#9
Longest Day
By Michael Collier
Well, I’ve certainly had quicker days.
Michael Collier — otherwise known as BBC Books editor Stephen Cole, perhaps wearing a jaunty false moustache — throws his authorial hat in the ring with Longest Day. I am guessing this was so he could keep a close eye on the canon event (to use Spider-Verse parlance) that needs to happen at the end of it, a bit like Peter Darvill-Evans joining the New Adventures when it was time to bring Ace back. However, as with Deceit, I came away from this feeling like the canon event — in this case, Sam and the Doctor getting separated — could have been folded into a better book. Or any other book at all, really. Nothing about Longest Day screams: “This is the only sequence of events that could lead to that outcome!”
None of which is a problem if you happened to enjoy the sequence of events we got, but alas, here we are.
Time moves at varying speeds in Longest Day, including so slowly that there is nothing to do but die by degrees, slowly melting away into agonised nothingness. Coincidentally, this phenomenon also occurs in the book’s plot. The prologue is the best example of this, with one character getting caught in a rush of time that ages them in front of the other’s eyes. To make matters more interesting, the scenes are shuffled about — shades of Eye Of Heaven? — but that approach is not seen again.
Before we get nitpicky, that’s my critical complaint with this one. A planet with separate time-zones which can kill you in an instant is full of promise, but Longest Day doesn’t take full advantage of that, for the most part marooning its characters (and us) on a boring desert world that could just as easily be Tatooine, with any random natural disaster you fancy happening underneath. Most of the strife and conflict here is simply not reliant on the time problem, with characters needing to metaphorically turn to the camera and tell us this planet’s got its dates fatally mixed up and any minute now, just you wait, it’ll go foom! Probably!
Longest Day is far more invested in the various aggressive factions fighting or just trying to survive on Hirath (the planet in question), and it’s in these characters that we get our best look at the bones of Collier/Cole’s writing. We’re introduced to characters like Taaln and Vost, who feature in the prologue and don’t make much contribution beyond that. Then there’s Anstaar and Vasid, bored workers on the orbiting moon station that monitors the time shifts. Then back on Hirath there’s a band of rebels against a galactic regime, with leader Felbaac and fellows Tanhith, Yast, Maadip, Elb, Dwynaar, Sost, Yattle, Caft and Crichter. Later they are menaced by said regime in the form of Sangton, Traxes and Fettal.
A couple of problems leap out at me there, and they complement each other. Unless your book is very long or somehow finds time to develop everyone (and have a plot) in 280 pages or less, that’s too many characters. (I haven’t even mentioned the invading army of Kusks, seen on the cover, who thank goodness don’t have names.) Also, I get that it’s SF and these aren’t meant to be human beings, but good god this has to be the most tin-eared collection of random noises masquerading as names I’ve ever seen. It does not remotely help when a novel is bouncing frantically from one bunch of people to another, as this one (weary sigh) does constantly, to then have nothing instinctive to grab onto about their names. “Felbaac” doesn’t evoke anything. “Taaln” sounds like a vocal warm-up. How do you even pronounce “Crichter”? As if to throw us a life jacket, the dialogue frequently does that “use the other person’s name” trick that comes in so handy in audio drama but tends to sound forced elsewhere. It’s positively embarrassing here. “You’re so smug, Anstaar.” “Dwynaar, we have all toiled.” “‘Fair words, Yast,’ replied Felbaac.” Verily, Zlorgak, but what hath Vortron to say about it?
But hey, what’s in a name? As long as a character is interesting, it doesn’t matter if they have a teeth-itchingly clumsy sci-fi moniker. And on that score: hmm. I think it’s fair to say that Cole is going for a degree of nuance here, especially with the rebels stranded on Hirath. Their leader has real objections to the K’Arme (brutalist police regime and only sci-fi-apostrophe-name in the book), but he is also a glory hound who will instantly harm or sacrifice subordinates for his cause, which half the time seems to be just self gratification anyway. Second in command Tanhith seems like an all round better egg, and he rescues Sam (or at least delays her execution) at one point, but later he sacrifices a wounded enemy without a second thought to save the group. Fettal is a sadistic enemy soldier, but when critically hurt she still turns to her adversaries for help.
These are shades of grey, more or less, but Malcolm Hulke or Paul Leonard it ain’t. The overwhelming effect of these characters is that they’re all as bad as each other. Even the ones we’re unambiguously supposed to like, such as Anstaar (I am having to scroll up and check these names every single time, FFS) complains so much that it’s hard to get attached. I reached a point early on in Longest Day when I thought, what am I meant to enjoy about this? Who am I clinging to? Certainly not Vasid, a whiny, paranoid and violent sex pest, but then for some reason he’s our designated co-pilot for about a hundred pages of the Doctor’s scenes. (I sat there thinking, this will pay off, he’ll become a deeper character somehow. He absolutely does not.)
