#53
Hope
By Mark Clapham
It’s New Writer time — sort of. Mark Clapham had by this point co-written the frothy Beige Planet Mars, the lore-heavy The Taking Of Planet 5 and the ah-well-there’s-always-next-time Twilight Of The Gods. Hope is his first solo novel, for which no less applause, garlands, kazoo toots etc.
For his debut he’s opted for something a bit less eclectic than those earlier co-writes. Hope begins with the Doctor pushing the TARDIS too far to reach the outskirts of humanity’s existence among the stars, the planet Endpoint, which then knackers the ship for a while. After giving it a moment to cool down, the Doctor, Anji and Fitz are separated from it, which means they’ll have to spend the rest of the book getting it back. Oh, and they’ve also arrived at the scene of a murder, in a city that divides into a somewhat prosperous overcity and a less salubrious undercity. Er – not exactly teleporting the envelope into another dimension, is it?
But it’s not without promise. I’ve seen reviews that respond quite negatively to the city of Hope itself, but I rather liked it. The patchwork design, and placing it on stilts above a poison sea sets it apart from earlier efforts like Original Sin – it’s an intriguing mental image. The main issue is the lack of a population. I noticed four named people within city limits, two of whom are load-bearing to the plot. As for the other two: Powlin is the head of the local militia, keen to solve the rising murder epidemic. (“Militia” is a bit of a loaded term but we don’t interrogate whether that’s any worse than a police force – could just as easily call them “the police” or “the watch.”) He seems nice enough, but then the Doctor takes over the investigation for plot reasons and it’s pretty much good night from Powlin. Pazon is a local wheeler-dealer, and is perhaps not to be trusted. He seems like he could enliven a dull page, but outside of providing Fitz with a few bits he needs – off-screen, I believe? – he doesn’t hang around much either. As for the denizens in all the buildings? Pass, apart from odd murder victim.
This is a shame since Hope is really about the ultimate fate of humanity. It presents some academic arguments for what that’s going to look like, but in terms of actual people living their lives, not so much, which makes it all a bit surface-level. Boo. In the meantime, the meat of the novel can be quite enjoyable, as the Doctor is recruited to solve a series of random decapitations and Fitz investigates a puzzling cyborg brotherhood who for some reason hate the city’s partly-mechanised ruler. This is Silver: an incongruously charming cyborg who brutalises any form of opposition. He is the man who can get the TARDIS back from the poison sea, so the Doctor and co. pal up with him whilst sitting on any reservations they might have. Especially Anji, who soon enters into a deal with (what might possibly be) the devil.
Silver’s moral ups and downs clearly fascinate Clapham, who at one point delves into the character’s back story a chunk at a time, creatively pairing this with Anji’s failed attempts to ascertain just that. He was a sickly boy who received some sort of alien transfusion, then excelled in the military, then finally found himself in the future where it made sense to put down roots and take charge. He rules Hope (and more or less Endpoint as a whole) to the extent that he barely bothers lying to people – although that observation is made by someone he’s successfully lied to so um, yeah, he lies. There are skeletons in his closet but the book spends so much time actually with Silver that these seem to shrink in importance. The secret of the anti-Silver brotherhood, and what nasty things can be found lurking in Hope’s sewers are relegated to half-hearted B-plots that barely move Fitz to investigate them. (If you’re wondering why a city suspended above an ocean has a sewer, um… sorry, my phone’s ringing.)
Probably the best Silver stuff, apart from the Anji plot (more on that soon) is his scenes with his female lieutenant, Miraso. She’s the other “new character that definitely needs to be here,” and she has a degree of brilliance while also being annoyingly blind to her master’s failings. She holds her own well as a character but her extra-curricular activities aren’t given nearly enough room to breathe. (Speaking of which, a scene where Fitz recognises a mysterious female face is a bit too easy to anticipate as being Miraso, since she is one of the vanishingly small number of other people, let alone women in the book.)
