#46
Psi-ence Fiction
By Chris Boucher
Chris Boucher is a bit like the proverbial box of chocolates. His scripts tend to be imaginative and they can be tight and brilliant, but sometimes they’re scattered and vague. His novels have followed suit: where there is a bedrock of clear ideas you get Corpse Marker, where there isn’t, Last Man Running. (So I guess you do know what to expect from him in a sense? Checkmate, Forrest Gump’s mum.)
I had hoped that Corpse Marker would be a turning point, but Psi-ence Fiction is a return to a less controlled, less effective Boucher instead. It even shows signs of skipping a thorough edit — hell, someone should have had a word with him about that title. Although come to think of it, an awkward pun does sort of set the tone for what follows.
It’s a Chris Boucher book so it’s going to feature the Fourth Doctor and Leela, which is good news: he wrote for the telly series during one of its peaks and he originated Leela with that Doctor, so he’s great at capturing those two voices. The combative twosome encounter both a profound sense of unease and some sort of time anomaly near a university in England. Said university houses a parapsychology department where Professor Barry Hitchins tests the psi abilities of a group of teens. Spookiness ensues.
If you read the I, Who entry on Psi-ence Fiction you’ll notice that the plot synopsis breaks down into two parts: everything that happens before the last thirty or so pages and then everything that happens in the last thirty or so pages. The first part amounts to one paragraph. Meanwhile in the actual book, the Doctor makes a mental note on page 194 that “There was finally some concrete evidence that something was happening.” It’s not plot-heavy, in other words, relying heavily on atmosphere instead. That’s not so terrible — very good stories have been told that are mostly just atmosphere and vibes. Image Of The Fendahl, for one. The downside, though, is that I can barely remember two thirds of this despite having just finished it, and its attempt to build atmosphere doesn’t come off anyway.
The Doctor and Leela are, predictably, fine. They split up for most of Psi-ence Fiction which seems more like a bug than a feature, but anyway, the Doctor is full of his usual ebullience and (albeit ineffectively) charm. He even indulges in a few of Boucher’s patented political aphorisms, such as: “[The Doctor] was struck once again by how uniform people’s behaviour became when they put on a uniform.” I could have done without his getting collared by security guards and policemen just for being eccentric – I’m not sure if that’s supposed to be a “sign of the times” thing where the story is, unusually for these two, set in the 00s, but it felt like wasted time. Similarly, while no reader is in doubt that the Doctor has us all beat in the “genius” department, his ability to suss the particular universal and temporal peril going on here is akin to plucking it out of the ether, which isn’t very satisfying to read. Nor is the resolution, which pretty much resolves itself.
Leela is usually the highpoint of Boucher’s novels and that trend continues here. She keenly identifies a psychic threat, having been menaced in a similar way by the Tesh in The Face Of Evil. To deal with this she recalls her old teachings and considers the ways that her shamans and the Doctor differ in their methods, as well as how much influence they still have on her now, which is all pretty interesting. “There had been so many instructions and orders, so much advice, she wondered if she would ever be allowed to think for herself.” You get the sense that Boucher isn’t done developing her character, which is a great reason to write tie-in novels. It would be nice though if she had more to do with the plot. Despite all that introspection, plus interacting with and at times protecting one of the psi-kids, she doesn’t impact very much on events; she is yanked into the TARDIS by the Doctor at the climax. I was hoping she’d play a more decisive part.
Neither of them seems critical, or even really relevant to what’s happening until the very end. They mark time by chasing literal shadows or investigating half-baked conspiracies involving bottled water. For most of the sludgy “pre-finale” section of the book, aka most of it, we’re marooned with other characters, starting with the teens at the university. You will quickly notice a theme in their dialogue: they’re funny. Or more accurately, they think they’re funny. It’s one of those dynamics where every individual character wisecracks all the time and every other character finds it irritating, then does it right back. I’ve read reviews that complain of not being able to tell them apart, and that’s sadly accurate.
The problem’s even worse than that, however: it’s every group of characters in the book. There are several university lecturers, each with some sort of stake in Hitchins’ work. (He is mostly referred to as “Barry”, which given that we’re on first name terms with all the students pushes him confusingly into the background at times.) The lecturers all gripe and bitch at each other all the time, so they don’t sound all that dissimilar either. Then there are security guards and policemen – at times I was unclear who belonged to which group – and all of them appeared to be gearing up for an open mic night. None of them are funny, none of them find each other funny, I can’t tell if we’re supposed to find them funny, but on goes the exhausting banter anyway, unearthing solid gold like: “‘No it isn’t,’ Ralph said, ‘and stop calling me Shirley.’” We also get stuff like “Enough with the comedy routine” – see the universal law of Irritating Characters Are Irritating. Telling me how annoying they are does not make them less annoying.
