Doctor Who: The BBC Books #92 – Asylum by Peter Darvill-Evans

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#42

Asylum

By Peter Darvill-Evans

In his afterword Peter Darvill-Evans says he has “tried to write something that is out of the ordinary run of Doctor Who novels.” I’d say that’s a fair assessment of Asylum.

Probably the most obviously unusual thing here is the casting choice of the Fourth Doctor and Nyssa. The continuity-minded among you might scratch your heads at that, since at no point in the run did these two characters travel by themselves. BBC Books were no doubt pleased that they’d already stopped telling readers when each story was set, since they’d need two answers for this one: the Doctor must be between The Deadly Assassin and The Face Of Evil, being on his own and having not met her yet, while Nyssa must be some time after Terminus, having long since left him.

Quite a torturous setup, you might think, and you wouldn’t be wrong. And for what? Straight away Asylum has almost no scope for interaction between its Doctor and companion. They can’t get to know each other and she can’t tell him anything that will be important later. “So why do it?” is the obvious question. Well, it adds novelty value. It’s a unique dynamic, outside of maybe the Sixth Doctor and Mel. For the vast majority of the (admittedly very short) novel, however, Darvill-Evans takes the path of least resistance and separates them. Which is either the practical thing to do or the final nail in the coffin, depending on your outlook. 

This isn’t the only odd thing about the book. Asylum opens with two prologues. (Not in itself odd, although while we’re here, what is it with Doctor Who novelists and prologues?) The first one introduces a rather good sci-fi idea about non-corporeal aliens stranded in the bodies of medieval Brits. They know the Black Death is coming. To ensure their survival they need to send one of their number back in time to find somebody brilliant to help. They select Roger Bacon, often considered one of the first scientists, who might be able to give them the Elixir of Life and hence allow them to navigate the plague when it arrives.

That’s all in prologue one! Next we find Nyssa in the far future, older, wiser, successful but not happy. A disaster is coming her way too, but she distracts herself by writing a thesis about a fellow scientist, Roger Bacon… until the facts start changing around him. Suddenly the Doctor (well, a Doctor) arrives, hot on the trail of the time anomaly. Once he establishes the likely focal point, as well as his and Nyssa’s awkward relationship, he leaves her to it while he goes off to investigate the historical figure. Except Nyssa has stowed away in the TARDIS.

Asylum is bursting with ideas before we even reach Chapter One. However we still have not reached the odd thing. What Asylum does next is… settle down. History transforming, aliens possessing humans, companions out of time — all quite exciting, only put those things out of your mind, because Asylum is actually a medieval murder mystery. And quite a placid one at that.

I’m guessing this was the novel Darvill-Evans really wanted to write, and the alien stuff was just the springboard. Fair enough. But the disparity between the intriguing setup and the actual matter of the book — which more closely resembles something you’d see on ITV on a Sunday afternoon — takes some getting used to. I kept expecting the alien plot to flare up, or the incongruity of the Doctor and Nyssa to kick off. I was way off: Asylum is a historical novel through and through, with heaps of research behind it (there’s a bibliography) and just as much thought behind the anachronisms of its dialogue and characters (there’s an afterword). Sci-fi-wise, Chekhov’s Gun doesn’t go off, unless you count the neat but rather sad epilogue with the aliens.

I spent a good chunk of Asylum mystified by this, wondering if — like in Independence Day, or my reading of it anyway — Darvill-Evans had failed to join his own dots. Having now finished it, I don’t think so. If nothing else, Asylum seems more deliberate than his earlier novel. True, the aliens never reveal themselves to the Doctor or Nyssa, who finish out the story with no idea what caused all this to happen in the first place. As far as anyone knows, something caused one of the brothers at Roger Bacon’s friary to commit the murders, perhaps hoping to capitalise on the Elixir of Life. It doesn’t really matter what, though, since (hardly a spoiler) things are put right in the end anyway.