There’s something almost comical about Silver being this hulking, terrifying figure – I pictured Cain from Robocop 2 – who is outwardly benevolent but maybe, just maybe, has a dark side? This is a guy who mashes a protester to death in one of his first scenes: he looks like something that would disagree firmly with Sylvester Stallone. Evil, huh? You don’t say. It’s somewhat interesting to suggest that he’s not that bad, which the novel ostensibly does when it introduces a second “pureblood” set of humans who haven’t intermixed with other species. (But have, ickily, intermixed within family lines.) These guys are killing Endpointers for their tough genetic material and view them only as cattle. The Doctor points out that the Endpointers are the real human descendants, or the ones worth a damn, and by extension Silver might not be so bad after all: he’s a random hodgepodge but he’s keeping the city in order, isn’t he? To loop back after that to, yeah he is quite bad actually – witlessly using the same logic against him, “It’s not biology that makes us who we are” – simply tells us to judge a big horrible monster by appearances after all. To which, fine – have Doctor Who, will monster – but why the hell did we invest so much time in him, then?
The back end of the book is a bit of a mad scramble as Hope either reaches its crescendo or suddenly opens a box marked “bonus ideas” – place your bets. The “bad” humans are found to possess terraforming pods which they are (I’m not joking) too stupid to realise would have come in handy for making Endpoint liveable. After a pause to lampshade that this is actually a bit like The Year Of Intelligent Tigers we get an incredibly fast transformation for the planet (with only 80 pages to go) and the apparent resolution of the plot apart from the Anji stuff. (I am getting to it.) I wondered what was left for us to do here – as does Fitz, somewhat clunkily and again with the lampshade: “It just all seemed too easy.” The answer to all this is a sudden swerve into Bond villainy, perhaps even ranting Davros territory for Silver. Bye bye, any possibility of a Sabbath-esque “pros and cons” bad guy. (I’m guessing there was at least a whiff of Sabbath influence here. Clapham probably read the book at least, what with the generous references to the Doctor’s current status.)
It’s a pretty miserable denouement, with Silver hurriedly creating a genetically engineered race of supermen called Silverati (“Silver calls them Silverati, presumably to indicate they follow after him,” thanks Anji, invaluable stuff there) and deciding to invade time and space. It’s not as if Hope had been teeming with moral ambiguity before that – there were some shades of grey e.g. in the sewers – but after the potentially promising debate between two very different sets of “humans” this finale is about as standard as it gets. When Silver inevitably fails he all but shakes his fist to say “I’ll get you next time, Gadget!”
It’s tempting to say “well what did you expect,” but Hope really isn’t that bad for the most part. It’s at least interesting that (spoiler) Silver has been running his own anti-Silver movement in the city just to increase his control over it, although those guys only appear in a couple of scenes, so never mind. There’s potential in the debate about which set of humans is the “right” one, although you’d be hard pressed not to agree with the Doctor’s initial assessment, but we don’t hear much from the “bad” ones after Silver puts them in their place, so ah well. Probably the most promising and interesting thing here is – you can exhale now, Dave fans – the Anji stuff.
Dave, Dave, Dave. Remember him? Who among us doesn’t. Set up as a fairly unimpressive no-need-to-stay-on-Earth boyfriend for Anji in Escape Velocity, and killed off in the same book, he warranted a bit of psycho-analysis from Anji in the following book, EarthWorld. It was very good stuff. But they wouldn’t let it lie: book after book has acknowledged Anji’s tortured feelings for poor, dead Dave, her failure to save him, the fact that he did not (despite his sci-fi obsession) get to travel in time and space. Most of this strikes me as quite bad planning from the EDAs. Dave wasn’t very promising in the first place and EarthWorld kind of put paid to Anji’s feelings about him already, but hey, it can be an arc for her anyway! I’m happy to accept that people can “get over” things and then still obsess over them, so whatever really on that score, but those inauspicious beginnings have simply made it a bit silly to keep dredging up a bloke that was essentially just Fitz if you swapped the leather coat for an anorak, who Anji wasn’t that keen on to begin with.
Hope does something with it, at least. When Anji meets Silver she realises here is someone who could bring Dave back to life! Or clone him, at least, using one of his hairs she’s been keeping in the TARDIS. (It would have been nice if that had cropped up a bit more in the interim.) She’s so moved by this idea that she even betrays the Doctor, taking scans of the TARDIS interior to feed back to Silver for future take-over-ze-universe use. It’s all worth it to undo the death of a man she even now describes as: “Maybe not the love of her life — she had been far too young, and way too cynical to think it would last forever, and had been on the verge of leaving him at the time of his death.”
