#17
Beltempest
By Jim Mortimore
If you thought Eye Of Heaven seemed a bit small scale for Jim Mortimore (at least until the bit with all the interplanetary portals) then maybe Beltempest will be more your speed. It’s in a similar mould to books like Parasite, dealing in massive and weird spatial phenomena with planets aplenty. It arguably has an even greater scale than that earlier book — so it’s surprising that it comes in noticeably below the standard 280 pages of a BBC Book.
As per Pieces Of Eighth, the writing for Beltempest wasn’t the happiest of Mortimore’s career. The book came in “short and late” as a result. This is good to know, because Beltempest has issues, some of which make a bit more sense when you bear that in mind. But in other areas I wonder if there were just fundamental frictions in what the book was going for.
The Doctor and Sam find themselves facing a solar system in crisis: the star Bel is dying at an absurdly fast rate, throwing out fluctuations that affect the dozens of celestial bodies in orbit. Various races and factions are at risk and they are scrambling. The Doctor and Sam are separated (only for most of it; they meet up in the middle), with the Doctor helping the military to stabilise the situation/find a solution and Sam falling in with a surprisingly effective resurrection cult.
It’s worth mentioning that the arrival of another huge star/planet/space problem rankles a little when we only just had that in The Janus Conjunction, and my review of that was already complaining of the format getting familiar. That’s not to say Mortimore doesn’t do anything interesting or new with it here — just that, well, was there something in the water in 1998 that made everybody write about space disasters? He seems aware of this, at least, putting in a couple of polite nods to Baxendale’s book: “What was it with suns these days? [Sam] thought of the near-disasters Janus had brought about, and wondered if the Belannian sun was being manipulated in the same way.” / “[The Doctor] wondered vaguely if the TARDIS had got a bee in her bonnet about wayward suns at the moment.”
And to be fair, this is different: this time billions (trillions?) of lives are in danger across multiple inhabited worlds. The story, admittedly in this respect also like Janus and various others, deals with events set in motion aeons ago by an ancient race, but the details are all Mortimore: the “alien beings” are so unlike anything we’d recognise that they wouldn’t even know we were there, living their lives on a scale we can’t comprehend. This is big picture stuff.
Is it too big, though? Enormous numbers of people die in this and it’s very difficult to feel the weight of that, firstly on a personal level, secondly when it happens over and over again. The crisis does boil down during a hectic moment when Sam is literally overrun by thoughtless fellow refugees; she ends up briefly caring for a young boy she calls Danny, who shortly afterwards goes back to his parents, but leaves her with something to think about. There are also attempts to focus the action on some of the military personnel the Doctor is working with, particularly a stressed doctor called Conaway, but these are quite fleeting. The action is at times so globe(s)trotting that I felt I’d missed a character’s introduction, or couldn’t quite keep track of what planet or spaceship they were currently on. The novel’s running commentary of widespread disaster becomes somewhat numbing after a while.
This, though, feels like a deliberate theme. Beltempest opens and closes with a commentary on the lifespan of stars and celestial bodies, how incalculable they are compared with our own. There are other bits like the Doctor’s discussion with Conaway about how we wouldn’t be able to interpret the signals of an ant trying to talk to us. And just generally there are nods to the incomprehensibility of scale like: “The chaos was indescribable … Individual identities no longer existed.” / “Sam did not know how many of the refugees, the crews, were dead, or how many more were dying. All she knew was that she couldn’t do anything about it.” / “Sam wanted to watch what happened but it all took place on a level beyond the perception of human eyes. The second most significant thing she would ever experience and she could not sense it in any way.” It gets so that when the Doctor casually says “I’ve saved more than a hundred billion people in the last few days,” my first thought was is that good then? compared with the number they started with. (My second thought was did you actually?, since it’s mostly just the deaths we hear about. There isn’t time or, in 250 pages, space to go and meaningfully hang out with the survivors, or get much of a feel for their now dead worlds.)
I don’t really know what wider point to take from the scale of all this besides, after a while: well that’s a lot isn’t it? Or: some forms of life are beyond our understanding. Which is interesting, but on an academic rather than an emotional level, for me. When the problem is finally resolved, it comes in a way that doesn’t exactly stop the death toll so much as put a cap on it, which is… still pretty horrible, but with an SF upside that again we are too small to comprehend or feel very pleased about. Our departure from Beltempest is sharp indeed, with no time to decompress. Then again, how long would have been enough?