So where does that leave Asylum — a sci-fi story that retroactively McGuffins its own premise, a character study about awkward strangers, and a murder mystery with a motive only the reader knows? Well, it’s certainly different. (Score one to Darvill-Evans.) If you’re going to enjoy it, though, you have to do so on its own level: gently paced past crime. It’s quite good at that. There’s plenty of historical flavour, some of it bracingly unpleasant. (See, the anti-semitism.) The period details can be ingenious, like Darvill-Evans’s answer to a locked room mystery. There are moments of genuine excitement, like an attempted break in and an escape from a burning building. And the basic thrust of what might be the birth of science is quite interesting to behold, with an intriguing and quite elegant counter-argument presented to Nyssa at the end. I’d never heard of Roger Bacon before reading this, and Darvill-Evans does a good job of showing why he’s worthy of note — if not entirely deserving of his plaudits.

There are some decent character moments as well, despite the uphill work created by choosing to write about these characters. The Doctor isn’t quite as effervescent as usual, perhaps because he’s in an awkward spot around this Nyssa person, but he still has moments of Baker-ish non sequitur. “I’ll join you there in a moment, if I may. Someone’s been lurking in the corridor behind us all the time we’ve been walking round and round this delightful cloister — so like my own — and he obviously wants to talk to one of us alone.” / “‘What if the time isn't right?’ the Doctor said. ‘Perhaps all this work, these theories and machines, would be best left here to turn to dust. I just don't know. Will I change the course of events if I save Roger Bacon's most scientifically advanced work? Or will that ensure that events follow the correct course? Can I bear to leave these things here to rot? Can you smell smoke?’” He also manages a compelling enough heart to heart with Nyssa at the end despite, or maybe because of their being ships in the night. He’s unusually pensive in Asylum, but I think this just about convinces as a character choice more than just “getting it wrong.”

Nyssa has a less proactive time. Despite evidently wanting to join the expedition in the first place she chills out in a castle for most of Asylum, barely cognisant of the mystery that brought them here. Instead she makes a friend in the widow Matilda and bats away advances from Richard of Hockley, a nice but thoroughly drippy knight of the realm. You can forgive the Doctor for occasionally remembering, with a start, that what’s-her-name is here as well, somewhere. Still, by the end this becomes a somewhat convincing character arc. Nyssa is still traumatised by TARDIS travel and clearly depressed; she often contemplates coming to live here instead, where it’s (potentially) less hectic, but a quiet rest isn’t enough to fix her problems. She even reaches a point where she’s content to be murdered. (!) Her realisation that she’d rather live on, as well as being a relief in itself, goes some way to justifying her inaction through the rest of the book.

Only some, mind. For all its pastoral mindset and relaxing pace Asylum drifts dangerously close to dull at times — an impressive feat where it needs a chunky afterword to even hit 250 pages. The supporting cast for example have clearly been thought through (again, see afterword), but that doesn’t mean you won’t mix up your friars from time to time. The murder mystery itself can be a teensy bit, who cares? And the book never entirely gets past the sense of a missed opportunity with the Doctor and Nyssa. But despite all that, I found myself on its wavelength in the end. I got into the slower pace and the (very) old-fashioned investigation, and the fact that these characters almost know each other but not quite, these aliens almost change the world but not quite, Nyssa almost considers a life in the past but not quite, and Roger Bacon is almost a pioneer of scientific theory but not quite, in a book that’s almost a massive sci-fi story but not quite… it all gives Asylum a sense of thwarted, missed-the-boat tragedy that arguably justifies its smallness. Almost, etc.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #80 – Independence Day by Peter Darvill-Evans

Doctor Who: The Past Doctor Adventures

#36

Independence Day

By Peter Darvill-Evans

The prodigal editor returns!

As you probably know, Peter Darvill-Evans helped launch the New Adventures and then edited them for years. It’s not a huge exaggeration to say that we wouldn’t have EDAs or PDAs without him, so it makes a degree of sense to get him in to write something for BBC Books.

Of course the concern here is that his only prior Doctor Who book was Deceit: a plot-relevant but otherwise long, stodgy, vaguely unpleasant and action-heavy entry that introduced the controversial New Ace. (An older, gun-toting Ace who ran away and joined the space army for a bit.) It existed in service of a plot arc and what little you could glean from it about the author’s creativity was not hugely encouraging.

Independence Day* is at least a more measured effort — albeit not in terms of chapters, of which there are only six plus a prologue across 280 pages. Darvill-Evans is no longer saving up all the important bits for 50 page intervals (a weird Deceit tic), and although this one dips a toe in creepiness there’s nothing to rival the Stockholm Syndrome relationship in that earlier book — although the concept of messed up attraction shows up again. It is, if nothing else, an easy to follow book.

