#56
The Suns Of Caresh
By Paul Saint
BBC Books seemed very keen on new authors at this point, with several trying out just for the space of one novel. (I’m sure the lack of return visits had more to do with scheduling than with them not impressing anybody; none of these “first goes” are as bumpy as Virgin’s.) The Suns Of Caresh is the latest and it shows us what Paul Saint — apparently a pseudonym for Paul Beardsley — has to offer.
For a while I wondered if he’d taken an original manuscript and stapled on just enough Doctor Who to make the grade. The book is initially about a non-Time Lord: Simon Haldane, an unfulfilled geek living in Chichester. He loves to read sci-fi novels when he’s not working at his mind-numbing factory job. Enter Troy Game, a beautiful young woman from another planet who can’t remember exactly what she’s doing here. Simon takes her in and his life quickly adapts. Meanwhile, some sort of threat is turning people to stone.
I’m not even mad if this was a touched up original manuscript as it’s quite an entertaining (if distinctly wish-fulfilly) setup. “Normal man adjusts to alien in his life” could be a sitcom; however, Saint (let’s stick with that) is clearly one of those writers like Paul Leonard or Nick Walters who really wants to know more about aliens and planets, as he invests a lot in Troy Game and her home of Caresh. There are lots of immersive little details about her, such as her appearance (short hair, big irises, no earlobes), her abilities (she can sing in an otherworldly way, read thoughts and replicate other languages), her social oddity (clothes are optional) and her customs (sex is strictly seasonal on Caresh). There are also little bits of secondary cleverness, like how her “language telepathy” doesn’t work over the phone and is actually the result of external interference.
Then there’s Caresh: a planet with two suns and an irregular orbit, unpredictable seasons and climates, different islands with their own levels of technology and antipathies towards each other, and giant locust monsters into the bargain. This is no “it’s a desert so I guess it’s called Aridius” situation, thought has clearly been applied.
He’s also spent time on the plot, or rather plots, as there’s a lot to get your head around. It’s here that Doctor Who gets back into the equation (you can exhale everybody) as the Third Doctor has been cajoled into investigating a time fracture on Earth that extends from 1972 to 1999. He encountered the earlier part during his Earth exile. (Saint going for controversy here with his UNIT dating!) A Time Lady with whom he is familiar, Solenti, catches him on his post-Three Doctors adventures and explains that this has something to do with another Time Lord, Roche. The Doctor has a matter of days to sort this out but for some reason, aiming for the 1972 dig site, he ends up in Chichester at the other end. The Doctor and Jo soon encounter time disturbances, stone bodies, a Time Lord in a mental institution, a dead TARDIS, monstrous “Fates” and Troy Game. And somewhere in all that is Ezekiel Child, the archaeologist from 1972 who is somehow a younger man in 1999.
The book is not short of ideas. Saint sprinkles in little ones as well, particularly when it comes to TARDISes. Jo reminisces about witty off-screen trips: “Sometimes it landed in UNIT HQ, often when she least expected to see home again; once it landed on a planet covered entirely by an ocean that was nowhere more than knee-deep; on another occasion it materialised inside a small cave, blocking off the exit so they had no choice but to depart without ever seeing what the world outside looked like. This had frustrated the Doctor no end.” Saint spends more than the usual amount of effort just on the TARDIS noise: “The twilit Dagusan ruins echoed with the moans of a gigantic living engine.” / “The TARDIS began its familiar landing noise, something between the roar of an animal and the sound of a very large slab being dragged over concrete.” And TARDISes feature interestingly in the plot, with one accidentally draining a lake when its doors are eroded open, and the Doctor’s one suffering a disastrous autopilot malfunction and crashing through various objects and cars — a spectacular sequence that eventually got a big laugh out of me: “‘This cannot be happening.’ Two men were carrying a large sheet of plate glass across a quiet road when they saw the TARDIS heading for them.”
This is not, then, an author unfamiliar with or uninterested in Doctor Who, despite there being a fair stretch of it without the Doctor. See also, Saint’s world-building with Time Lords. He invented Solenti for this and treats her with enough confidence that I half expect the blind mystery woman and her regenerating guide dog to turn up again. He also imbues Roche with peculiar abilities, such as a very targeted and mischievous talent with regeneration. So many parts of The Suns Of Caresh feel like the writer has sat with them for a bit. It’s nice.
