggests she could return, which I’m all for. (I’m still not 100% sure the book justifies having an intelligent dinosaur in the cast, but be honest, it wouldn’t hurt most books, would it?)

It’s tough to review a book or even say anything useful about it when you’re struggling to get two and two to meet at a nice coffee shop. It’s really hot this week, maybe my brain just didn’t engage like it should have. To keep my critical hat affixed, then, I’m fairly certain that (time loops or ersatz Earths or no) introducing a brand new old heartbreak for Bernice is at best a risky move, and mining it for emotion is like drilling for oil in a crash mat. Also, the basic design of the book – already complex and reticent with answers even before you chop it up – worked against it, for me. Again, maybe it’s the heat. Something about the whole atmosphere of this book, though, just did not work for me.

I know others really enjoyed it, some of whom even with that sense of bafflement. The Sword Of Forever may well be your thing, just as previous Mortimores have been mine, and if so: brilliant! It contains thrills and wonders, but for me the lasting effect was of climbing out of an uncanny valley and feeling well out of there.

5/10