If I seem cagey it’s because I spent most of Independence Day convinced that it was Doing A Thing that would eventually pay off. On the surface it looks like the most, well, surface kind of story imaginable: the Doctor and Ace become embroiled in a slave revolt. They’ll light the blue touch paper and then down will come the terrible tyrant. It’s not exactly new ground but it could be satisfying if done well. The way Darvill-Evans positions his players, though, suggests a much murkier story.

Straight off the bat, the Doctor’s past actions have played a part in all this. While travelling with Jamie he landed on Mendeb Two for no apparent reason — rationalising that he always arrives somewhere “for a reason” — so he asked Jamie to pick up a souvenir to remind him to come back. Jamie picked a vital part of the planet’s communication relay, which ultimately caused a critical imbalance between planets Two and Three. (Maybe tie a knot in your hanky next time.) Fast forward to the Doctor’s return with Ace and Mendeb Two is now easy pickings for its sister world; the populace are being used for slave labour. So you have a story about the Doctor fixing his own mistake.

Sat on the ancient space station between the two worlds is Kedin Ashar, a Duke of Mendeb Three who is apparently loyal to King Vethran, whose kingdom relies upon brainwashed slaves. However, he is secretly working against the King. However (part 2) he is also facilitating the King’s slave trade using his own skill as an inventor/chemist. His plan is to invent a new mind-altering slave drug which wears off sooner, and supplant the original without Vethran noticing. Which is… good, but he’s still actively trading in slaves, and has dosed who knows how many people with the permanent version of the drug already. So he’s not exactly the white knight he appears to be, at least to his followers. The question inevitably occurs of whether he’s really any better than Vethran, and his answer isn’t all that compelling: “I can’t claim that I have a grand new vision for my planet, nor that I’m acting from long-held principles. I’m a soldier and a scientist, not a politician.” So there’s a question of whether this coup d'état will turn out to be anything more than a redistribution.

Then you have the slave revolt, which is happening independently of Kedin/coincidentally with the Doctor’s help. Landing on Mendeb Two he finds the slave operation in full swing and meets Bep-Wor, a depressed fisherman whose wife is a slave on the other world. Soon they’re working together on Mendeb Three, with the Doctor hoping to find Ace and Bep-Wor hoping to find his wife. This mini-revolution soon becomes worryingly messianic, with the brainwashed and free slaves alike chanting “Doctor!” Bep-Wor is hugely swept along by this and he begins steering the group away from the Doctor’s plan of finding the King to negotiate; instead they go from place to place freeing slaves, and doing so violently, against the Doctor’s wishes. (For a while he lies to keep this secret from the Doctor.) So this revolution isn’t spotless — there are questions to be asked about their methods, whether Bep-Wor is really better than the villains he’s killed, and how the Doctor squares that with his own moral code.

Then you have Ace. Free of her New Adventures continuity, she nonetheless wants to grow and be independent (geddit), and insists that the Doctor set her down on the space station to fend for herself. Soon she’s breaking up a fight to rescue Kedin, sleeping with him, winding up a slave herself and then eventually breaking her conditioning, assisting the revolution and intending to stay behind and make a life for herself. So you have a story about Ace’s independence and burgeoning adulthood, and the difficulties within that.

Even some bits you’d normally take for granted are presented with a little extra ambiguity. Vethran, our oogly-boogly bad guy, hardly appears in the book at all; he’s such a background figure that I couldn’t help focussing on Kedin’s grey areas instead. Is Darvill-Evans using this to tip the story the other way? Is Vethran’s reputation exaggerated perhaps, and Kedin’s muted? And we have the slaves. Now, obviously they’re not happy. They’re slaves! They’re drugged into forced contentment! But then we meet a slave/master couple who seem sort of genuinely functional, the one filling in the deficiencies of the other. Bep-Wor’s half-crazed army can’t cope with this idea so they kill the owner and liberate the slave; it’s strongly suggested that we shouldn’t cheer them on, which suggests that maybe, I dunno, there’s a grey area in all this.

Maybe I’ve got my charitable hat on but I think there’s genuine promise here. Sadly Independence Day doesn’t follow through on any of it. Which suggests worrying things about my choice of hat.

