Doctor Who: The BBC Books #101 – Grimm Reality by Simon Bucher-Jones and Kelly Hale

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#50

Grimm Reality

By Simon Bucher-Jones and Kelly Hale

Fantasy seems to hold a special fascination for sci-fi writers. It’s an alternative, perhaps even forbidden path to strangeness: we took the one with long words and explanations, they took the one with primordial rules and “monsters, just because.”

Now and again you get sci-fi stories that see how the other half lives, and Doctor Who has already taken a few novelistic whacks at it. Conundrum is generally understood to be The Good One, though it mostly worked with different media rather than this genre specifically. The Sorcerer’s Apprentice took it literally, alternating fantasy and SF as the plot demanded — and I would argue, watering both down in the process. Managra dived into literature, but in a way that verged on fantasy. Grimm Reality might be the most direct example yet, hurling the TARDIS onto a planet where anything can happen, but always in the form of fairytales.

I can see the appeal already: narratively you can let your hair down, worry less about the mechanics of things; it’s enjoyable to put your SF heroes in a different context. But it’s a tightrope walk. You still need rules and, on some level, your fantasy walk-on-the-wild-side still has to function as sci-fi, because look what it says on the front cover. It’s a conundrum (ahem) that’s hard to solve. Do you veer more fantasy or sci-fi?

Grimm Reality has its magical cake and vanishes it. There’s an upfront SF reason for what’s going on here: a white hole. (So what is it?) This has fired blobs of multiversal possibility at a nearby planet, although the planet already comes with fantasy craziness as standard. (We get another SF reason for that later on.) That taken care of, everything in-between can be as fantasy as you like. Simon Bucher-Jones and Kelly Hale (I don’t know in what configuration) dutifully fire a rat-a-tat-tat campaign of fantasy problems at the Doctor, Anji and Fitz, such as: a Cinderella job where Anji works for six cruel sisters, and a wishing box won’t help; a quest for Fitz working for two thoughtless princes, also involving a magic wolf skin; a journey to a giant’s castle for the Doctor and some new friends, where the giant’s size is never fixed; a contest to become a King’s bride, with the contest threatening everyone in the kingdom; multiple terrifying figures demanding answers to their riddles; and a sleeping princess whose rescue and reawakening is the talk of the town.

If you like fairytales, and most of us do, there’s a pretty constant supply of fun here. It does however get a bit wearying jumping from one fairytale to another, and within that from the progress of one group of characters to another, and within that from the Doctor/Anji/Fitz to a visiting crew of (reassuringly sci-fi) salvage hunters hoping to strip mine the planet of any white hole goodness. At its peak Grimm Reality has five or six protagonists on the go, each with their own cadre of supporting characters and all going through the motions of some vaguely parodic fantasy story. For a book intrinsically about storytelling, its general inability to sit bloody still and tell us one of them from start to finish is not a plus. Despite its colourful simplicity, I often found it hard to stick with as a novel.

There’s also the individual stories themselves. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect a degree of subversion here: our brilliant SF characters bringing what they know to bear on archetypal fantasy stories, and either turning them on their heads or finding that the rules of fantasy will fight back. There is a little of this, with the Doctor plying his trade as “Doctor Know-It-All” and offering mostly quack solutions to fantasy problems, until the King demands more help than he can give; and Anji, tricked into servitude to possess a wishing box she can’t actually use, tries to game it so that the sisters wish to her benefit, only that doesn’t work. Mostly though, these are just straight fairytales that show up and happen. The presence of yer actual Doctor Who alumni in the proceedings doesn’t make a huge difference, which somewhat begs the question of why we’re combining the two things.

The sci-fi stuff is dialled down, perhaps by design. It’s promising enough: the salvage crew is made up of three distinct species, which is a nice bit of world-building, and at the start they take on board William Brok, a rugged but unlucky salvager who found the white hole shortly before his ship failed on him, only for his rescuers to steal the glory. He develops a combative quasi-romance with “human-Captain” Christina, which points to a decent arc, but it’s Christina we follow to the planet, leaving William more or less to the reader’s imagination afterwards. (Christina’s a pretty strong character anyway, or at least she’s consistent, refusing to wilt because of William’s or the Doctor’s charms. She is, frankly, a sod, which is quite interesting.) The abanak (avuncular hippo-people) and vuim (insectoids seeking a cure for a disease) are compelling enough, though they quickly fall into archetypes.

