#48
Instruments of Darkness
By Gary Russell
Well, better late than never. Gary Russell’s Instruments Of Darkness* was originally scheduled to appear seven months earlier and was replaced at short notice by The Shadow In The Glass. I don’t know what kept him, though my first guess would be his responsibilities at Big Finish.
And wouldn’t you know it: in a move that will delight enjoyers of shared media, Instruments Of Darkness is the first BBC Book to feature a Big Finish original character! Evelyn Smythe, come on down. (While we’re at it, this one also contains explicit links to the Virgin books, thus linking all three continuities. I’m not made of stone — that’s just plain delightful.)
If this already sounds like yet another trip on the Gary Russell continuity-go-round, well, yes it is. But at least he’s mainly focused on his own ideas this time. This isn’t a brand new novel so much as the third act in his “C19 trilogy,” concerning a shadier-than-UNIT group who make questionable use of alien tech. (Russell T Davies must have been taking notes.) By this point C19 are no more, but some of the characters from The Scales Of Injustice and a few from Business Unusual reoccur here. All of them have loose ends to tie up.
To be clear: keeping the continuity in the family like this isn’t automatically better than going the fanwank route. In much the same way that books by Craig Hinton might only be comprehensible to those that know The Time Monster back to front, this one relies heavily on your having read (and remembered) Business Unusual. Let’s be honest, that book was a while ago. Russell spends a good amount of time recapping events, so you’re unlikely to be completely lost if you’re new here, but all the same it might have been better if a sequel like this had come out a little closer to the last instalment. (And it’s me saying this — I’m reading these at a rate of knots compared to how they were originally released. Business Unusual was four and a bit years ago in publishing time.) Frankly you shouldn’t need to spend that much time recapping.
Memory warnings aside, it’s kinda cool that he wants to dive back in and explore these characters further — and potentially quite rewarding, if you already happen to have Scales and Business on your bookshelves. What he comes up with is quite interesting, too. The Irish twins (a pair of augmented assassins who can’t die by conventional means) have recanted their evil ways and are looking for the Doctor, and hopefully some understanding as well. Trey, Mel’s friend and also a powerful psychic, is still searching for Joe, his lost love who isn’t really dead. And there’s that lurking question: is C19 really gone? Could there be something else now — something worse?
A recurring theme in Russell’s trilogy (which ought to encompass Who Killed Kennedy as well) is the consequences of Doctor Who stories — the people you wouldn’t necessarily think about and how they were affected. That’s a smart use of continuity (if, indeed, you must use it) and Instruments Of Darkness touches on that again, first by following those earlier characters to their next chapter, then by introducing more collateral damage. We meet retired Vice-Marshal Dickinson who suddenly finds out that his son, supposedly killed in action with UNIT, is alive. Will he find him? There’s an amnesiac villain with ties to the Doctor, as well as a grudge, but he doesn’t know all the facts. Who is he, and what happened to him? There’s Mel, getting back to Earth several years after she left — will she contact her family, and what will she say? And then there’s Evelyn, a walking consequence of the Doctor’s past in more ways than one. In case you missed it after all that, the Doctor helpfully makes it clear that this subject is on his mind: “What of the people I leave behind? As the years have gone by, as experiences have piled upon experiences, I’m left caring more, worrying more.”
Long story short, there’s potential here for a good, meditative book on the trauma of the past, of being left behind, finally putting a button on those ideas after three books. And long story even shorter: Instruments Of Darkness is not that book. Sadly it’s a case of all setup and no payoff.
The most obvious problem here is that there’s too much going on, and it’s not all marching in lockstep. In the main you have the ghost of C19, aka the Magnate, aka the Network. (I think…? these are different things?) Aka a bunch of shifty people in France who pretend to control the world, but actually have much murkier goals. (Which are worse than controlling the world, somehow?) This organisation contains a group of paranormally gifted people who, rather improbably, spend most of the novel just standing in a room. (Andrew Cartmel’s psi-powers arc it ain’t. Nevertheless he named the book after them.) More pressingly they have John Doe, their boss with amnesia, along with his duo of lady assassins (yes we‘re getting another gruesome twosome ala the Irish twins) and Therése Gavalle, a reluctant new recruit helping to bolster their super-powered ranks whilst puzzling over a gap in her own memory. There are also assorted other staff members whom we’re probably supposed to be able identify due to their memorably unpleasant fates later on, but reader, I couldn’t.