For starters there’s the Doctor. Yes, it’s interesting that his actions may have doomed Mendeb Two. But you ideally need to do something with that other than have the Doctor go “oh, whoops” and then proceed to get exactly as involved in the anti-villainy plot as he would have done on any other planet. His complicity doesn’t make much difference to the story since at no point does anyone find out or care about the Doctor’s little mistake, and beyond a little early encouragement he barely contributes to their victory anyway, instead spending a fair chunk of the finale dead. (He gets better.)

Then there’s Kedin, our distractingly handsome hero/slave trader — you know, that old combo. Kedin is anything but lily white politically, but he seems sure that he can fix the slave problem. Based on what, though? There’s zero actual plan to restore the slaves to who they were before, since at the time he planned all this he didn’t know the Doctor would turn up to at least have a credible go at it. Did he think setting a load of servile zombies free on their old stomping ground was a win? All his new drug does is confirm that some new slaves will revert back. Some plan!

His personality isn’t much better. We’re meant to believe he’s pining for his kidnapped love, Tevana. It’s a key motivator for him. That doesn’t seem to get in the way of his taking Ace to bed though, does it? Not to get all prudish about it, but that’s some very messy motivation for a guy already dabbling in straight up villainy, and yet by the time the dust settles at the end you’d think Aragorn had returned to Gondor. So I guess just don’t worry about all of that.

It’s clear that we’re meant to pity Bep-Wor, who gets a downbeat ending after hearing some unencouraging news. I nevertheless kept waiting for his bloody revolution and occasional lies to come back on him, but they didn’t. Shouldn’t it make a difference that he goes against the Doctor’s wishes, uses him as a figurehead and eventually (unconvincingly) feigns helplessness when his mob kills somebody harmless? Instead it’s just one of those things the book throws at us as if to go, well, it’s more colourful that way. And it is, but you really ought to put a button on it as well.

Like Kedin, Bep-Wor is lauded at the end. His unhappy postscript might be seen as penance — I dunno, he mostly seems unhappy about one very specific thing there. The best I can come up with is that Bep-Wor’s decay is because the Doctor felt he deserved it for making his earlier mistake, and that’s why he doesn’t do anything to stop it. I know, I know, it’s probably just (debatably) interesting colour.

You can see that Ace’s story is meant to be meaningful, a sort of New Adventures character arc speed run, but it just doesn’t work. For starters, she gets it all wrong: she completely misreads the initial attack on Kedin (she thinks the fancy rich guy is blameless, not the band of angry peasants? Ace thinks that?) and she puts a fatal amount of trust in him, even after he seemingly ejects her into space. The “mindless slave” section is then a very curious choice for the character, effectively writing her out for half of it. (That may be for the best as it’s strongly hinted that she did more than serve drinks on Mendeb Three. A reference to her being “fit for the arena” due to her fight skills is promising but that goes nowhere — perhaps it was from an old draft.)

Although her recovery and rush into action at the end is some of the most direct and enjoyable stuff in the book, her moral flip-flopping over Kedin is laughable. He drugged you and sent you into slavery! He boffed you while supposedly pining for his missus! But because he’s sad about it, Ace reckons she’s all grown up now and ready to go and serve Kedin instead of travelling in the TARDIS. No way: you, sir, are having a laugh. And so Darvill-Evans appears to be with Kedin’s wince-inducing Casablanca kiss-off at the end. At least we can find some amusement in the Doctor failing to entertain her plan for even a second.

Lastly we have the “take for granted” stuff, and no prizes for guessing how much that leaves in the bank. Vethran is described with, of course, thwarted ambiguity: “Bep-Wor had expected — he didn’t know what he had expected. Someone more remarkable, perhaps: a man whose face betrayed an inner evil. Vethran was tall, imposing, with keen, intelligent eyes and a full beard. And that was all.” But he’s clearly studied at the Ming The Merciless school as there’s no doubt of his total nastiness based on his actions; he even does the “try to kill the goodie when he’s not looking” trick! So yes, he really is worse than Kedin after all, because he just is, so there. (And to now put on my nitpick hat: why did he wait so long before brainwashing his hostage? Come to think of it, why doesn’t he just brainwash the world? Seriously, just poison the water supply and bam, no more wars. Why all the faff?) As for the apparent ambiguity around slaves — which I’m not exactly hopping up and down about as a concept — there’s only one scene of it. Another example of our “whew, that was weird, anyway” approach to moral complexity.