Like I said, whatever, people don’t always make sense. At least this is grounds for some interesting character development. Or so you’d think, as the resurrection of Dave comes very late in the book – within that last 80 page spurt, amid all the shooty fighty business – leaving us with very little time to ponder on it. Our last chance to make something of it is the confrontation between the Doctor and Anji, but that’s sadly a damp squib: he’s mad at first, but then she explains that Dave is dead and that’s very sad actually and the Doctor does time stuff too, doesn’t he, and that’s somehow… enough? He’s even supportive! “I should have realised you had good reasons … I would probably have done much the same in your position.” To which, sorry, what a crock. This isn’t Dave. This is a simulacrum that does not remember Dave’s existence. Dave is still dead, this is a random person Anji immediately agrees to imperil for the greater good, then promptly leaves to continue his existence on a back-end-of-the-universe planet with who knows what prospects. It’s at least debateable whether Anji has “resurrected” or “saved” anyone here – but they don’t have the debate, let alone interrogate the idea that Anji handing over the interstellar car keys to a final boss in a video game might be a bad omen. (The Twelfth Doctor forgave Clara for that sort of thing, I suppose.)
Ah well: once that’s all over and done with Anji believes she is “leaving the emotional baggage of that time behind her,” so at least we’re in with a chance of laying Dave (Daaaaaave!) finally to rest. Unless they decide to just keep going on about him regardless, of course.
The character writing isn’t great in Hope. Some of that is down to the frustrating lack of purpose we see in Silver and Anji, but occasionally it’s just not very good. The Doctor oscillates between being genuinely bristly and vulnerable following The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street, e.g. insisting they abandon these people and get out of here or casually asking Fitz to risk his life for an investigation, and just being a bit dull, spouting flat jargon like “The atmosphere out there seems to have sufficient oxygen levels for your purposes… and quite a few other things, by the looks of it.” The novel is structured in a way that favours Silver, which means the Doctor comes across as a bit of a plonker for not spotting any red flags. But he’s sometimes not supported by prose that has a certain Nervous Nellie quality of underlining things that didn’t need it: “‘I wonder what happened to all the people,’ mused Fitz. ‘Evolved into these ones, I should think,’ said the Doctor, gently mocking what he clearly saw as an outmoded, human-centric view of history.”
It’s not just him, either, and it’s not just unnecessary underlinings. Sometimes it’s sheer redundancy. “‘I have sulph-shakes and caffy for those early morning cravings, and for the health-conscious, simple full or semi.’ ‘Skimmed?’ asked Anji, clearly thinking that Pazon was referring to milk.” / “‘What’s with the ceiling?’ Fitz asked, never too afraid to speak his mind.” / “She could feel the weight of the data-packed scanning unit in her pocket. That weight was both literal and metaphorical, as the strain it exerted on her was mainly due to the nature of what she was about to hand over.” / “She rubbed her head, calling for whoever was outside to come in. She was expecting Silver. Instead, it was the Doctor’s head that appeared around the door” followed on the same page by “Anji had been expecting Silver, and the Doctor had arrived instead.” Snip snip, editors.
It’s not very polished and its focus is a bit wonky. Yes, Silver is interesting, but maybe the rest of Hope’s citizens could also get a look in, and maybe don’t do Silver dirty at the end. There’s the skeleton of a pivotal story for Anji here (and don’t forget Dave! Don’t EVER forget Dave) but it’s not quite where it needs to be, since it proceeds from the idea that what she’s doing is fundamentally fine and you’d all do the same thing in lieu of actually moving on – which might have been the stronger story. I ended up imagining a version of Hope that brought in the Dave dilemma earlier, or perhaps even changed it. (Have Dave brought back without Anji’s consent, maybe? How would she deal with a second chance?) You could have the “terraforming” plot at the halfway point, and then properly spend time interrogating Silver as a bad guy vs the (somewhat) nicer guy he seemed to be before. But that would need to be a much longer book, and you’d still have to add the occasional non-Silver character for Hope and Endpoint to really mean something to readers.
I found Hope readable and well-paced in spite of my complaints. It ticks along, it’s no car crash; it has a familiar shape and it works well enough within that. It’s quite creative at points, playing with tenses to add mood. I liked the Silver back story bits. But it leaves a bad taste at the end, which inevitably made me wonder if much else about it actually worked.
5/10
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