There’s not a lot of nuance outside of the goodies-or-are-they-baddies-actually. When the K’Arme arrive on Hirath they’re so obviously brutal that their mission to avoid bad publicity (!) seems like merely delaying the inevitable. The Kusks are keen to get their hands/mandibles etc on something hidden on Hirath, which will of course allow them to rule the universe etc. They’re a bland bunch to read about. (They even have a Leader who says “Excellent!”) Their physical description suggests something very offbeat, but that could also have done with some red pen: I got lost trying to picture them, although the combination of a “protruding groin” and “hardened breasts” stuck out. Your move, fan artists. (No wonder the front cover is just the head.) Description is generally more miss than hit in Longest Day, with Cole returning curiously often to people having sweaty brows and things being “thick”. (Serious drinking game suggestion there, every time something is “thick”. It can be anything — a throat, fingers, a metaphorical fog…) Dialogue is rarely memorable, thanks in part to all those goofy names. We know the rebels don’t think Sam can be trusted, for instance, because they occasionally say things like “you stupid freak bitch”. (Yeah, but what do they really think?)
Ah, poor old Sam: she’s having a bit of a shocker. When we meet her she’s nursing downright unambiguous romantic feelings for the Doctor, which I’m not sure has been a consistent idea so far, but I guess the editor of the range ought to be able to set out his stall. On arrival at the moon station she starts quipping in a way that’s really more annoying than funny (with lots of exclamation marks! These denote humour!), but you could rightly argue that being crap at jokes is as in keeping with being seventeen as are her fluid feelings about this handsome guy she knows. When faced with a particularly paranoid Vasid, who has quite possibly just committed manslaughter, she launches into a painfully weird and unconvincing flirt to distract him, which involves implicating the Doctor which, uh, do you think that’s wise? Then for most of the book she’s stuck on Hirath, getting called names by rebels and used as a distraction by Felbaac. At one point she bludgeons herself unconscious with the butt of a rifle, which I’m not sure you could even do, but hey. It’s a rough old time, in a nutshell, peppered with some not entirely convincing behaviour.
She does at least pause to consider things now and again, such as the Doctor (nudge nudge), her parents (who as described here don’t quite align with the couple of activists set up in earlier books), her possible other self that exists in another timeline (set up in Alien Bodies — keep them story irons in the fire!) and her general sense of morality, which mainly takes the form of a polite dig at War Of The Daleks. (“She remembered trying to convince a Thal warrior that fighting and obeying orders you didn’t believe in were [sic] bad, that they killed your inner spirit. She shuddered at how fatuous her comments must have sounded. Life was never that simple … She’d try harder not to preach in future.”) Again, there’s some nuance in here, and that’s commendable. I just wish the experience stringing it all together was more enjoyable.
Over in the corner we’ve got the Doctor, cutting a not very impressive figure I must say. I’m not trying to score him on successes here, but he manages to miss what happens to Anstaar and then to Sam (both forcibly teleported away, hopefully not to their deaths), spends a lot of time with Vasid (no thanks) and seems powerless to do much of anything about the imminent doom of Hirath, or whatever’s going on with Sam. (He literally has no idea.) I don’t want to give the impression that If Character Not Succeed At Thing Then Story Bad — I just didn’t get a lot out of the action he was engaged with. It’s not as if he greatly reflects on the fact that he’s on the back foot the whole time.
Separating them like this certainly does nothing to suggest what the great appeal of Sam is to the Doctor. Yes, it helps Sam’s angst if he is (comically) oblivious to her feelings (and there is more of this later with Anstaar making an innuendo he just can’t grasp), but an integral part of the Doctor/companion dynamic is what they like about each other, and his side of that is AWOL. The Doctor really could be looking after a lost kid here. (But like, not very well, lol.) I would say fair enough, that’s just how it is, but that’s not consistent. Look at Vampire Science! (Frankly, “look at Vampire Science” ought to be a standard EDA rule.)
This lack of a relationship perhaps makes the ending weaker than it should be, but then, maybe that’s why we got the ending. Thinking the Doctor has died, Anstaar helps an unconscious Sam into a Kusk ship. As the Doctor revives, Sam is off to fates unknown, all by herself. (Anstaar bails in an escape pod before Sam wakes up. Remember, she’s the one we’re meant to like.) It’s possible that absence is intended to make the hearts grow fonder, and I’m curious how it’ll play out. As with much about Longest Day, though, the interesting thing here is more of a bullet point than a successful culmination of what the book is going for.
What this book has is a lot of characters, a lot of scenes, a lot of desert and a lot of unpleasantness. What it doesn’t have is a strong unifying story, so I absolutely waded through it, forcing my way across arguments and attacks and gobbledygook names that I just didn’t care about. It’s frustratingly still a good idea, this chopped-up planet thing: Doctor Who did something similar back in The War Games (although the Doctor seems to have forgotten about that here) and Virgin would have a go at it later in Return To The Fractured Planet. (They arguably already did in Oblivion, which came out the same month as this, but that was whole different timelines across a planet at once.) Longest Day sometimes glimpses what it could do with that, but all the same it ends up haplessly stuck in the same interminable, nightmarish stasis as its characters.
3/10
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