I’ve clearly got a bit sidetracked by all the ambiguity or-lack-thereof, so to get back to the book: yeah, I guess it is just a surface level slave revolt thing after all, despite appearances. And to be fair it can be enjoyed on that level. Darvill-Evans has clearly thought a lot about Mendeb Three and its strangely anachronistic society, with dukes and peasants somehow flying rickety rockets to a space station with much better tech. (5 years to get from radio sets to orbit? Yeah, okay.) Independence Day has an ungainly way of unspooling the planet’s lore at us, occasionally pausing just to “as you know, Bob” directly in the prose for no reason, but some of the added colour isn’t bad. Sue me, I got somewhat invested. (Sadly though it’s not just the prose that gets a bad case of the talkies. Ace, seemingly possessed with the soliloquy powers of Spider-Man, at one point announces to herself: “Now then … what was all that about? That Kedin’s a crafty old sod. Charming and very horny, but definitely crafty with it. I suppose he’s trying to find out how much I know about all this futuristic technology. It’s obvious he hasn’t got the hang of it at all. I just wish I knew what he was up to on this godforsaken space station.” Smooth!)

It’s not, without wishing to be mean, the most memorably written book. This is the sort of SF/fantasy plodder to throw out lines like “‘The signal, Tevana Roslod,’ Madok said”, and where “flirting” manifests as “I think you’d better say a prayer to your own deity, young lady. You’re about to sin.” (Oh, Pete.) We’ve established that virtually no one in this is someone you’ll want to root for, and there’s little in the way of interesting interior lives; nonetheless, the simple march of Darvill-Evans’s revolution keeps the pace up pretty well. The finale is exciting, and there are moments of wit along the way, like how Ace’s brainwashed speech and thoughts aren’t quite as flat as everyone else’s: “It’s a good job I’ve been told that I’m happy doing this, [Ace] said to herself, because otherwise I think I’d be quite pissed off.” If nothing else it’s unchallenging on a plot level and quite easy to get through.

I think I liked it better than Deceit. That’s not a very high bar, and it’s difficult to tell how much of my generally-finding-it-sort-of-okay was because I’d tricked myself into expecting a more complex book. I still think Independence Day has the germ of something with all that moral ambiguity, though equally that might just be a tonal leftover from the New Adventures. With a book this eager to comment on the action and tell us about the surroundings, however, I have to doubt there’s all that much hidden under the surface.

5/10

*Not a great title is it? This is a coup, they depose the guy. They’re not becoming an independent anything, they’re just getting rid of their ruler.

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #13 – Deceit by Peter Darvill-Evans

Doctor Who: The New Adventures
#13
Deceit
By Peter Darvill-Evans

Surprise!  Ace is back!  Phew?

I'm biased because I really like Bernice, and these books came out too long ago for me to say I didn't see it coming, but... really?  After three books that shoehorned Benny into the plot with varying degrees of awkwardness, it's rather sad to throw away the possibility that the writers will get better at it, not to mention the chance of developing an organic friendship between Bernice and the Doctor.  However these books shuffle it, what you're going to get from now on is one too many people in the TARDIS.

Okay, dismount soapbox, now for the actual book.  I might as well address an elephant in the room, as I did for The Pit: Deceit is another infamously unpopular New Adventures novel.  (Two in a row.  Huzzah.)  Knowing this and reading it anyway carries an obvious risk: you've only yourself to blame.  But I think it's important not to take received wisdom for granted, to make up your own mind and in any case, the rough will help you appreciate the smooth.  I want to follow the whole New Adventures story, warts and all.

Here be warts.  Deceit isn't as terrible as I was expecting, but it still makes complete sense that people tend not to recommend it.  This is a book many feel they have to read because it reintroduces a long-running character; it's as important to the world of the New Adventures as Love And War, but only in the strictest technical sense.  Given its significance I couldn't help wondering how this is the best they could come up with.