Some of it’s not so much unfunny banter as weak sitcom writing, with a general background radiation of swearwords possibly intended to grit things up, or more likely add a dash of Blackadder-ish snark. See distracting lines like “Put the sodding sandwich down, put the sodding coffee down, put this sodding character in the SODDING LOCKUP!” Urgh. A general lack of punctuation makes it all read as a bit breathless and try-hard.
Throughout Psi-ence Fiction (and boy, is it annoying to keep typing out that title) I wondered if all of this was meant to be creepy. I’m leaning towards yes. We open with a séance where one character is screamed at by a murderous and distractingly profane spirit. The tone of this is immediately difficult to take seriously – constantly calling her a BITCH! in all caps is a bit too bizarre for Doctor Who, like a rude older relative at a party – but said character isn’t strongly affected by it anyway, or not enough to give the insouciance a rest. The creepiness just goes away when the encounter ends. Another character is affected when an encounter with a Ouija board gets a little too threatening, but for some reason we’re not around for the scene where she is so distraught that she takes her own life, making that seem like a random crime that occurred in the background.
In the meantime, on we go with the relentlessly dippy dialogue, with endless references to one of them imitating Hugh Grant and snarky digs about TV shows. At no point was I concerned for their welfare: they all seem fine. I was generally wondering where the Doctor and Leela had got to, and whether I could come too. Nothing terribly frightening is happening in their absence, other than the prospect of more scenes with these people.
Things are a little more consistent around Leela as she hunts for the vague sense of unease or darkness that seems to exist nearby – but “vague” is the word for it, and no amount of Boucher’s at times atmospheric repetition can fill the hole where a defined sense of threat ought to be. Saying that, he really is good at using talismanic phrases to build a bit of mood: “She must not look back no matter how much she wanted to. She must not stop running no matter how much she wanted to. She must get out of the wood. She must get out of the darkness.” / “Everything was moving except for her: everything was motionless except for her.” But it’s all just weird hallucinations and misdirection that might lead to her death, or a murder, but never gets that far. Anyway, it’s not up to Leela to take this crisis by the shoulders and shake it into submission, more’s the pity, so she essentially just has a weird old time until things tidy themselves up at the end.
When the finale rolls around and it’s time to connect the psi-kids plot with the “temporal anomaly” business from the beginning, it just about works, but you’ve got to suspend a hell of a lot of disbelief even for Who. The emotional reason for a character inventing a device that can turn back time is sound enough – it would have been more satisfying if we’d spent time building up to it beforehand, ah well – but the actual concept of a university lecturer building such a thing, and in such a way that it could obliterate the universe, is a teensy bit of a leap, no? His reason for requiring a psychic collaborator is thin as tissue paper as well. All in all, I was left imagining a whiteboard with PSYCHIC VISIONS and TIME STUFF on it, and a lot of question marks in-between. Boucher employs that repetition trick again to make for a more atmospheric and exciting finale, but he can’t rise above a welter of technobabble, a load of “just vibes” prose and what’s essentially a magic wand that fixes it all.
I wonder if this one missed the usual editing window. The plot is ungainly at best, speed-running all of its important stuff at the last hurdle – surely that could have been tidied up. There are dropped speech marks and typos aplenty, with “Chole” for “Chloe,” “Gallifray” instead of “Gallifrey,” a reference to “the sweeny” instead of The Sweeney. And there are peculiar Americanisms like cellular phone, cemetery and galoshes – hardly a crime, but why are they there? I’d like to think the characterisation could have been tightened up a bit as well, but if you looked at that too critically you’d probably lose sheer, aimless banter that amounted to whole chapters.
It’s worth stressing that he really does write the Fourth Doctor and Leela well, and that’s a significant part of why you’d pick up a Doctor Who book by Chris Boucher in the first place. It’s quite readable and hares along at a good pace even though pound for pound little is actually happening, which is no small feat. There are aspects that genuinely work quite well, like the way Boucher writes a character with mind-reading abilities, sneakily picking up in dialogue on something we just read in third person prose. I wish there was more of that, and more was made of it.
I’ve had worse experiences reading BBC Books. This just isn’t among the particularly good experiences.
4/10
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