#45
Bullet Time
By David A. McIntee
I wasn’t keen to read this one because I knew a thing that happened in it.
You know how it is with decades-old books and spoilers: if you’re going to read about them then you run that risk. I try to sort of detect review spoilers by osmosis, then jump over them and skim the rest while squinting, but to be honest this has about the same success rate as finding reviews with or without spoilers in the first place. I didn’t have a hope with this one.
Can a Past Doctor Adventure even have a spoilery thing in it? Turns out yes. Received wisdom tells us that as these books are set between TV episodes they can’t do anything major, but first off, they got rid of the continuity links on the back covers a while ago, which perhaps tells us that they give less of a hoot about that now. Second, with the Seventh Doctor and no Ace this one is implicitly set after the TV series wrapped up, so it’s basically a New Adventure and fair game. Third, it’s by David A. McIntee, who wanted to do A Big Spoilery Thing in a previous book (also a PDA) but was talked out of it. We have new editors at this point who must have been more receptive to his grisly pitches, so spoiler warning, if you care about that sort of thing.
We don’t need to worry about it for the majority of Bullet Time, which has a lot of other stuff going on. (Too much, but what else is new with David A. McIntee.) We open in Hong Kong, 1997, near the time of the handover. This was still quite recent when the book came out, making Bullet Time a neat “historical” adventure. (See also the adorable detail that people’s phones keep running out of credit. Aww!) A UFO is shot down; shortly afterwards Sarah Jane Smith, investigating a porn ring, gets thrown out of a plane and rescued in mid-air, pretty much exactly like in the opening scene in Moonraker. Not shy about action scenes, is our David.
Bullet Time quickly settles down into a more low-key thriller with multiple groups — UNIT, the cops, the Triads, Sarah, her rescuer Tom Ryder and the Doctor — investigating alien devices, unexplained cases of spontaneous human combustion and each other. It has the makings of something really paranoid, with overt shades of The X-Files, but it’s more interested in the people involved than what it all means. McIntee is going for a sort of Paul Leonard “people are complex in all walks of life” thing here, except his one is mostly about humans rather than aliens.
The Triads are the most fleshed out examples. We meet a couple of them on their way to remove a man’s hands as punishment, and en route we get wrapped up in their love lives and family concerns. We get to know how they got into the Triad – mostly just to make a living – and we get the impression that they are more than just the awful things they do. Two of the book’s strongest action scenes (McIntee is known for doing these well) concern the deaths of Triad men which happen more or less by accident, inviting us to pity them for the chain of coincidences that rubbed out these otherwise potentially decent human beings. (Okay, they belong in jail, but still.)
We similarly get to know the cops, who have families at home and skeletons in the closet, and UNIT, who have evolved in directions a lot less friendly than the Brigadier, Benton, mugs-of-hot-sweet-army-tea etc. All of which is interesting, but perhaps it’s too much for one novel (or in any case this novel) to sustain. There are simply too many characters here. Combined with McIntee’s favoured writing style of endless abrupt scenes that feel like they’re ramping up to an action scene even when they’re not, Bullet Time is one of those books that always seems like it has somewhere else to be. Picking it up again a day later it can be quite challenging to remember not just what happened before you put it down, but what half-a-dozen plates were spinning at the time. Before long I was getting the different groups confused, especially where they all have quite similar goals.
This seems like a point of personal taste, but I think Bullet Time has an information delivery problem. Quite why the Triad etc are interested in UFOs and alien devices, and why people keep exploding is kept obscure for almost the entire book. Yes, holding back a big reveal is sort of the point of big reveals, but this felt like holding back the entire reason for following the narrative. This is where it’s very handy to lean on the complex lives of the people involved, but then the book’s overpopulation becomes a problem. I’ve seen Bullet Time described as “fast-paced” and that feels way off to me; it was more like channel hopping between filler episodes.
We do at least have a central mystery to pick at: the Doctor appears to be the head of the local Triad, assassins and drug deals and all. What’s that about? As Sarah notes, this can’t be right – not unless he’s “some sort of evil pod-person.” The conceit of a Doctor and companion meeting again at different times of life is a good one, and Bullet Time challenges the idea that they’d even recognise each other – morally rather than physically, since Sarah knows about regeneration. She is used to an adventurous but morally forthright Doctor, whereas the bloke with the question mark umbrella is a devious schemer. It’s a smart contradiction to throw in the path of an investigative reporter, and it lays bare the difference between the two Doctors, as well as the ways in which Sarah has grown and changed.
