#22
The Joy Device
By Justin Richards
The New Adventures were at an awkward stage when this one rolled around. We’ve introduced a major arc, run with it more consistently than the range has done before, then appeared to resolve it, but introduced a new arc element anyway, then knocked that one off that in the next book. The main arc is over or merely paused, depending on who you ask, and we’re just… still here. It’s like waiting for a bus. They’ve brought Justin Richards back one book after his quasi-finale (did they even let him leave the building?), probably in the hope that at least he’ll know what to do.
By all accounts he didn’t, because The Joy Device is anything but a decisive next step. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Bernice needs a holiday. Before long she becomes entangled in a crime and a murder due to a Hitchcockian wrong-place-wrong-time contrivance. Various parties seek a mysterious artefact. No one seems remotely interested in what is or isn’t happening on Dellah. It’s as if they all collectively picked up a script that fell down the back of the sofa ten books ago.
None of that is by mistake. Per Richards: “[They] came to me … and said ‘We need another Benny book and we need it in a month.’ I said, ‘Well, to be honest I've written the last-ever Benny book. Doing some more is a shame from a narrative point of view.’” As a stopgap, he came up with something even he didn’t think would sustain a novel, and probably no one would think of as essential to read, but which might pass the time amiably enough. Think, average Benny novel, but as a farce. (“So, average Benny novel then?” you might say. No comment.)
Bernice’s need for a holiday does at least come via the arc plot. She is no longer dying, but chunks of her memory have gone for good. She doesn’t know how to cope with that – having copious journals isn’t the quick win you might think, partly because she rewrites them all the time. So she wants to make new memories. The best way to do that, she reckons, is to live dangerously, which horrifies all her closest friends. (It’s worth mentioning here that she isn’t 100% committed to this and expects them to talk her round, but Jason makes such a balls up of it that off she goes. (It is also worth mentioning that all her closest friends are men. Isn’t that weird?)) So Braxiatel, Chris, Jason and Clarence decide to keep a close eye on her activities and swoop in – literally viz Clarence – to remove any dangerous obstacles. Bernice is going to Mr Magoo it, in other words, whether she likes it or not.
I’d be lying if I said this approach reaps a lot of rewards (as would Richards: “I don't think that's a book. It might be a short story but it won't sustain a novel”), but I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it. The entire conceit is based on how much the characters care for Bernice, and that appeals to me enormously. One of the major issues I’ve had with Jason as a character is that he butts heads with Bernice, usually as a tired prelude to the old “they fancy each other really” routine, but often with a real unpleasantness that makes you think, well why bother adding him in then? Since Beige Planet Mars though, he’s kept the twattishness to a gentle sarcasm and by all accounts he actually wants to be here. Suddenly the bullish uselessness is endearing, and the concern - though not enough to sustain a marriage between two unstoppable forces - is genuine. (As I said about another Dave Stone protagonist in Return To The Fractured Planet, I wish they’d reached this point sooner. I’d read more books about this guy.) To a lesser extent, concern for Bernice makes Clarence a better character too: he has identity crises for days, but one thing he’s sure of is his platonic love for our scrappy archaeologist. It anchors him, which is no mean feat for an artificial life form with giant angel wings. In short, these two running around to make sure Bernice is okay made me smile a lot.
It’s also quite funny, although your mileage may vary. I’ve watched enough Frasier to rub my hands with glee at the thought of a comical misunderstanding, and there’s tons of that here, with Bernice being assured of danger at every corner by her well-travelled guide Dent Harper only to see nothing of the sort. “I appreciate your tales of danger and mystery and intrigue, really I do. But everyone here is just as nice as pie.” This slowly drives Harper to distraction, which is quite fun in itself. Later, when the two of them are tasked with finding Dorpfeld’s Prism – our mysterious object du jour – they narrowly escape execution only because, unknown to them, Jason is jabbing a knife against the mob boss in question, so she suddenly becomes courteous.