Perhaps the best way to boil down this sort of chaos, indeed the thing that makes Beltempest part of a series, is seeing it all through the eyes of its lead characters. Separating the two of them seems like a smart move to cover more ground, though again it’s already a popular EDA “thing” and it prevents/saves authors from having to write the Eighth Doctor and Sam dynamic, which really ought to have been a prerequisite post-Seeing I. Mortimore wasn’t sure what to make of Sam (which strikes me as editorially worrying — surely they had a decent style guide by now, especially after Seeing I?) and the result makes that feeling fairly clear.
On the plus side, there are plenty of references to her recent adventures — Janus, Vanderdeken’s Children, Placebo Effect, Seeing I, so basically he read or was briefed on all the latest books which is good — so there is a textual understanding of where the character is at. But the general beats in Beltempest mostly concern growing up and making her own decisions — something she hasn’t noticeably been prevented from doing by the Doctor, especially after Seeing I. Her quest to save lives here feels authentically Sam-ish, as does the very human degree to which it goes wrong, though that feels like ground we should have sufficiently covered by now. (And what are we saying there? She’s a good person but like, calm it down a bit?) There’s an out for that, but it’s unlikely to be popular: Sam is quietly possessed by another unfathomable form of life (as part of the cult she falls in with) so she gets to make some crazy decisions towards the end. This is definitely a Sam trope by this point, as well as a general Doctor Who crutch for not knowing what to do with the companion, which authors have been using since Transit. The most interesting Sam moments here are arguably when she grapples with fake memories, implanted by some other unfathomable alien guys in order to motivate her. But even there, the fact that those aren’t her memories leaves the exercise curiously light on any lasting effect, just as her overall possession — as in Kursaal — means that in psychological terms, it weren’t me, guv, so there’s no need to worry about it.
This leaves us with the (Eighth) Doctor, who does at least have some reference footage to work with, but again it feels like some sort of style guide would have been beneficial. The Doctor here is a being of “manic intensity,” literally bouncing around and losing his thread in ways that annoy pretty much everyone around him, including Sam. (“He was behaving like a little kid; a rich kid, with too much money and no common sense, abandoned by irresponsible parents to amuse himself at the expense of the local townsfolk. When was he going to learn? You didn’t earn respect by being irresponsible.” / “Aellini felt anger build. ‘Lives are at stake here.’”)
Mortimore is historically great at writing the Doctor, particularly at suggesting his weird depths and oddities, but despite a reference to this one being “different now … younger, more mature,” his default setting seems to be a guy on springs with an IV hooked up to some lemonade. Which, to be fair, he sometimes was in the TV Movie — but only sometimes, and that was specifically a story about him just having regenerated, so he perhaps had an extra few screw loose. Perhaps this likeable sugary quality is a deliberate tonic for all the chaos around him here. There certainly are some delightful moments that brighten the mood, such as a cheery whip-round to borrow clothing to plugs holes in a spaceship before they imminently decompress, or a prison wheeze where he constructs a “deadly weapon” just to encourage the guards to let them out faster. But that cheeriness can seem a bit crazed in context, even in the context of Sam: “Every few moments he would hum distractedly. Then he would stop, as his thoughts turned inevitably to Sam, then, putting aside the pain of loss, he would start again.” Perhaps that sort of disconnectedness, and his levity in general, is part of the book’s (maybe) theme of unfathomable beings — the Doctor too is beyond us, beyond normal considerations for things. If so, that’s not a bad take, but in the context of recent novels (of which Beltempest is specifically aware) in which he has nearly (or actually) lost Sam and moved mountains to get her back, it doesn’t ring true.
As is often the case in these books, Beltempest has some great ideas. I loved the concept underpinning it all, the reason for the planetary weirdness. (I was less keen on the religious cult and the overtly nudge-wink Christ imagery, but it very much seems like there was something in the water for Mortimore to write that the same year as The Sword Of Forever.) Exactly why the ideas come at us the way they do here, in great breathless blasts or in casual comments or in sudden late interludes containing vital information, I don’t know. From context it seems that the book wasn’t finished to Mortimore’s satisfaction, which is probably it, hence a newer and expanded version in the works ala his earlier rewrite of Blood Heat. Giving Beltempest more room to breathe seems like the best course of action: maybe throttle some of that carnage into view for us, and make us truly feel the difference between e.g. “Belannia VII” and “Belannia VIII”. Would it even make sense to break this stuff down, though, or does that go against the point of the book? I’ll have to wait and see. In this incarnation however, Beltempest is very much the thing that it portrays: a massive event in space that we can’t possibly hope to fathom.
5/10
No comments:
Post a Comment