#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
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