It’s still a lot to keep together, which perhaps explains why the overall framework feels paradoxically small: a lot of it is just characters hunting through a richly-described Chichester to either find dots on a scanner or evade death by stone-transforming Fury. This is later swapped out for Bognor Regis (whoa, slow down!) and then — mercifully for any sci-fi fans like the fictional Simon — Caresh, so we can finally tie all this into what’s happening there, viz an impending ecological disaster that has somehow set a couple of enraged Furies against Roche on Earth.
I enjoyed the deceptive and quite fun smallness of it all, buoyed by Saint’s skill with ideas of all sizes, but I don’t think he quite ties everything together. Simon is our point of view character for a while — a role he shares with Troy Game who to be fair has the more interesting perspective, e.g. thinking that buses are moving buildings — but he exits the book quite abruptly after 150 pages, never to be missed. This is perhaps just desserts for his incel-ish behaviour towards Troy Game, but such righteous misfortune still caught me by surprise for a pseudo protagonist. Perhaps I’m just struggling to reconcile this with the idea that — no offence Paul Saint, I know nothing about you — Simon feels a bit like an author insert at first. Other aspects of his life feel slightly too developed to be such non-starters in the end, like the flirty co-worker who somehow knows what Troy Game is called, and the occult journalist/foil who seems to have his own thing going on and then just isn’t in the book any more. All things considered he’s not beating the “already had half a novel on the go” allegations.
The wider plot stumbles a bit too. So much effort goes into the time fracture and explaining the time fracture, and on that score at least there is a great visual focal point in Ezekiel Child — but he’s barely in it, and his curious affliction of ageing and experiencing life backwards is entirely a reported event, despite being interesting enough to support a novel. (You might call it The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button.) For all that I enjoyed the general hijinks in Chichester, with raid-the-toybox antics involving TARDISes and regeneration, the moment things moved to Caresh I wondered if we truly needed any of that; none of it meaningfully changes the pickle the planet is in.
That, too, takes a bit of explaining — and attempts are made, the phrase “Let me get this straight” is used more than once — but the beat for beat action on Caresh is still just more chase stuff, with escaping and recapturing and really quite redundant haircuts for the Doctor and Jo to get us to the image on the front cover. They’re sussed as suspicious types immediately anyway. (It’s difficult to mind what with the hilarious way it’s handled. “‘Jo!’ the Doctor barked. ‘I am not doing it and that's final.’ It was not final, of course. They argued some more and the Doctor eventually conceded, with rather poor grace … There was complete silence except for the combined hum of the clippers and the control room. Jo eventually broke the silence. She said, ‘Are you going anywhere special on your holidays this year, sir?’”) There’s some good derring do with boats and giant locusts to build momentum, but then a last minute misunderstanding from Troy Game pointlessly upends everything at the eleventh hour. It’s one of those books that puts a lot of effort into hitting its page count — quite slyly on Earth, and then pretty obviously on Caresh with stunts like that.
There are still interesting things to be found in the book’s secondary setting. Solenti has been hinting about leaving Roche’s work undone, which of course doesn’t sit right with the Doctor. This is where that annoying misconception comes in — but then right next to it is a very good moral conundrum about Roche’s plan and its consequences. Unfortunately the Doctor doesn’t need to weigh his options on it, he just drums up an (admittedly very neat) plan B instead. Which, hooray etc, but that’s then just another interesting thing that isn’t quite in focus. (See also, the Doctor deliberately not telling Solenti he has a companion. What was that in aid of?)
Much about The Suns Of Caresh is wobbly-legged in that “first time author” way, but it’s one of those where rather than be annoyed about it I just wished there had been more books to course-correct any imperfections. Paul Saint has a good imagination in or out of an obvious Doctor Who setting, and for what it’s worth he’s great at the Who stuff too, writing a very enjoyable and recognisable Third Doctor and Jo. (Honourable “not that bit” mention for the Doctor’s spiky temper tantrum towards Jo near the end. In the bin please.) Much of what I liked about it was its ideas and sense of fun; some of what I liked about it may not have even been intentional, such as the references to now quaint modern tech. (“He’d risen early so that he could surf the Internet before the lines were busy.” Bless! A thousand times bless! Mind you this could already have been social commentary by 2002. Depends on Paul’s internet speeds.) What I didn’t like so much was generally due to chewing it over afterwards — in the moment, it worked well enough. I’d say that despite some uneven patches this is a colourful entry and worth seeking out.
7/10
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