#8
Eye Of Heaven
By Jim Mortimore
Mortimore alert! Stand by for strangeness.
I would not have laid odds that Jim Mortimore’s first BBC Book would be a Past Doctor Adventure. Wouldn’t it be more enticing for him — a well known experimental Who writer — to jump into something new instead? That is, of course, assuming that all PDAs will feel a bit like a lost telly episode, and that is, of course, entirely wrong in this case.
Eye Of Heaven feels new. For starters, after 33 fruitless Missing Adventures my prayers have been answered: Leeeelaaaaa! Now, it might be sheer coincidence that she never got a whole novel to herself at Virgin, but I tend to assume her popularity was at a low ebb at that time and nobody asked for one. Out of all the companions it could be said that she has the most unusual background and most identifiable narrative voice, which might have made her seem like an outlier? Eye Of Heaven clearly views this as a feature and not a bug, however, as it’s an entirely first person novel — which means we’re not only getting lashings of Leela, but Leela as-told-by-Leela. If you’re anything like me this is like several missed Christmases showing up at once.
Mortimore captures her voice well. She is a hunter, always assessing situations from a point of attack. She is blunt and to the point. (“My name is not ‘gel’. It’s Leela. Use it or do not speak to me.”) She lacks the context to understand civilisation’s foibles but does not lack intelligence; in 2024 this reads a bit like neurodivergence. Perhaps that’s just me, but regardless, it makes for an unusual and fun method of teasing out information as Leela interprets it all in her own way. (“The holy marks meant, The Times, London, 21 August 1872. The Doctor had told me this cloth was a sheet from something called a newspaper. He said there was a different newspaper every day. I thought this was good: the cloth was so flimsy I could poke a hole in it with my fingers. I did so now to prove how strong I was. The hole joined others beside different marks, ones I had been told meant, Noted Archaeologist Seeks Sponsorship for Expedition to South Seas.”) There’s also a good deal of comedy to be had here, as social mores pass her by: “Stockwood groped in his pocket and pulled out some breadcrumbs, which he threw at the birds. They began to fight over them. Clever. Provoke them to fight and then kill the survivors. Twice as much food for the tribe. I held my hand out for some bread.”
As if to make up for lost time, there are bits of back story around Leela’s family and the Sevateem way of life. This serves as a handy refresher for a character that hasn’t exactly been over-saturated in print, and it allows Mortimore to indulge in some visceral and highly visual moments. He’s good at those: the trippy first person account of the death of Leela’s younger sister is not likely to leave my brain, joining the likes of the perilous star-bridge crossing in Lucifer Rising. (Which was co-written, I know, but experience suggests that this bit was mostly Jim.)
Perhaps for the same reason, this is Leela at her most Leela, with the Doctor’s personal influence appearing somewhat minimal. She is fiercely superstitious throughout, convinced that various characters are agents of Cryuni, the Sevateem spectre of death. (The Doctor attempts to right her on this but it mostly just amounts to helpless eye-rolling.) She is also unapologetically violent, at first somewhat cautious about the Doctor’s no-killing rule, then eventually leading a wholesale war against a gang of pirates, killing many and “gutting” at least one. She justifies this quite understandably with “We were at war. To lose was to die.” Do I have any better ideas? No. But it is perhaps unfortunate that the Doctor has no opportunity to take her to task for this; it feels like a not insignificant step backwards from where she was in the series at the time. (This is way beyond a Janis thorn against an assassin, last deployed in The Talons Of Weng-Chiang.) All that said, I wouldn’t be surprised if Mortimore simply wanted to showcase what is different about the character in this instance, and if so he is successful.
It is not, however, an entirely Leela-driven novel. We toggle narrators as we go along, a list that eyebrow-raisingly includes the Doctor. This is another rare treat (added to Leela, and first person in general) and Mortimore carries it off with breezy confidence. The Fourth Doctor is a difficult character to crack, but the voice here straddles the line between whimsy and depth. Even in the other characters’ segments he leaps off the page as fun (“The Doctor took out a pocket watch and flipped open the lid. ‘Eighteen seventy-two… half past August’”) and mysterious (Leela, who is able to perceive honesty through body language, notes that “The Doctor’s expression told me nothing. His body also told me nothing — beyond his interest in Stockwood’s tale”). In his own passages he regards the human world with affection and occasional surprise, and we get occasional peeks behind the proverbial curtain, such as his use of transcendental meditation to cure a bullet wound. (Featuring, casual as you like, the back story to his acquiring the Holy Ghanta before The Abominable Snowmen.)
