#56
The Book Of The Still
By Paul Ebbs
This one’s a rarity: a debut novel where the author didn’t come back to write another one. I’ve no idea why. (I’m going to assume he was busy.) It makes The Book Of The Still a bit of a curio since there’ll sadly be no follow up to measure it against.
Still (ahem) it makes a strong first impression. The title is portentous — The Book Of The Still sounds like a big deal. It begins with an epilogue (!) written by someone who hates the Doctor, which suggests — since this is a time travelling series — that this is going to be a complicated affair. And the font is noticeably small, like in The Adventuress Of Henrietta Street: an obvious BBC Books trick to condense a larger novel into 280 pages, suggesting that there’ll be a lot of book for this one to be complicated in.
The first chapter promises an “Obligatory Spectacular Opening” and it doesn’t disappoint, with a master thief sky diving into a building to steal the book of the title, only to be revealed as the Doctor when he’s caught. Other memorable set pieces appear throughout the novel, such as the Doctor resolving a bomb threat by materialising the TARDIS around it first (a little bit Looney Tunes, but in a good way), and the Doctor literally surfing his way through space onto the surface of a sun inside a cube made out of shockingly resilient book pages.
You might infer from all this derring-do that the Doctor is an unstoppable force in The Book Of The Still, but that’s only true some of the time. There’s some acknowledgement of his increased frailty since Adventuress, such as Anji noting that he looks green about the gills re rollercoasters: “She felt closer to him at times like this, when he was open about his vulnerabilities — rather than when he was swinging one-handed across fiery lakes in save-the-distressed-damsel mode.” Although yes, he does do that a bunch here as well, the book still finds time to interrupt his flashy burglary attempt, stick him in a quite unpleasant prison and threaten him with execution, get him beaten up several times, selectively hand over control of his brain to someone else, force him to strangle someone almost to death, and when push finally comes to shove re all the complicated time stuff promised at the start the understanding of it comes from another character, as does the resolution. At one point he feels that there’s no hope of saving a planet so he dances (badly), and then wakes up his companion so he won’t die alone. I wouldn’t exactly say that he’s on the back foot here but Paul Ebbs seems keen to put things in his way, or take things from him, which is quite interesting. (As to the frequent references to his hair getting pulled out or people attempting to pull it out, I’m not sure whether that’s “Paul Ebbs hated the wig” or “The Author’s Barely Disguised Fetish.”)
The other characters have a spottier time due to not always being themselves, although the Doctor has flashes of that as well, sometimes (however improbably) for unrelated reasons. Fitz and Anji both fall afoul of a shady escort agency, the gist of which is that your memories are replaced with new ones that make you more pliable. In Fitz’s case it makes him a good match, since he thinks he’s a seventeenth century swashbuckler and his date is the woman he rescued. (Though he isn’t very consistent with that identity.) In Anji’s case it’s to facilitate a robbery for fictional reasons. (Still not sure how she did the robbery.)
Anji is otherwise well written, although her instant loathing of Rhian — the Doctor’s fellow prison escapee, keep up! — puts her in a pretty ugly light. She’s quite capable, such as when manipulating a bunch of looters into getting the TARDIS turned right side up. (The TARDIS falling doors-down is a stroke of “surprised that doesn’t happen more often” wit.) I liked her overall fondness for the Doctor and keenness to help out.
I can’t accuse Fitz of being poorly written here even when he’s not himself, as his “other self” is mostly a wild romantic and that isn’t exactly a bolt from the blue. When he’s able to respond properly to events around him he’s about as loveably Fitz as he gets, even outright saying he loves the Doctor at one point. (Is that the bar for me? Companions that want to be around the Doctor?) The degree of out-of-his-mind-ness does threaten to edge him out of the story, however, and we never really deal with the horror of his being forced to love someone. Yes, it’s Fitz, so if anyone wasn’t going to mind that sort of thing then etc etc, but it’s still decidedly iffy and it’s rather dismissed as a concept. (On another note, Fitz losing his memory here really ought to tie into the same thing occurring in the EDAs as a whole, but I’m not sure Ebbs’s story does anything with that. Oh well.)
The book is a little more upfront about the concept of addiction, which Paul Ebbs says (via I, Who) is largely the point of the thing, hence the central character of Carmodi. I’m not sure “time addiction” really does much for his theme, it being rather hard to explain or manifest that idea, but elsewhere you can see Rhian going to quite extraordinary lengths for her missing father and the overall idea of paradoxes — you could say she’s addicted to them. Both characters shoulder the novel’s resolution, which perhaps adds weight to their bits of the story being the truly important, theme-y ones.
If this all sounds a bit fractured, frankly that’s because it is. “Madcap” was the word that kept coming to mind: we vault excitedly from one set piece to another, having a mostly splendid time it must be said, but the majority of the book isn’t really focussed on advancing the plot. It’s more of an adventure story with the Book passed frantically from one party to another. Actions like the Doctor’s blackout-then-burglary aren’t explained until the very end, whereas I’m not sure I ever understood the motivations of the three thugs behind all of Fitz’s woes, who somehow snowball into a nigh unstoppable triumvirate throughout the book despite being essentially The Three Stooges.
Ebbs has heaps of ideas and they’re broadly imaginative and funny, such as the planet Lebenswelt being so wealthy that its prisoners have gold-encrusted handcuffs; it’s “the kind of place where a pauper could eat from a carved emerald plate, but basic sewage systems seemed to be beyond them.” The fake memory scenes are fun vignettes in and of themselves, particularly the adventures of Captain Fitzgerald. (I’m less clear on why the baddies took from this that these were the correct names of people he knew. Aren’t they influencing this stuff?) The bigger villains, the Unnoticed, are a lot less amusing but just as colourful: strange Lovecraftian horrors that go around in trench coats blowing up any worlds that have heard of them. (It’s in the later Unnoticed scenes that we get the most blatant examples of addiction and addicts, with miserable skeletal “time sensitives” walking around a kind of hell they volunteer at, covered in sores. The symptoms connect more than the fix.)
Perhaps the most “money on the table” idea is the Book itself, which is a sort of ever-present lifeline for stranded time travellers. That idea is planted fairly soon and it has obvious potential for complicated hijinks, which Ebbs mostly fulfils during the somewhat higgledy-piggledy climax, but it’s still not what I’d call a time travel book; for much of it the Book could be the Ark of the Covenant instead and you’d get a similar narrative drive. A message from the Book does drive a fair amount of the action, but again it’s not a message for any of the regulars so we’re not terribly focused on it.
As usual I should avoid having preconceptions about what a book will be like. The Book Of The Still is a hell-for-leather tumble of spacefaring nonsense rather than a particularly solemn or important timey wimey puzzle. (Until the climax when it’s that for sure.) It has a consistent sense of humour but also some notes of sensitivity in its prose, like when Rhian sees the two-left-footed Doctor spring into action: “[she] saw how well the Doctor could dance, when the right tune came along.” It’s got some things to say, although they’re perhaps under too many layers of sci-fi to speak clearly, and its high points rank among the more Technicolour sequences in Doctor Who lit. I liked it. I just wish there were more Paul Ebbs books so I could see what he tweaked next time.
7/10
No comments:
Post a Comment