#20
Tears Of The Oracle
By Justin Richards
Oof.
Look, I know every book can’t be Dead Romance, and that a sideways nightmare not even featuring Bernice Summerfield won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. But for the very next instalment to not only jump back into the structurally sound embrace of Justin Richards, but also make things far more traditional overall, feels like an over-correction to me.
Still, there might be reasons for that besides “that’s just how he do.” During my customary post-book visit to Simon Guerrier’s Bernice Summerfield — The Inside Story I learned that Richards believed he was writing the final Benny book. (There was a lot of that about at the time: Where Angels Fear was assumed by some to be the end.) That certainly might explain why a series that has just spent the last few books pushing further and further away from its conventions should suddenly find Bernice – oh, lord – on an archaeological dig that turns into a murder mystery. It’s probably supposed to be a victory lap. You don’t do those in completely uncharted territory.
It also explains why Richards delves into recent continuity more than you’d expect for just another one-off trope jolly. For a while I thought he was just being thorough, but the significance piles up: the treaty between the People and Time Lords, established in Dead Romance, is front and centre, and we pick up Chris’s story from there; the events and characters of Walking To Babylon get a mention; Clarence’s mysterious origins are given some more fuel; The Mary-Sue Extrusion is potentially still important to Bernice; a character arc I didn’t know was a character arc is resolved from Dragons’ Wrath; characters from The Medusa Effect are seen again as Bernice and Braxiatel revisit Dellah, which then shoves us right back into Where Angels Fear; hell, one of the book’s sub-sub plots is setting up the Braxiatel Collection from Richards’ (and Braxiatel’s) debut, Theatre Of War. (Said back-when-they-had-the-license book also forms a critical plot point near the end.) There’s even a flashback to Happy Endings! Plus Richards canonises, as much as you can without the license, Brax being the Doctor’s brother. This stuff isn’t continuity box-ticking, it’s “don’t forget to turn out the lights when you go.” You can even read one of the book’s final flourishes as a neat resolution to the Gods arc. I know hindsight is wonderful, but Richards has just made it rather awkward for that idea to keep going for three more books, one of them his. (And to think, I was only just marvelling at how well the editors and authors had been keeping it together.)
You’ve got to admire – and I do – the effort it takes to tie this all together. But a lot of that stuff comes quite near the end, or becomes clear at that point, with Tears Of The Oracle feeling in the main like a decent meat and potatoes dig of the week. The main concern of the plot, as well as being a riff on The Thing (and perhaps a riff on riffs on The Thing), even feels like suspiciously similar territory to The Medusa Effect (also by Richards), as a series of historic deaths threaten to happen again to Bernice and friends. In this case a trip to The Oracle, a fortune-telling statue long thought lost, goes better than expected until an unexplained shape-shifter starts offing the expedition. Is this what happened to the previous expedition? Paranoia increases, naturally, and Bernice hurtles ever closer to the book’s framing device, which sees her preparing to complete a murder-suicide bid.
It’s good, solid stuff, as you would rightly expect from Richards, though if anything I thought the team would be more paranoid. (It doesn’t seem to occur to them that the killer must be one of them. Goodness knows who they thought dunnit.) The paranoia angle is very specifically tied to having contact with the killer, and it mainly manifests in Bernice going on a panicked rampage at the end, which is rather frustrating to read as we’ve got very little reason to believe she’s right and everyone else is wrong.
What with all the continuity affecting Braxiatel, the People and even – significantly but also just as a means to have him show up – Chris, who regenerates in this one, Bernice comes close to being a silent partner in the book, especially when she starts drifting along with the antagonistic folie a deux. (Bernice not being entirely herself is also one of the range’s tropes, while we’re at it.) It’s an odd one to end on, in theory at least, since it also lobs a terminal illness into the mix. Yes, we end on a note of hope and a spirit of adventure. You know in your gut that she’s going to zoom off and beat this thing, with or without further adventures. But if you know the range is wrapping up now or even soon, “she’s dying” could seem like a tasteless footnote.
As ever, you’re in safe hands with Richards, and this is definitely a tighter effort than The Medusa Effect. I think I’m just not the most receptive audience for his puzzle-solving narratives; the tendency throughout Tears Of The Oracle to present information in journal entries, confessions or other forms of data seems oddly antiquated, like Victorian novels that are all diaries. That form of storytelling also ironically minimises Bernice, unless she’s writing all the journals, which might seem a rather choosy criticism after flying through Dead Romance without her, but if you’re going to send her specifically on a last hoorah with trowels and crime scenes then she really ought to run away with it.
6/10
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