It’s also worth saying that, although I think Leela gorges on her impulses in Eye Of Heaven, when the Doctor takes an interest it rings very true: “‘I am a hunter. There is nothing here to hunt. Except fish.’ The Doctor smiled. ‘If the mind is willing there is always something to hunt.’ ‘I do not understand.’ ‘Then hunt that. Hunt understanding. Make it your enemy and track it to its lair. Grapple with it. Take it and make it your slave. Your tool. Use it. Feast upon it. Grow fat on it.’ ‘That is silly. Understanding is not an animal. It cannot fight.’ ‘Galileo wouldn't agree with you.’” I very much agree that “hunting understanding” is how Leela approaches the world around her. Big Finish makes for good further reading here. (As, I hope, will BBC Books.)
The Doctor isn’t in it much — quite right, as you wouldn’t want to overdo the first person bits with him, but even so Leela is mostly fending for herself here. This allows for a few more narrators. To list them all would verge on spoilers for the story he’s telling, so suffice to say the main one is Horace Stockwood: a fifty-something anthropologist who visited, and fled Easter Island decades ago, leaving a friend to die for fear of the natives (angry at his theft of a sacred tablet) and some apparently, terrifyingly mobile stone heads. Stockwood’s initial prologue is another of those “in the moment” Mortimore passages, all the better for being in first person. The juggling of narrators means taking a moment to orient yourself at the start of each chapter (do they mention Janis thorns, or refer to the TARDIS as “old thing”?), but it all helps to paint an interesting picture with the story, probably more so than if we’d just had one narrator. (That is, provided you don’t find this whole setup a bit annoying. I get the sense that some do, but that’s just the nature of taking a swing.)
But wait — there’s more. As well as being a first person novel, told by rare-book-companion Leela, but also told by the Doctor, and other characters as well, Eye Of Heaven also happens out of sequence. Not bewilderingly so, it must be said: we are for the most part either following the sea voyage back to Easter Island (so Stockwood can make things right — fulfilling what has become his life’s obsession) or the lead up to it in London. It’s quite binary. But as we go on, things juggle around more enthusiastically, with more narrators added into the mix. There is a whiff of a plot reason for this (see Chapter 23), but that comes and goes somewhat in isolation from the rest of the book, leaving the stronger impression that this was simply an interesting way to tell the story. If so, well — it is interesting! But I never quite felt the last-act-of-Memento zipping up of perspectives that I hoped was coming. For what it’s worth.
The blender of viewpoints only has minor casualties, such as a critical piece of Leela’s story only being related to us later by Stockwood after she told him about it. (You would think “how I escaped from inside a whale carcass caught inside a tornado” would be worthy of its own chapter, but BBC Books are pretty rigid on page counts, so maybe that bit had to go.) There is also a major character reveal that happens in the earlier portion of the story (pre-voyage) but is related to us in the later portion, entirely without ceremony because at that point the characters already know who it is, which seemed an odd choice. Nonetheless, I didn’t have too much trouble following it, and the vast majority of the story is there. (NB: If you’re struggling to keep it all together, as I was occasionally due to sheer attention span vs excessive chopping and changing, it might help your concentration if you try and figure out the correct order of events. This only occurred to me late on and all of a sudden I raced through it!)
You could be forgiven for thinking Eye Of Heaven was a pure historical, what with so much time being spent on London malfeasance and treachery at sea. It certainly reads like a kind of genre pastiche, not unlike Mark Gatiss’s approach in The Roundheads or Andy Lane’s in All-Consuming Fire. (Another first person-er!) There are shades of Robert Louis Stevenson here, and perhaps some H. Rider Haggard. But the story is bookended with horror and sci-fi, and when the time comes to tie it all up, there’s no doubt that we’re in Doctor Who territory. The secret of the stones is a satisfyingly brain-bending one, full of dazzling visuals and huge implications. It’s a pity this is only the icing on the cake, but again, I suspect BBC Books’s 280-pages-or-bust style guide had something to do with that. (The existence of Mortimore’s Director’s Cuts suggests there’s always more book somewhere.) For good measure, the Doctor does mention the Ogri, which perhaps subtly reminds us that there are only so many “stones moving about” stories you can tell in Doctor Who before you’re on the same ground. Maybe it avoids repetition if we keep them more as a spooky suggestion.
Eye Of Heaven takes some swings. Narratively, it’s an unusual thing sprinkled with different flavours and wrapped in another unusual thing, but I’ve seen criticism levelled at it for not having enough actual plot. Is there something to that? Well, what we have is comfortably secondary to the way it’s told; I think it’s fair to say there is more artifice here than is strictly needed. But in an ongoing book series, finding interesting ways to tell stories is vital, and frankly, it’s more fun that way. I doubt this particular approach is for everybody, but I lapped it up. The characters, despite all the first person, are not the most rounded individuals outside of Leela, but there’s still a definite poignancy to Stockwood’s life story, and latterly his part in the wider sci-fi meaning. Ultimately I’m glad we passed the narrative parcel.
It’s a deceptively straightforward story for Mortimore, at least at first glance, but the narrative complexity and commitment to intensity in its action sequences made it one that fizzed around my brain after reading it. I think it justifies its choices and I think it’s one I’ll read again.
8/10
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