Deceit begins, as so many New Adventures do, by spinning a bunch of plates.  Over here you've got a sinister relationship between man and computer (and soon, woman and computer); over here, a woman tries to contact her husband in deep space, but he'll never get her messages; over here, a military operation sets its sights on the mysterious world of Arcadia and gathers soldiers for the cause, including a familiar citizen of Perivale; and over here, Arcadia itself, a medieval world descended from Earth colonists, where people die at a young age and strange Counsellors rule by suggestion.  The Doctor and Bernice are off doing nothing much in the vortex.

The book gives an impression of a lot going on, but it's false.  Instead of chapters we have parts of roughly fifty pages, and Peter Darvill-Evans saves much of the book's action for those intervals.  At 50-odd pages we finally hear from the Doctor and Bernice.  At 100-odd pages the TARDIS lands on Arcadia.  At 150-odd pages so do Ace and the remains of the military.  At 200-odd pages the Doctor and Bernice arrive on a creepy space-station.  At 250-odd pages, so does Ace.  Darvill-Evans is impressively strict about this, but in the interim, not a lot actually goes on.  Ace investigates her ship, her crewmates and her mission – really though, she just travels to Arcadia.  The Doctor and Bernice separate on Arcadia, they walk lots, meet people, meet up, get locked in rooms.  It kills time. Once the action shifts to the space-station it becomes Journey To The Centre Of The Corridor, while Ace and co. make shooty-peeow-noises on Arcadia for, as we later discover, no reason at all.  The 300-page mark looms, we learn what it's all about and the Doctor sets one of his traps to make it stop.  Then, congratulations: it's over!

There is no reason for it to take as long as it does.  Deceit is noticeably the longest New Adventure yet, a generous 325 pages including an Epilogue, Appendix and rambling Afterword.  As editor of the range, Peter Darvill-Evans didn't have to submit his book for editing, and it shows.  In the Afterword he admits: "I'm aware that I've tried to cram a lot into it.  Perhaps too much."  Ya think?

And yet, that's kind of the opposite of the book's problem.  He crams too many pages into it, certainly, but story, and even that frequent New Adventures fall-back, ideas are in short supply.  Action scenes trundle and explode, corridors are walked and answers take the scenic route.  In truth, it's long because it's long.

Fortunately there are some ideas to be getting on with, most having to do with continuity.  Deceit marks the return of Ace, three years older and even more skilled at demolition, so obviously there's some emotional content to do with Love And War.  Darvill-Evans does quite a bit of narrative housekeeping, and it's here you feel his hand as editor of the range.  The concurrent, similar endings of Nightshade and Love And War are folded into the same Doctorly narrative.  Events from Warhead inform Deceit's villains.  Something unseen occurred at the end of Witch Mark which is only now resolved – the tail-end of a sort of Cat's Cradle 2.0: Now Even More Off-Screen, as Darvill-Evans explains the Doctor and the TARDIS's so-called erratic behaviour since then.  (A way to write off the clumsy handling of the-Doctor-and-Bernice, perhaps?  Say he had other things on his mind?)  He even takes the ending of The Pit, when the Doctor had to let seven planets die to appease history, resound in a way that Neil Penswick had neither the time nor the ability to manage.  It's arguably a continuity-fest, which can be the worst kind of fan writing, but it's trying to inform the characters rather than simply stack up Do You Remember This points.  It felt more rewarding than intrusive, so he must be doing something right.

And as for those characters, while it is undeniably a mistake to maroon them amid great oceans of nothingy non-plot, they are at least likeable and recognisably written.  The Doctor is, let's face it, hard to get wrong: he plots and schemes, he has eccentric moments, emotions bubble beneath his eyes.  Darvill-Evans's Bernice is more of a boon.  She's in tune with Love And War, still possessing that nervous sarcasm and modest intelligence: "'Read all about it,' Bernice shouted, lifting her hands in what she hoped was a universally recognized gesture of peaceful intent.  'Town terrorized by unarmed archaeologist in scruffy jeans and old jacket.'"  But there's also a vulnerability that comes with half a dozen not-altogether-fun rides in the TARDIS.  When she meets Elaine, a troubled and grief-stricken girl locked in an attic, her distress and anger are palpable. And when Ace signs up at the end, her world is shaken. "The Professor and the Doctor.  They made a good team, didn't they?  They understood each other. ... The Doctor didn't need Ace any more.  Did he?"  I'm still – and I can't believe I'm writing this – surprised that the Doctor and Bernice spend much of Deceit apart, and that he sort of forgets about her again.  Just pair them up already, for god's sake.  But she acquits herself well.

