#44
Byzantium!
By Keith Topping
My first impression on plucking this one from the bookshelf was similar to the first impression of the bowl of petunias plummeting to its doom in Hitchhiker’s Guide: oh no, not again.
I did not like The King Of Terror very much. Horses for courses – there are enthusiastic reviews for it out there (NZDWFC gave it 5/5), so what do I know? But I still found it a rocky read with its off-the-chain violence, poorly-judged character swings and bizarre air of silliness that seemed to throw the whole thing even more off course. I was surprised to see the author back again so soon.
His next effort is a very different beast. (Whether that has anything to do with The King Of Terror, I don’t know.) Byzantium! is still a fairly violent story but it’s set in a violent time, so that tracks; there is still a little bit of silliness, but it’s in manageable doses; and as for the wild character swings, well there are still a few of those. (Whoops.) Bottom line, it’s a more reasoned and less frantic novel than his last one. Phew.
The setup is a bit unusual. At first it seems like Topping is going to replace The Romans outright, as the First Doctor, Ian, Barbara and Vicki appear fresh from the cliffhanger of The Rescue with the TARDIS falling off a cliff. (Vicki is clearly new here which also dates it.) They are in Byzantium (duh) rather than Rome, but otherwise it’s the same time period as The Romans. This all turns out to be an extended prologue to the televised story, ending with the TARDIS in Rome and the travellers on their way to find it. That’s an interesting proposition for a novel, sticking another adventure onto an existing one, but it begs the question: is there much you can do that won’t just repeat The Romans?
The basic gist is similar. The four characters are separated in a Roman city and they must work to get back together and find the TARDIS. But since we’ve got the added scope of a novel it can be a much bigger separation than what we got on TV (a home invasion): violent Zealots start a riot in a bustling city square, killing many and forcing the four travellers to go their separate ways. Each is completely oblivious to the fate of the others.
This is a good way for us to explore the makeup of Byzantium. Ian gets into the good graces of the Romans, seeing the high society on offer to a select few; Barbara is gradually trusted by the Jews, aka a more everyday society whose antipathy boils over into the Zealots; Vicki is taken in by a family of Greeks, the downtrodden native group who have every reason to hate the Romans; and the Doctor finds himself with a band of Christians, currently the city’s outliers and quick to be persecuted while they work on the tenets of their religion. Byzantium is a powder keg and if the Zealots hadn’t lit the fuse then somebody else would have.
I think Topping’s right in that this is a situation worth exploring, even if it means bolting your book onto an existing telly script. The tricky bit is the number of moving parts, and how to get momentum out of each one. Where The Romans split into fairly archetypal parts of Roman society, allowing for clear and dynamic action in each one (slaves, assassins, the front and back of the Emperor’s court), Byzantium! concerns a complex society with many different ingredients. Frankly there are a lot of characters and they don’t all have particularly pressing goals – irritations, dislikes and suspicions, but not much in the way of a mission. This even extends to the regulars, who from the outset either assume that their friends are dead or otherwise can’t get any immediate help to find out more, so just carry on with what they’re doing. This is critical: the impetus for The Romans (find each other and get back to the villa) isn’t there, so despite the more violent and exciting inciting incident Byzantium! veers away from the more usual quest narrative, moving towards a slice of life drama instead.
That’s not a bad thing – it would be redundant to repeat the telly story any more than we’re already doing just by setting this one so close to it. But it does mean spending great swathes of the novel wondering when the Doctor, Ian, Barbara or Vicki are going to get a ruddy move on and start looking for one another. There is drama to be had in the meantime, with the Zealots planning further outrage and a Roman mutiny in the offing, but while these things have clear figureheads and they could result in bloodshed, all the same it’s a bit difficult to track their progress in such a densely populated story. One very-full-of-himself Roman officer or promiscuous-and-power-hungry Roman wife is very much like another after a while, and the Zealots aren’t in it much comparatively.
This is where our four characters come in handy, anchoring the action. Barbara moves past the initial suspicion of the Jewish quarter but never dispels it entirely; she captures the eye of Hieronymous, an officer with great sway, and later rebuffs him painfully, which all feels very “60s Doctor Who episode”. His decision, once spurned, to persecute the Christians to an ever greater degree felt like a turning point in the plot (page 160!) but it doesn’t hugely change things, although it does add some serious light and shade to the Jewish characters. The Doctor, meanwhile, has quite a nice time helping to translate and write the gospel of Mark, which is “the equivalent of collaborating with Shakespeare between draft one and draft two of Hamlet.” He’s initially a rather bleak figure here, weighed down by the loss of his friends, which puts him in a good position to be buoyed by the Christians. (There’s probably something to be said by someone more religiously-minded than me about the emphasis on peaceful Christianity in this book versus the other religions, but I’ll have to sit it out as it’s all Greek to me. So to speak.)
Vicki has perhaps the biggest character arc in Byzantium!, eventually becoming the focal point to get the gang back together. Straight away she goes from the raw nerve of The Rescue to yet another tragedy in (apparently) losing the TARDIS crew. It makes sense that she feels out of place pretty much for the entire book, befriending a young Greek girl but incurring the wrath of her mother. She is clearly still coming to terms with growing up – something that Topping elucidates quite well at times, less well at others.
