#7
Ghost Devices
By Simon Bucher-Jones
When I review books one of the main things I turn to for help (apart from the pool of Doctor Who trivia taking up brain space which perhaps should have gone towards useful everyday skills, but hey ho) is what the author did last time. Ghost Devices sees the return of Simon Bucher-Jones. His debut The Death Of Art didn’t quite work for me. I didn’t hate it; in fact I enjoyed many of its facets and ideas. The whole thing though could be described as a bit of a mood that I couldn’t get into. Therefore – no offence to any passing Bucher-Joneses – I’d be lying if I said I cracked open Ghost Devices with a giddy sense of optimism.
Well, that was then. Fast forward to now and it turns out Ghost Devices is much more my kind of thing. Hooray!
The prologue features a sentient factory questioning its lot. Neurotic robots are a bit of a cheat code to get me to enjoy things, so that made a good first impression. And then once again we’re dabbling in The Also People: a logical extension of “neurotic robots”, as well as a perennial fan favourite and increasingly the Rosetta Stone for Bernice-novel world-building. Who could object? (Although, sidebar: let’s see some non-Aaronovitch reference points as well, shall we?)
The plot concerns ancient machines of death with varying levels of sentience that try to commit their usual murders, genocides etc but end up squirting condiments or performing magic shows instead. This makes for a delightfully offbeat intergalactic crisis, but it has made certain warlords understandably upset. The head of a crime family is keen to start the heads rolling by visiting the homeworld of the Vo’lach – the ancient death-machine builders – while Vo’lach agents are keen to monitor the situation and keep any visitors at bay. Both parties hide in plain sight once an archaeological expedition crosses their path.
And speaking of Bernice: she is hired by an agent of God (as in the big computer one) to go on an expedition with the promise that a duplicate will write her next book for her. The perpetually late post-grad agrees, despite somewhat meta misgivings: “I know my life seems to be falling into a Bernice-has-a-university-problem-goes-on-a-field-trip-almost-gets-killed-but-triumphs-brilliantly-and-solves-her-domestic-crisis-into-the-bargain style of thing, but just occasionally I do need to do some real work.” (Put a pin in that for later.)
The expedition is to Canopusi IV, more specifically The Spire: a gargantuan tower of mysterious origin that is worshipped by the somewhat primitive, if seemingly agreeable natives. The Spire is made of “futurite,” a crystal with temporal properties, and the structure sends back information from the future. (Bits of futurite also litter the nearby desert, which is a mystery for later.) Bernice can’t believe her luck in getting onto this expedition. Professor Fellows, who is leading it, cannot believe his bad luck for exactly the same reason: “Bernice ‘Jonah’ Summerfield. The woman had been a jinx on so many offworld field trips, that it had got to be something of a joke.”
And, well, this is entirely fair, isn’t it? We’ve all heard the clever-clever argument that the Doctor turning up somewhere in the TARDIS is a trigger for certain doom, but that’s just wrong, like blaming firemen for fires. Canonically he goes where he’s needed – often not the place he intended. The doom was already happening! Bernice Summerfield doesn’t (or doesn’t always) have that in-built excuse, so the fact that she keeps turning up at dig sites that become bomb sites is worthy of comment. This week God has asked nicely for her help, which might as well be the TARDIS picking a location out of a hat, but unless she’s going to start working for The People on the regular that’s a narrative sticking plaster. And anyway, Fellows and his colleagues don’t know about that.
All of this hints at a narrative question that I’m happy to see articulated, even if there’s no answer yet: can you really get away with dropping Benny into an archaeological dig-of-doom in every book? Does she do anything else? Isn’t her academic life ticking along as well? (Now unpin that thought from earlier: even Bernice has noticed the level of contrivance in her life.) What else, in other words, can these books do? At least Doctor Who can swap our its star wars for historicals, or just give the interstellar megalomaniacs a time out. Bernice finds herself increasingly in a rut, which is undoubtedly bags of fun to be in but is a bit tricky for sustaining a series.