And there's Ace 2.0.  Older and wiser, doesn't seem to say "toe-rag" or "bilge-breath" as much (never again, pretty please?), but still maintains a cheery and rebellious attitude.  And phew for that: I thought she'd be a humourless space marine.  She's recognisably Ace, only a bit more balanced.  It's just a pity she spends so long marching through endless action scenes.  Now, I've more than once heard that Deceit devolves into little more than an action sequence as it goes on, and that's not entirely true; there is, believe me, plenty of tedious walking down corridors and sitting in rooms as well.  But the action is there, and it's simply monotonous.  Lines like this only serve to suggest even Darvill-Evans knows it's filler: "'You could let them land here.'  'Don't worry, Doctor.  We intend to. Although I think I'll play a few games with them.  I don't want them to have an uneventful journey.'"  Jeez.  Are "uneventful" and "tediously repetitive" our only choices?  What’s to stop the baddies simply beaming them up if they're so keen to have them?  Is it intrinsically more interesting to zap a bunch of androids first?  (Going back to that quote, there are other moments of possible self-reflection dotted about.  Take "'Do you know,' the Doctor said, 'I rather think we're getting somewhere at last'", or "It seemed like hours since she had slipped away to find Ace, but nothing had changed much. "  It's like the book knows it's swaddled in padding, which – surprise! – only makes it worse that it is.)

Unfortunately, while Darvill-Evans demonstrates a good ear for the regulars, his supporting cast are dead weight.  Arcadia is medieval-yet-alien, so a bog-standard Tara, then.  You've seen and heard it before, and the whole "You die when you reach 30" dilemma reeks of Logan's Run – not to mention Timewyrm: Apocalypse, plus the countless things that inspired Nigel Robinson in that.  We scarcely meet any Arcadians apart from Francis (cowardly and sleazy) and Elaine (small and vulnerable), so when their fate hangs in the balance, it is necessary to restrain a shrug.

And what of the military?  About 95% of Ace's compatriots die before they reach Arcadia, leaving Defries, a woman single-mindedly obsessed with bringing down those responsible, and Abslom Daak, a Doctor Who Magazine creation who's pretty much just single-minded.  "Daak was always the same: without reference to the creed, colour, gender or opinions of whoever happened to be around, he was rude, randy, rebellious and always ready for a fight. "  When even the narrative agrees that a character is "always the same", there can be little hope for them.  He amounts to nothing more than a watered-down Gilgamesh, including a lascivious intent towards Ace.  He's hardly even irritating, he's so bloody boring.

Perhaps the most interesting characters are Lacuna, the Sinister (with a capital s) interpreter for Pool, a group of minds responsible for the Arcadian dilemma.  And Britta: a wife stuck light years away from her husband, drawn into an abusive and servile relationship with Lacuna, whose monstrous feelings are Pool's only outlet.  I say "interesting" here – perhaps that's the wrong word.  Lacuna and Britta fall into a bizarre and troubling Stockholm Syndrome, and it is damn uncomfortable to read.  By the book's end, they are in each other's arms, presumably forever.  It's, uh... yeah.  I'm not sure what to make of that.  I'd say it was the weirdest bit by miles, if not for the scene where Daak makes his umpteenth rapey advance on Ace and she comes within a hair's breadth of actually going for it.  You, uh, only live once I guess?

The prose is solid and readable, and so an obvious improvement on The Pit, but it's not something that brims with personality.  I probably couldn't pick one of Peter Darvill-Evans's sentences out of a line-up.  But given a more layered and interesting story and, ironically, an editor, I'd probably read another of his books.  I can't recommend this one.

Deceit needs to exist only inasmuch as Ace (apparently) needed to return in one of the books.  If you're desperate to know what happens to her, as I was, here's the edited version: she joins the army, meets the Doctor and Bernice again and sticks with them.  If you're still bloody-mindedly determined to read it, and to hell with the negative reviews, it's best to think of it like lancing a boil: a necessary but unenjoyable task to be got out of the way.  There is absolutely no point in taking your time over it.

4/10