The SF ideas can’t really compete with the fantasy ones. Take the white hole/multiverse stuff: there’s a strong suggestion that this opens up infinite possibilities to anyone that encounters it. Obvious story potential there — only, we’re already on a planet that can manufacture anything, provided it’s a fairytale, so everybody on it is sort of doing all right for magical possibilities, thank you very much. The concept of growing literally anything for fantasy reasons cohabits in Grimm Reality with anything that can happen for sci-fi reasons, and the confluence of the two is just a sort of muddle, really.

In amongst all that you’ve got three regulars and, I would say, some potential for characterisation. That’s another tightrope walk: how much of this is just satire? You don’t really do satire for the meaningful character stuff, and sure enough Anji faces fairly archetypal “modern girl in ye olden times” difficulties living as Cinderella, or being magically compelled to compete for a marriage she doesn’t even want; Fitz has a rough time and harbours grudges against those princes, but for a considerable stretch his “character arc” here is that he’s cold; and the Doctor seems uncharacteristically naive for a lot of this, trusting dangerous people and needing a lot of magical help to get out of scrapes. But there are glimmers of meaning here, with the Doctor being offered (and refusing) the restoration of his memories, and Anji once again going back and forth about her place in the TARDIS, and pining for Dave. (I’m not too crazy about either of those. Do Doctor Who authors ever compare notes? Aren’t these somewhat settled questions after EarthWorld and The City Of The Dead?)

With a few honourable nods to the anything-can-happen likes of Conundrum, Grimm Reality mostly reminded me of the Benny New Adventures. Story-wise it feels like a fusion of Oh No It Isn’t! and Down (with a dash of Oblivion) and the book’s general wise-guy tone hews closer to that mildly inebriated world than, IMO, Doctor Who. I don’t know if I would have liked it better as an entry in that other range — lord knows most of them were unspectacular — but as a pit stop for the EDAs it doesn’t leave a huge impression. It successfully replicates another genre without doing a heck of a lot with it, and it arguably mistakes a large quantity of fantasy tropes for a coherent plot. It still provides good fun in short bursts, and the let-your-hair-down aspect is a genuine selling point for a Doctor Who book. But as far as subjecting fantasy tropes to critical thought goes, we already have quite a lot of Discworld books for that.

6/10

Doctor Who: The BBC Books #56 – The Taking Of Planet 5 by Simon Bucher-Jones & Mark Clapham

Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor Adventures

#28

The Taking Of Planet 5

By Simon Bucher-Jones & Mark Clapham

Things are looking up for the Eighth Doctor Adventures. A range of books with much to recommend, they nevertheless often find themselves in ruts, usually consisting of visits to ill-fated colony worlds or, if Sam Jones is around, the nearest hospital. There’s a definite sense post-Interference that this will no longer do, and quite right. The scale of storytelling is much grander all of a sudden. You can’t move for all the ambition flying around.

This has its downsides. I found The Blue Angel all too pleased with itself and apparently keen to keep its genius out of reach of the reader. I felt like my time had been wasted. The Taking Of Planet 5 isn’t quite so obscure, but there is still that sense of authors trying really hard to prove how clever they are. I’m genuinely glad that there seems to be a renewed mission statement at BBC Books — be bigger, grander, don’t be afraid to get complicated — but I wonder if they’ve hit the accelerator a little too hard.

Once again we’re playing with ideas and entities established by Lawrence Miles (they didn’t pay that guy enough), and it’s not just him. The Doctor is intrigued by the apparently real existence of H.P. Lovecraft’s “Elder Things” so he takes Fitz and Compassion back to Earth’s pre-history to investigate. Here he finds Time Lords from his own future (Miles’s War In Heaven from Alien Bodies) masquerading as Elder Things after killing all the real ones. (Or, spoiler alert, the “real” ones.) They have a plan to help win their war, but this is in jeopardy because the Celestis (estranged Time Lord splinter group, also Alien Bodies) have infiltrated their group, hoping to usurp the plan for themselves. To make things worse, the two Celesti agents don’t share the same agenda. Meanwhile, 12 million years in the future, an Antarctic base in 1999 is investigating the fallout from what will happen here. Compassion has somehow straddled the two time periods.