Lots to ponder then. Ghost Devices doesn’t, of course, push us to the next stage (in my ignorance I still hope there is one), but it does some interesting things with Bernice. She is again (!) not quite the protagonist, more of a team player, with Fellows leading a strand of story at the Spire once Benny and others head off to find the Vo’lach (who, multitaskers they, also built the Spire). With the added context of Fellows (see “Jonah”) it seems less of a wrench not revolving it all around her. She is only one component of these expeditions, and it would threaten suspension of disbelief to always position her so. Bernice, in this one, consequently feels like a scruffy little variable you’re delighted to cut back to. Like the larger meta questions, this lack of focus feels like it’s either going to be solved or I’ll just have to get used to it, but this time the mix works.
Bucher-Jones writes Bernice very well generally, which isn’t always a given. There’s the essential wit: “‘It’s the wider implications I’m worried about. I just don’t see why anyone would use poison.’ Bernice hesitated. ‘If I said to kill him, would I be hot or cold?’” There’s the way she jumps at anything resembling pop culture: “‘It’s me, I am the Air Vent itself, not some hunky rescuer in a torn vest trapped with his wife, who needs a vital operation, in the bowels of a nuclear reactor captured by terrorists in the path of a runaway Continental Siege Engine.’ ‘You saw Die Hardest?’” There are the little meta series-of-adventures nods, as already mentioned: “Well, it’s just that you seem a liberal, educated, benevolent sort of Priest-King, not at all a raging fanatic.” He also nails that aspect of moulding the prose around her, sometimes giving Dave Stone a run for his funny-long-sentence money: “Staggering back from a pub in the students’ quarter, at twelve bells past closing time, the bells being measures of spirits, not of chronology, Professor Bernice Summerfield hadn’t expected to find an angel waiting on the stairs.”
But apart from all the funny stuff there’s grit too. God’s offer of a pseudo-you doing her homework has its appeal of course, but it also sends her into a mild existential crisis. (Do you really need her if you can outsource like that? Ah, the joys of AI!) The Spire gives her a vision of the future that seemingly includes murder, about which she anguishes – until a moment of crisis when she fulfils it because circumstances demand it, and she accepts the cost. (There is an out for this shortly afterwards, but you can’t unring that bell, can you?) At times she wonders how Chris or Roz would handle the situation. And when she saves the day in the end, which incidentally she can only do by wilfully endangering a friend, she may have fundamentally damaged the universe. Existential crises are here again! Things weigh on Bernice in a way that they do not seem to – within earshot of the reader anyway – for the Doctor. Highlighting those differences, like funny robots and air vents with opinions, is my jam.
There’s so much to like. Any hang-ups? Well, yes: there’s a little stylistic quirk carried over from The Death Of Art, although that was far from the first New Adventure to use it, but for me it’s a biggie. You guessed it: short sections. Cut, cut, cut goes the action across the page. And I’ll give it this: we are often cutting around the same scene. But the effect on me is the same. My attention span just can’t take it. Ask me to restart, as a paragraph break does, and I might take the opportunity to go and do something else. It’s an interruption. And it’s generally not the same scene. This is a stylistic choice and not everyone will be bothered by it. (You might even find it improves a book. Quick cutting is after all pretty standard when the action mounts towards the end.) But it made Ghost Devices a somewhat long, stuttery experience for me, despite its merits.
Apart from that it’s very funny and gently puzzling, most of the time in a good way. (At one point a time paradox unravels in far greater detail than I’m used to, which was cool and broadly easy to follow. But then, for example, a lingering plot point is answered by Bernice on Page 206 as if it was entirely obvious, which it wasn’t – perhaps a bit of editorial lampshading there? Still, it made me laugh.)
It’s refreshing to revisit an author and find myself on their wavelength this time around. I hope for more pleasant surprises in the range.
7/10
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