I doubt any readers seriously thought he’d begun a life of crime in earnest, but that’s sort of beside the point. While he has a compelling reason for getting involved – which is another example of “people not being what they seem,” in this case the alien invaders he’s trying to keep out of everybody’s way – he’s not keeping track of the collateral damage. It seems fair to assume that people are getting their hands (or whatever else) lopped off while he’s in charge; he’s completely naïve about day-to-day Triad practices, almost getting a close friend sexually assaulted in the process; for good measure, he ruins Sarah’s professional life “to keep her safe”; he has done something to the local drug trade to render it ineffective, which seems very “Doctor”, but as the cops note this might have its own deleterious effects; and while it turns out that (ahem spoiler oh who are we kidding) the aliens aren’t so bad after all, they’ve done questionable things that he didn’t know about and then isn’t happy about, which he’ll just have to put up with for the sake of Earth’s safety. This isn’t a New Adventures-y masterplan in action, but rather a man spinning a plate that won’t stay on the stick. This, too, is a character not being what we expect.
Sarah’s disenfranchisement ought to be the heart of the novel, but there’s too much novel for that. It’s essentially without a protagonist – we’re as likely to follow anyone in the Triad or Tom Ryder as we are Sarah. And not every avenue is automatically interesting, with Tom being an archetypal American hero not unlike a Terrance Dicks character, at least until his loyalties come into question near the end, which recontextualises him entirely – again though this is something we don’t have time to get into because a) we keep diving away to look at somebody else instead and b) we don’t find out critical plot specifics until the thing’s nearly over. When we finally understand what’s going on and what it all means it’s genuinely interesting, heightening McIntee’s themes of murkiness, and there’s a tremendous scene of the Doctor (having mostly failed to pull a rabbit out of hat) dressing Tom down for his human ineptitudes, but I couldn’t help thinking: where was all this for the last 250 pages?
It’s time for The Big Spoilery Thing! Just thought I’d mention it. If you like, you can go and put the kettle on and come back afterwards. Or just squint and power through it at your own risk. Patent pending.
Putting Sarah more in the driving seat might have helped with The Big Spoilery Thing, which I’ve no doubt went down like a cup of cold sick at the time. She dies in this, very near the end. For what it’s worth this is both a heroic act and an indictment of the Doctor’s scheming – it underlines the fact that he can’t muck about on this scale without getting his hands dirty. That’s the sort of exploited character flaw that would perhaps make more sense in the New Adventures, where it could meaningfully affect him long term; in a one-off there’s no reason for anyone to revisit it. (And of course the TV series gives us an out for continuity reasons. Cheers guys!) I knew it was coming, I didn’t particularly like the idea, and the way Bullet Time is written (emphasising the messy web of different lives rather than dwelling too long on individuals) means that the story must push on immediately afterwards, hardly eulogising the fan favourite character and perhaps making a point of not doing so. There is a lovely epilogue that makes you think for a moment that things didn’t go as poorly as all that, but then – tee hee hee, I’m sure – the rug is pulled. It’s one of the stronger pieces of writing in the novel and it’s very poignant, even if I sort of wish someone had poked him in the eye for suggesting it.
Whilst I personally dislike this kind of edgy revisited-character arc (I’m still giving Eternity Weeps the stink eye for what it did to Liz, sorry not sorry) I think McIntee does it with enough gravitas that it doesn’t feel token. It’s a cost not normally balanced against a Seventh Doctor “playing chess with people’s lives” story, and in that context it makes the whole thing a bit more thorny and complex. I wouldn’t disagree with anyone saying she deserved better – the novel agrees with you – and I’m not going to get hung up on book continuity anyway if I don’t like it. What else can I say about it other than it’s as horrible as he intended it to be, well done, and now I’ll file it away as an interesting redundant timeline.
That about wraps it up for spoilers!
It’s one of those books where I like what it was going for, but I don’t think I’m that big a fan of his writing style, which for me stifled what he was going for. I want to learn more about these people, but for that to work I need to properly sit with them sometimes. I want to marvel at the difficult choices the Doctor has made, but I can’t do that if I don’t know what they were until 25 pages before the end. There’s still more complexity here than there might have been with exactly the same plot and characters, which is absolutely something to applaud, but in practice it’s too much like story porridge to really come together. You just have to enjoy it in short bursts instead.
6/10
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