Some of the writing is just downright good, like this bit of unseen slapstick: “‘The genuine ones are incredibly strong and emit a perfect C-flat when you tap the lip of the opening on something.’ She carefully lifted it up again. ‘Here, like this.’ The embarrassed silence was broken by the sound of the lift arriving. Dent followed Benny in without a word. Benny coughed. ‘Sorry about that,’ she muttered. ‘Do you have someone who clears up?’” And I’d direct anyone in need of perking up to Chapter 2 – the comedy of errors as Bernice makes her mind up and her friends panic is a thing of bliss.
How far any of the above will take you probably depends on your tolerance for frothy comedy and gentle character beats. I was clearly in the mood for it, and even then I found the story almost aggressively lightweight. The whole debacle around Dorpfeld’s Prism feels like it should be interesting, but it isn’t. The artefact causes whoever holds it to be happy, but only because they are oblivious to danger. That’s a thematic link to what Jason and Clarence are doing for Bernice, but even then it’s just the same thing again, except more literal and more obviously a bad idea. So bad you sort of wonder what the local crime boss thinks she’ll get out of stealing it. But even then, Bernice eventually gets hold of the thing and is fine actually, so I don’t really know what Richards is saying. It doesn’t do much to enhance the action; narratively all it does is defuse situations or get people killed by proxy. As for the idea that real happiness can’t be as easy as holding a magic gem, I’m struggling to even take the piss out of such a basic concept, but Bernice does pretty much have a nice time with or without it, so…
Most of the non-regular characters are similar non-starters. The crime boss, Mrs Winther, shows promise as a weary and potentially reasonable fixture of the underworld, but firstly it’s hard to root for someone with such a patently daft retirement plan, and secondly Richards won’t stop making references to her weight, as if that has any bearing on her characterisation. (Technically it could do, but it doesn’t, so it just seems cruel.) Her number 2, Nikole, thinks her boss is old and weak and is itching to bump her off and take over the business - but first of all, how bog standard is that, and second of all, that was Mrs Winther’s plan for her anyway. Chill, love, the promotion’s in the post.
Perhaps wonkiest of all is Dent Harper, Bernice’s famous guide, who just doesn’t quite add up. He’s an adventurer who keeps journals and rewrites them – okay, there’s a parallel with Bernice. (Again, it ain’t subtle.) But he’s a little different in that his rewrites exist to sensationalise his life and make him sound better. (Bernice’s rewrites also come from a place of insecurity but there’s no pomposity there, and she keeps the original versions.) After we’re introduced to Dent and the concept that he embellishes things, he then appears to believe his own hype, which makes for good comic fodder. But then, with Jason and Clarence taking care of business all around him, it’s not really possible to show that his (overhyped) worldview is wrong – because it isn’t, if external forces need to get in the way to make it safer than it really is. You could show him being surprised at more real life danger happening than is normal, and then bafflement when it’s taken away before Bernice can spot it, but that’s a layer of complication that just isn’t happening. As with Dorpfeld’s Prism then, I ended up wondering what Richards was trying to achieve here. A comic buffoon who can’t tell reality from aggrandisement? Probably, but he’d have had exactly the same journey if he really was the danger-loving guy he purports to be, and that doesn’t seem right.
Probably the only material gain from The Joy Device is Bernice’s perspective on memory loss: she eventually decides that not knowing how she got out of this scrape or that disaster is no bad thing really, so long as she knows that she did. This is not as much of a boon as getting her memories back - and I still think that was a weird, mean thing to do to your protagonist in her surely soon-to-end series - but it gives her something of a restorative to be getting on with. (And it probably would have felt a bit pat anyway if she got them back right after she cured her terminal illness. Here’s an idea, just don’t fire these random life-altering horrors at her if you don’t want to keep them around.) Apart from all that, The Joy Device is knowingly just a runaround, destined to be enjoyable in the moment or irritating as part of a series. I got through it very quickly, which ought to count for something, and like Benny I really did have a nice time, whilst sort of wishing more would happen.
6/10
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