Anyway, this merry band are up to something that context tells us must have something to do with the opening chapter, which quickly jumps through different time periods and cultures. (Memorably featuring some genuinely awful non-British dialects.) A spooky force is intervening in women’s lives through the ages, predominantly to save them from sexual assault or murder (lovely) but also to see if they are Ini-Ma… a concept you’ll be left to puzzle over for most of the book as we bin that off and everyone worries about other stuff instead. The Magnate don’t immediately seem interested, preferring to fuss over super-beings and murders. Nor do the Doctor and Mel (and Evelyn) as they’re busy tracking down the Irish twins. And nor are the friggin’ Irish twins, who are themselves loosely working for the Magnate/the Network but also not because they don’t do that sort of thing any more, but they still are anyway, so…? Yeah I don’t know guys.
For a book that evidently suffered some delays, and so presumably had extra time, it’s not very coherent. Characters’ loyalties are confusing and the book spends so long not getting into the whole Ini-Ma thing that the Doctor (and the reader) has to hear great chunks of exposition about it towards the end instead, as if it was a bonus idea grafted on later. Only at that point is there a sudden barreling rush to make this apparently universe-bothering threat matter, and it doesn’t convince, partly because Russell writes his godlike beings with the same irritating insouciance as everyone else. (“Oh do belt up, Time Lord.” Terrifying.) Climactic action scenes then happen in frenzied blurs, with Mexican stand-offs that involve too many people to keep track of, all moved along by Russell’s signature casual blasts of violence that suddenly make things unappealingly nasty — also, where possible, hurriedly binning off characters so you feel like it was a mistake to wait around for them. It generally gets worse as it goes along, particularly with proofreading errors, which suggest this thing still wasn’t ready when they finally put it out — and perhaps that the ending was written at a sprint. “It occurred to Mel that Evelyn’s faith might have been displaced.” (Do you mean misplaced?) “It’s is already New Year’s Eve.” (It’s is?) “Hmmm… what about those people at the network/“ (Question mark?) “He took A deep breath and then bellowed once more.” (Random capital A?)
All of that’s just the small stuff and plot stuff. The important bits — the ones I think are important anyway, highlighted above — are character stuff. Russell’s not that interested in his world-ending threat so why be upset if that’s a bit messy? Trouble is, the character stuff isn’t very strong either. Take the Irish twins: the concept that they’re effectively do-gooders now, helping out around a village, caring for similar C19 cast-offs and building a support group among the villagers, is full of possibility. They finally meet the Doctor but there isn’t time to win him over very meaningfully — the plot’s going “Mush! Mush!” by that point — so they just explain what’s up, the finale is enacted and then Russell brusquely gets rid of them. Shame.
Better is Trey’s story, which tangles up with the Twins and latterly with Joe, who’s with them. But Russell isn’t here to tell a great love story, leaning into tragedy instead. Okay, could work, tragedy is entirely worthwhile as a story choice — but the truth about Trey and Joe, or more accurately Joe and Trey, is given to us in a throwaway final paragraph, which doesn’t so much recontextualise their scenes and actions together as simply confuse them. I audibly “Huh?”’d.
There’s that retired Vice-Marshal, who has some degree of pathos in his background and retirement home scenes, then reclaims a bit of dignity by throwing off his pursuers and searching for his son — successfully! But he ends up barely speaking to him, usefully holds a door shut for a bit and is then bleakly chucked out of the story, along with his son. Killing characters isn’t automatically a bad thing, I’m not saying that’s an invalid choice, but do it often enough and it begins to feel like these things just aren’t paying off. See also Therése Gavalle, whose allegiance shifts for plot reasons but who then starts acting like a one dimensional murder-crazy bad guy for seemingly no reason. (Don’t worry, she — altogether now! — gets dumped real quick.)
