#51
The Adventuress of Henrietta Street
By Lawrence Miles
I don’t know what’s more impressive — the scale of what is attempted here or the fact that Lawrence Miles came back to write it. Frankly it’s not hard to imagine a little bad blood after BBC Books published The Ancestor Cell, which wrapped up most of his world-building ideas in what you might charitably call “a hurry”.
I wonder if they sweetened him by really letting him off the chain this time. After all, The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street is comfortably the oddest BBC Book since The Blue Angel. It would give Campaign a run for its money if they’d actually published that one — and in fact, the two are quite similar in concept. You take an original novel, you don’t write it, and then you write another much more peculiar book around the bones of the first one. Jim Mortimore wrote a crazy, multiverse-spanning sequel; Lawrence Miles has written a pseudo-non fiction book that treats the original as a real event. As mildly infuriating as it is that they didn’t publish Campaign — which, remember, had a lot to do with missed deadlines — it’s good that the authors kept swinging for the fences like this.
The gimmick here is quintessentially Lawrence Miles. Non-fiction can be a way of reporting events once removed, and he’s been doing that for ages. Alien Bodies was hugely important for Sam, but it externalised her issues (literally, with a second set of biodata) in a way that other characters reflected on more than she did herself. It felt like it was about the idea of things happening to Sam without really getting her take on it. Then you have Interference, which took bold steps to upset the status quo of the EDAs (and the PDAs!) — but all of the pay-offs were theoretical at that point. (And in some cases, stayed that way.) It was about the idea of possibilities rather than the possibilities themselves. Enter Adventuress, which has all sorts of ideas — look who we’re dealing with — but from the outset it’s not directly connected to them, relying instead on diaries, dream journals and who knows what other ersatz second hand sources to piece it all together, occasionally just guessing at what it all means. It’s his most “removed” book yet, offering glimpses of a more relatable novel that probably never existed.
Let’s not sell that novel short, though: even if he’d written it in a more usual style, all “the TARDIS arrived and the Doctor said ‘Where have you brought me to this time, old girl?’”, Adventuress would still be noticeably out of step with the rest of the run. In it, the Doctor attempts to reconcile a breakdown in the Earth’s relationship to time, which is opening gateways to a realm of murderous apes, by installing himself at an 18th century brothel. He utilises the magic abilities of everyone there to combat the threat holistically, culminating in a symbolic marriage that he goes through with, no take-backsies. Well, not exactly a base under siege, is it? Even apart from the eyebrow-raising brothel stuff, the tone is much more fantasy than sci-fi, although it’s grounded in the latter.
In amongst all of that Miles is also up to his old canon-bothering tricks again, affecting the status quo and setting up stories for others to write. (You have to assume he got some sort of assurance that they would actually bother this time.) However, there’s something more democratic about his approach here. Although he sets up new stuff too, Miles notably builds upon what others have done — in particular, surprisingly, The Ancestor Cell. (He also references Dark Progeny and Grimm Reality, since we’re keeping score.)
Adventuress supposes that the destruction of Gallifrey had long-reaching consequences for the universe, breaking down dimensional barriers and poisoning the Doctor. (It would have been useful if other authors had hyped this up a bit first. Miles seemingly can’t catch a break with support for his world-building in either direction.) It also engages with the idea that the Doctor is not who he once was — something Justin Richards originated — but rather than lamely pointing out that he can’t remember e.g. The Horns Of Nimon any more (while still doing all the usual stuff), as some others have done, Miles asks: okay, so who or what is he now? And he offers an answer. I’m not a big fan of this whole amnesia/“I’m the Doctor but only about 95%” stuff, but this feels like a genuine attempt to make something of it.
This Bit Has A Spoiler In It!
As to whether he makes something good out of it, your mileage may vary, and Miles being Miles this is ultimately still a hand-off to other writers. But anyway: this is the book where the Doctor loses one of his hearts. I was unable to avoid hearing about that in advance, but I was pleased to discover that it wasn’t (as I’d assumed) attempted murder — it’s to save his life. (And to benefit his surgeon to the tune of one bonus heart, but we don’t know that at the time.) The result is a Doctor restored to health and confidence. He is anchored to Earth now instead of Gallifrey; he is “a man: one born of the Earth, or at least bound to it.” This culminates in a bloody battle to the death with the King of the Apes, a menace that overall reflects humanity and not Time Lords, where he viciously mauls and decapitates his enemy and has to be stopped from going even further. He’s a more down and dirty character after all that — in case you missed the wedding and the bit about the brothel — intrinsically more linked to Earth, but in no way precluded from flying off and rescuing other planets as well.
It’s good to make a virtue of him being different post-Ancestor Cell, and I think Miles has perhaps done more on that front than anybody, but all the same I’m puzzled by this apparent need to diminish the Doctor, whether it’s his memories or his organs. It’s presumably to make him more relatable, but first of all the PDAs are still right there with their alien-as-anything protagonist, and second of all, do we need to understand the Doctor all that much? All this can hardly be to save us from continuity since — as I’ve moaned about before — you need to be a tenth-level anorak to have any idea what they’re on about, Gallifrey-wise. At the end of the day it’s an arc, so it’s really only a question of where it’s all going. Hopefully somewhere satisfying. You’ll forgive me though if I’m a bit worried they’ll chuck it in the bin… again.
That’s It For Spoilers. Well, The Big Ones.