The problem is her blunt, occasionally just plain weird manner of speaking. “Sorry but that’s, like, pure dead easy for you to say.” / “That sounds peachy-fine to me.” / “Look, don’t trade any of that philosophical babble with me, old man.” It just doesn’t sound like her. I think Topping covers this somewhat by emphasising her insecurities: “She came from an age of computers, electronics, space travel, interactive learning, virtual reality, chemical stimulation, instant maturity. She was fourteen, going on 108, yet to these people … she was what appeared to be to the naked eye: a mere child.” Later a character calls her on it: “You are a child, my angel. Oh, you try to obscure that. You like to think that you are old before your time. That you have had your childhood stolen by tragedy and circumstance. You have seen much that the likes of I shall never see. But, at heart, you are still blessed with the vigour of youth and the freedom that goes with it.” None of this quite squares with the fact that Maureen O’Brien was given generally sweet and innocent dialogue on screen, or at least dialogue that runs counter to the grouchy teen we see here, but at least there’s a rationale.
Then you have Ian. Story-wise it’s not bad stuff: he befriends some officers and a respected librarian (called Fabulous – this isn’t important, I just thought you should know) which gives him a passing familiarity with the local politics and shenanigans and makes it easier for us to follow it. He also finds himself fending off advances from wives and female slaves, lending a little of that farcical flavour from The Romans. Honestly this kind of thing feels more suited to Steven Taylor, or even Fitz – and it’s especially odd where Byzantium! is bookended with “Ian and Barbara married in the 1970s” vignettes but the book offers no material about their relationship. (Ian isn’t even saying “no” because his heart lies elsewhere. He just doesn’t want anyone to have another reason to murder him.)
His dialogue is the bigger issue, though. For whatever reason Topping characterises Ian as a Cockney wide-boy, with all sorts of sayings and dismissive bits of slang that just sound bizarre coming from the generally-RP schoolteacher. “Do you mind awfully if I get up, only it pen and inks a bit down here.” / “Okay, so the former lady of the house goes like the netty door when the plague’s in town.” / “If you want to talk geography, darlin’, then fine.” / “It was a well-known fact (which Barbara Wright had spotted some time ago) that it was the quiet birds that always got Ian Chesterton’s attention. She was peach [sic], this slave girl.” Again, the basic skeleton of this seems right enough for the era: he was similarly well-in with the local court in The Crusade, and he gets an inscribed weapon here to match his Knighthood there. It’s just weird that an author as specific about the nerdy details could swing and miss so hard on what the character sounds like. (Meanwhile he makes time for Billy fluffs, having the Doctor say “Cheddarton” and “Chestington” on the same page.)
There are other peculiar details. The Doctor seems to know Vicki’s future, somehow. (“I shall take care of [Vicki], [he] said quietly. ‘Her destiny was mapped for her thousands of years before she was ever born.” I’m guessing this is a general “make the Doctor seem more mystical” gimmick?) He also mentions Mondas, despite not finding out about that until his final story. (Same again?) There’s a possible cameo from an older Vicki, or “Cressida” anyway, even though the dates for that don’t remotely line up. There’s the strange detail that the TARDIS fell off a cliff at the end of The Rescue, where we find it at the beginning of Byzantium!, but it presumably needs do so again once it gets to Rome in order for the stories to link up. (One of those funny little messes that the story, in trying to be clever, creates for itself.) On the whole though, Byzantium! plays it straight – although there is a bit where someone says “What have the Romans ever done for us?” I guess he just couldn’t help himself. (Honourable wackiness mention: the exclamation mark in the title.)
I mention all of this because The King Of Terror (again) had a tendency towards quirky, ill-judged asides. Byzantium! also does that a little, but it’s subtle, for instance using the flight of a passing bird to connect various scenes, or lines like: “When Georgadis and Evangeline awoke a sleepy Vicki to give her similar news…” or “Ian Chesterton had hardly slept either, though for vastly different reasons.” I have a well-documented (moaned about) dislike of frequent scene changes in books and that’s obviously going to occur in a book with four protagonists, but this feels like a graceful way to handle it. The same applies to the character descriptions. Overly detailed to the point of distraction in TKOT, here it’s mostly left to our imaginations, or otherwise handled with care. “Handsome and dignified, a thin and wiry frame that spoke of many meals missed so that others could eat instead” beats pretty much any attempt in the earlier book. Byzantium! probably benefits from less zany subject matter and tone than its predecessor, but it just feels overall like a more assured piece of writing. (Just for posterity though, there are quite a few typos in it, and at least one historical snafu re Prometheus being transposed to Rome as Vulcan – that was Hephaestus, surely? But it mostly goes off without a hitch.)
It’s hard to disagree with Ian’s uncertain summary at the end: “Is it just me, or didn’t we solve anything?” Byzantium! presents a complicated problem (a place teeming with different peoples and interests; conflicts within conflicts) and just watches it all fall apart. The main characters don’t influence it much, and I’m not sure what they learn from it other than a generally better or more bloody-nosed understanding of history. (The Doctor gets this in early: “Do you really believe everything you read in those history books of yours, child? Do you think it was all that simple?”) I’ve seen Byzantium! criticised for a lack of plot and I can’t really dispute that; it feels like we have four protagonists mostly just sat about existing in a troubled place. It could certainly be tighter and more exciting – somehow, it’s more low-key than the story it’s (by implication) expanding upon. And yet, I liked hanging around here, watching the world go by, wincing at the occasional murder. It’s strangely peaceful. I do quite want to watch The Romans now, though.
7/10
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