It’s definitely complicated, and it’s not made any easier by all the characters being in disguise. The Time Lords look like blobby eldritch horrors, although that’s not their normal appearance; the Celestis look bizarre in their own way, but (when they’re not casually making themselves two-dimensional) they’re disguised as Time Lords disguised as eldritch horrors — actually, both are disguised as the same one. In the 1999 portion of the story one of the scientists is secretly a Time Lord agent, and pretty soon another one is a Celesti in disguise, killing and copying a little like The Thing.

Navigating all this can be tricky, especially when the Celestis are called “One” and “Two” and are sharing the same disguise. It’s harder still without a lot to get your teeth into character-wise. Both groups investigating this site either side of 12 million years, the Time Lords and the humans, could do with more definition.

The Time Lords are split into veterans and newborns, with the varying levels of experience that implies; their leader Xenaria has a certain no-nonsense attitude that comes across well, subordinate Holsred is quite likeable, but the rest could just as easily be random names generated as the novel went along. They believe the Doctor to be a general from their own ranks pretty much just because he said so, which is great as an example of the doctor’s ability to take (or fake) authority, but does rather diminish them as a serious concern. They’re all a bit silly, albeit knowingly so: busy people encumbered with tentacles.

The humans are worse. The Taking Of Planet 5 has quite an irreverent sense of humour, which is perhaps another carry-over from Lawrence Miles (he treats this sort of universe-bothering weirdness much the same, even in Interference), but it manifests rather awkwardly at times, particularly in 1999. Pretty much the only thing going for the humans character-wise is that McCarthy, an American woman, is fat, something the book finds very amusing. (“Luckily her butt was big enough to absorb most of the impact as she hit the ground.” Oof.) The rest all snap at each other or, where men and women are concerned, boringly lust after one another. The most interesting one isn’t human. There is indeed a joke to be made about whether you’d notice if these guys had been bodysnatched. You might hope to latch onto these scenes for their contribution to the plot, but nothing very interesting is happening in the 1999 part of the story, other than explaining how Compassion got there or why there’s a big hole in the dig site — things that, once revealed, are really more technical explanations given than great mysteries solved.

That’s the book’s main issue for me: a lot of it feels academic. That’s not to say it doesn’t have interesting ideas. The faked existence of characters from H.P. Lovecraft (and by extension, the ability to manifest any literary nonsense as real) is an obvious story goldmine, but the creatures are dead by the time we arrive and the device is hardly used again, very much damp-squibbing the Doctor’s assertion that “we’d better be prepared to meet anything. Anything at all.” The Time Lord plan is quite grand, involving the release of an ancient horror that might doom us all etc, but it rests entirely on close familiarity with a Classic story that is itself barely represented here. Granted, it’s safe to assume that sort of nerd pedigree in the readership — who else are these books aiming at? — but the casual way said story is invoked leaves us without any of its original legwork or sense of danger.

Then you have the Celesti plan — or plans I suppose, oy — which entirely concerns their headquarters, Mictlan. (A weird Hell analogue that is mysteriously falling apart.) Quite apart from why the reader should care about a place this fundamentally unpleasant, the existence or destruction of Mictlan is neither here nor there for most of the characters, besides One and Two. And heck, even those two feel differently about it. Blow it up, don’t blow it up. Ehh. (You can see how this will figure into the War In Heaven arc, so I’m willing to concede it will be interesting. But right now do the Doctor, Fitz or Compassion give much of a stuff either way? Not really. Should we, if they don’t?)

The best we’ve got in terms of stakes is general suggestiveness about the wider story arc(s), but for obvious reasons none of that pays off here. The War In Heaven doesn’t noticeably budge, although you can see how the removal of Mictlan might matter to all that. As to the other plan, it probably would have been a bad idea to try to control Evil From The Dawn Of Time #numbers anyway — it places the entire universe at risk to even try — but hey ho, they’re prevented from doing so because the Doctor is around to course correct, which is another thing that makes the Time Lords look like unthinking idiots for even attempting it. Still, this kind of thing suggests a way that a war in the distant future can affect the here and now. Considering the Doctor would rather not know about any of it, that’s probably the only way we’re going to integrate it into the EDAs.

