#19
Dead Romance
By Lawrence Miles
Things have been looking bleak for the universe since Where Angels Fear unleashed its godlike entities on Dellah. Now along comes Lawrence Miles to ask the important question: what about other universes? Can they be screwed, too?
I’m getting ahead of myself, but that’s in keeping with Dead Romance, a novel told in first person by a distinctly unreliable narrator named Christine. Her notebooks full of memories are not always in the right order.
First person is just better, in my experience. Obviously it needs to be done well – it is done very well here – and third person can be better written, but first person just gets a story into your brain faster, or gets you into the story faster. Christine’s direct and unpretentious reactions to the weirdness and horror that stalks London, and later space at large, grounds Dead Romance in a way that would have helped plenty of other New Adventures to get their ideas across. (That includes ones by Lawrence Miles. Early parts of Dead Romance recall gnarly NAs like Christmas On A Rational Planet or The Death Of Art – all spooky WTF imagery and gross body horror. But this time there’s a clear purpose from start to finish, and nothing feels like it’s happening just to sprinkle on a bit of atmosphere.) The occasional bit of information arriving too early, like a wound in Christine’s leg or an as-yet-unmentioned character named Khiste, really only serves to make you rethink what you’ve already read and want to know more. I was never confused by Dead Romance, but the gulf between what had been revealed and what was very quietly still a mystery often fluctuated.
Here’s the gist: Christine, who tells us from the start that the world ended in October 1970, is having a terrible time thanks to rather too much cocaine and some kind of cannibalistic creature attacking her. She also has a run in with Chris Cwej, who later rescues her and recruits her to the cause. He is here on a mission from his employers (hold that thought) and as Christine knows too much, she’ll go along with him. She travels to other worlds and between universes as Chris tries to do something about the Entities.
As with The Mary-Sue Extrusion, we’re seeing this conflict from an unusual perspective, once again with Bernice Summerfield more as a concept than a character. An interesting editorial decision there. (I sympathise with anyone wondering when the hell we’re going to get on with it, Bernice-vs-the-Gods wise, or even where-is-Brax wise. But I’m not having a bad time waiting for it.) Christine, not a native of the twenty-sixth century, has even less idea what all this means that Dave Stone’s protagonist du jour. But I think both authors approach their outsider perspectives differently. Christine’s lack of preconceptions about the Time Lords are especially helpful when framing the good and the bad in this conflict.
Because ah yes, Chris’s employers – referred to here as “the time travellers” – stand no chance of anonymity behind Miles’s barely-trying air quotes. And they do not come out of this well. Some of their questionable practices are likely just the worst-case-scenario inventions of Christine, such as a murder-regeneration cycle that gradually causes more agony in the recipient. But at least one is on full display in front of her, as Chris foggily remembers his time with an “Evil Renegade” who went around ruining everything, which handily makes him more compliant around said renegade’s big collared betters. When they’re not brainwashing the friendliest character in this series, they’re experimenting on him and others in the front lines, causing mutations into things that will fight better, perhaps survive a little longer. Perhaps this isn’t really “our” Chris – we’ll see what he has to say for himself if he crops up again – but maybe that’s just me hoping, because good grief, the damage to Chris in this, both physical and mental.
And what’s it all for? The time travellers (why not) aren’t actively fighting the Entities in this: they’re retreating, possibly to think of a better idea later on in relative safety. Either way it’s not going to get rid of the problem. This fits, in a rather twisted way, with their policy of non-intervention. They retreated quite openly in Where Angels Fear, so it’s really just an escalation of that. Even the creatures they are most keen to negotiate with – the sphinxes, dimension-expanding monsters that originally worked with the Entities – aren’t directly interested in the conflict. Even the Entities aren’t uniform on the matter. (The Mary-Sue Extrusion highlighted that different “gods” have their own interests, and we are reminded of that here.) After a while it begins to feel like this is more about them being challenged than a genuine assessment of the threat they are facing. Later, when things kick off in this much-maligned 1970, they arguably have even less to do with the arc plot and more to do with the time travellers themselves and their warped monopoly on the worlds they observe.
(I have heard it said that Dead Romance feels like a novel apart from the series, and this bit of plot supports that. But the central question of what will be done in the name of defeating monsters slots perfectly into what the books are doing right now. And besides, no writer could create Dead Romance without being fundamentally interested in Doctor Who and the New Adventures. This one is too broad and too deep for BBC Books by a long shot, but it still finds time to casually throw in a sequel to Shada.)
Underneath all this is Christine, gazing in wonder at the weird worlds where Chris must make treaties with monsters, before – or during – finding herself back in her flat. Again with that out-of-sequence storytelling: she can never entirely hold on to a sense of where she is in the story, or even in her relationship with Chris, which seems to happen mostly when we’re not looking. All of this creates a tantalising sense of the story being both enormous and room-sized, as much itself in a cavernous realm of space as it is in a ruined magic shop. This fits entirely with the story itself, where monsters bigger than human imagination can be reasoned with and huge decisions can be made as simply as tossing a coin. It’s a novel that shrinks and expands throughout, as if sphinxes had settled in between the words.
It’s tempting to dive more into the plot and what it all means for Christine and Chris, but perhaps it’s better to tear those pages out of the notebook. Dead Romance holds together more confidently than I’m used to, and despite its earnest Doctor Who nerdiness – because this is the guy who wrote Alien Bodies, which barely seems bleak at all now – it feels like it ought to appear on sci-fi bookshelves on its own merits, a nightmare you want to share with others. You should go and read it, in other words, despite how gloomy I’ve made it sound. If Christine can stare all this stuff right in the face, so can you.
9/10
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