As well as expanding the parameters of the series and its characters, Miles spends a lot of time on his setting. Well, it’s “non-fiction,” so that’s sort of a prerequisite. There’s a huge amount of historical flavour and — I’ll bet David A. McIntee loved this bit — heaps of information on display, giving a terrific flavour of England in 1782. (No doubt some of it is fibs but I feel like I’d be spoiling it to check.) He’s particularly careful to frame Scarlette’s house of ill repute as something feminist, specifying that before pimps came along prostitutes were more along the line of rock stars. (!) I don’t have secondary sources to check that, but it’s certainly a nice thought, and it helps to make the Doctor seem like less of a creep for making his base of operations there. There’s certainly no sneering at the women, with Scarlette being the adventuress of the title — strong, proud and instrumental in the eventual victory. I do wish, though, that we’d got to know her (or the rest of them) a bit better.
Which brings us to the overall inevitable problem with Adventuress: we don’t know what people are thinking, or generally what they’re even saying to each other. Miles is fairly strict with his gimmick, deferring to journal entries for most of the specifics, and mostly only comes a cropper during some of the more spectacular action scenes when — sorry to be a party pooper — there’s simply too much detail to pretend we’re just hazarding a guess at it all. This then makes it doubly bizarre when his unnamed narrator says things like “It’s impossible to guess what Scarlette might have told her audience” — strictly speaking it’s impossible to know, you can guess your head off otherwise, but is it really outside of possibility for us to know things like that when so much other mad nonsense has somehow made it into this extremely bizarre pretend book? We’ve got various accounts of very private conversations between the Doctor and <very spoilery unnamed cameo>, but not that?
Meanwhile, we’re just not very close to the characters. We can judge the likes of Scarlette by their actions, but that’s about it. What did she think or feel about the Doctor, given that their association went beyond what he’d normally experience with a human? What, if anything, did he feel for her or Juliette, who at one point is also slated to be his bride? (Of convenience, but even so.) What did Fitz or Anji think about all that? There are suggestions that Anji is jealous, but since this is second hand reporting that’s suspect at best. There are so many moments when a grounded view of what’s happening and what’s being felt would, I’m sorry to say, simply be more satisfying than what we got. For heaven’s sake, what do you mean “It’s not known what Fitz’s reaction was, when surrounded by a mob of prostitutes”? Find out!
It’s frustrating that we pick and choose what is and isn’t known. Take the Doctor’s history, for example. It’s all a bit euphemistic because this is half remembered stuff from 1782 and the Doctor may have fudged some of it anyway — frankly, it’s amazing how much is in the book, but surely in order to identify the threat and respond to it he must be somewhat aware of what happened to the Time Lords? Isn’t that a big deal and worth a mention? How did they skirt the subject, if (presumably) Fitz managed to do so? What his thoughts are on the subject are of course not recorded; he and Anji flit through the book like ghosts at times, although Miles’s narrator dutifully records that Fitz bedded at least one of the prostitutes. It must have been a very notable experience to spend literally months in this place, especially for Anji, but (all together now) we don’t get to hear about it. Yes, clever gimmick and everything, but isn’t that a lot of money on the table?
Fair’s fair, Miles is similarly opaque with his new all singing, all dancing addition to the canon: this is the book that introduces Sabbath, shadowy spy guy with a TARDIS-like boat and a fondness for human companions. Readers of Alien Bodies will remember Miles’s mirroring of the Doctor and companions in various combinations, and this is another one of those, albeit one aimed at his diminished post-Ancestor Cell persona. This is a man with skills the Doctor temporarily lacks (at one point even foreign languages) and one with similar goals, but a more mercenary outlook. He appears to be as emotional as the Doctor — as much is suggested when one of his companions, a Leela-esque fighter, meets her end. His precise nature in relation to the Doctor is kept vague, at least until a cheery reference to his homicidal wishes later on, but his name carries a certain weight in fandom. Visiting the book when you only know Sabbath as a moody menace makes his and the Doctor’s various scenes of borderline camaraderie quite pleasingly bizarre. It would be nice to know more about Sabbath in his own mind, or even more about what others think of him, but well, gimmick, etc. In his case however, a little mystery seems fair enough. He is a walking setup for later, after all. (Let’s see how everybody else writes him. Dramatic chord!)
There is nothing inherently distant or vague about non-fiction, but in trying to imitate that genre The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street adopts a strange lack of feeling. It is a dense book, much bigger on the inside for a 280 page EDA thanks to its minuscule font, full of incident and detail but staying a bit too far away from character and intent. It feels at times like we’re hearing about Miles’s brilliant ideas rather than experiencing them, which is pretty standard for him, but as it goes on there is an increasingly thin line between historical account and plot summary. It can also be an awkward example of “non-fiction,” since it occasionally disappears into fanciful action and comes without a clear understanding from the outset of what the thing is about. It is apparent that this is a novel since it holds so much back. (I’m sure nobody wanted it to be any longer, but this sort of thing usually comes with an introduction.)
That said, these really are very good ideas, reframing Doctor Who as something altogether more red blooded and peculiar in the aftermath of its recent changes. It’s full of images that have already lodged in my head more than most EDAs, and as usual for Miles it’s an example of what, in the grand scheme of these books, you could have won. I just wish I didn’t also get that feeling about this book while I was reading it.
7/10
No comments:
Post a Comment