And then of course there’s John Doe. I had — stupidly, entirely my own fault, when will I learn etc — spoiled this for myself shortly before reading it. The truth is revealed five pages before the end (so I dunno, reference guides, maybe it’s not mandatory that you advertise it) and then we only get the character’s first name, and incredibly the character isn’t around for the pay-off. They just don’t finish their arc. There’s no reunion with the Doctor, no reckoning, just a sad little “what a pity” moment whilst also taking a moment to dig the boot into a character no one, including the Doctor, liked. This doesn’t champion Russell’s theme of people left behind and the Doctor’s collateral damage — not when it sounds pretty squarely like it was the guy’s own fault he was in this state, which alarmingly suggests that he was just a conveniently unpopular target for a womp-womp twist. Think, Scrappy Doo in the 2002 Scooby Doo movie. What, I’m getting tired of saying, a waste. (Although to be fair the Scrappy Doo thing made me laugh.)
Lastly we have Evelyn. (I’m skipping Mel. She is politely warned off of phoning home because unbeknownst to her future-Mel is home already, so it’s simpler if she doesn’t engage. Conveniently enough.) Yes, it is unequivocally a delight to have Evelyn here. If you haven’t heard her Big Finish stories you will get some idea of what she offers: a more grown up sensibility, a feisty cantankerousness, and a sort of mellowing effect on the Doctor. (Not so much the latter though given Russell’s propensity for “everyone’s awfully snippy today” dialogue.) I like her in this. I like her scenes with Mel, although their character development predictably comes along in great heavy blobs rather than being organically threaded through the story — we always stop to pontificate on it.
The problem is the bizarre device used to get her here. The story is set at the end of 1993: huge, albeit unclear importance is placed on the New Year celebrations. Evelyn, as we know her, is from 2000. To get around that, we learn that she eventually tired of TARDIS life (this was published during her BF run, so odd choice already) and the Doctor dropped her off, but in 1988, without any means to get by, just so she could keep an eye out for the Irish twins should he happen along and wish to find them. I mean? Isn’t that essentially punishment? Evelyn is out of time and off the grid for an unknown number of years and can’t meet her loved ones. Yet this is somehow cloaked in the Doctor’s concern for people he’s left behind, which is a bit rich. It’s a bizarre bit of stroppy mistreatment for a character at that point still ongoing in Big Finish, and it’s downright bleak to say this lady of advancing years has six of them to look forward to alone, just because the Doctor can’t find a 1988 equivalent of a Google alert. For me it made the whole Doctor-and-Evelyn house of cards wobble unnecessarily. I was not a fan. (To be fair some of the blame is placed on the TARDIS for aggressively taking his side in an argument, but come on, they all knew the deal when the time came to leave her there.)
I’m not convinced that Instruments Of Darkness says anything about Russell’s themes that wasn’t already implicit in the earlier books. There’s no added guilt for the Doctor or any representative of UNIT (none are present) and there’s no notable catharsis for anyone affected by him — even though in Evelyn’s case we’re adding new grudges. The book at least has some new ideas (the Ini-Ma thing) but those don’t feed into said themes, and when it’s time for a dramatic conclusion we have to pull important information hurriedly out of our proverbial nether place because there wasn’t space to set it up, so the Doctor’s umpteenth “there should have been another way” coda re the bad guys doesn’t hit very hard. If you detach from the themes there’s not much else here: a nice enough inclusion of an audio character, some jolly Sixth Doctor writing, a bit of banter and some sudden bursts of action. It’s less a thrilling conclusion than just a load more stuff — an author, very much like his character, faced with things left behind and concluding little more than “Shame, innit?”
5/10
*Super picky of me but I don’t much like the title. It has a reference point in the plot but it feels too portentous for what most of the plot actually is. I wish he’d kept up the pseudo-malapropism theme from Business Unusual, and perhaps called it Finished Business.
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