Probably the most compelling thing about The Taking Of Planet 5 is another little ongoing Easter egg hunt, viz, what’s going on with Compassion? Fitz and the Doctor haven’t forgotten about her ease with piloting TARDISes in The Blue Angel, and we add to that a strange ability to make use of the signals around her and make inexplicable, powerful sounds that control her surroundings. Her personality is still a little on the rudimentary side — unemotional yet bitchy, a sci-fi favourite — but the authors are all in with the peculiarities of this ex-Remote person. She’s utterly unfazed by her wrench across 12 million years, and quickly falls into a sort of Doctor-companion role with the secret Time Lord, albeit both of them are a bit less friendly than the duos we’re used to. I still think it’s weird that the books skipped her addition to the crew, but there’s some back-filling of a sort here: the Doctor considers “whether letting her join him in the TARDIS had been the solution to her problems”, suggesting there had been a thought process there, and when Compassion thinks she’s stuck on Earth she thinks how “[she] could have hoped to travel for longer, but Earth would have to do for the immediate future”, telling us she actually wants (or wanted) to do this. Hey, it’s just nice to have it confirmed. Anyway, apart from that we’re engaging with the interesting things about her, which from past experience is not something to take for granted.

The Doctor and Fitz fare less well. The Doctor is a bit of a rough sketch in this one, with a “goldfish attention span and constant energy”. Between his not-trying-all-that-hard subterfuge with the blobby Time Lords and his getting caught up in a lot of TARDIS action near the end, he has a tendency to fade into the background of the plot, at one point ceding what feels like Doctorly action to that guy in 1999. (He even has an equivalent sonic screwdriver!) I liked the bit where he sympathised with the terrible evil thing and considered going back to rescue it one day.

Fitz has never been friendlier or, in all honesty, less useful to the plot than he is here, but he’s a delight to be around; highlights of his activities include an arguably sexual encounter with an Elder Thing-disguised Celesti, because Fitz gonna Fitz. He’s mostly here to bluntly and repeatedly ask what’s going on, which feels like something I ought to be critical of but to be honest this time I was relieved to hear it. Even the Doctor at one point remarks that “It’s all so confusing I could do with explaining it to myself.”

I wonder if the mixture of ambitious-bordering-on-convoluted scheming and the occasional simple restating of facts is a hint of the cowriting process between Bucher-Jones and Clapham. See also, the helpful (I mean it!) recaps of how Fitz became Kode and then Fitz again, what Compassion’s deal is, and even a whiff of how The Blue Angel came about and where it’s left the Doctor emotionally. Maybe that was all done by one author or the other or both, but I think in mixing it up The Taking Of Planet 5 keeps just on the right side of confusing. It doesn’t help with the general sprawling state of it as a piece of drama, but at least you’ve got plenty to think about.

A last thing to mention would be the general jolly nerdiness of the thing. Obviously there’s the geeking out about Lovecraft, which is mostly lost on me as I haven’t read any. (See also White Darkness.) There’s an obvious debt to a certain 70s story, although as mentioned that’s not handled all that well. The stuff I liked most was the sprinkling of references, something I’m normally immune to but in the context of a big complicated event, and with the general sense of humour employed, it adds a certain levity to an at times stodgy book. There are nods to things as disparate as zygma energy, Karfel, Morlox, Stangmoor Prison, Raston Warrior Robots, Ogri and D-Mat guns. There’s a pre-emptive puncturing of the mysterious Enemy of the Time Lords: “They’ll probably be terribly disappointing. With my luck it’ll turn out to be Yartek, leader of the alien Voord, with a big stick.” The plot manages to explain (although did it need explaining?) the way the people on Delphon communicate with their eyebrows, as well as the way the Tersuruns communicate with a less subtle bodily function. (The Curse Of Fatal Death is canon!) There are oodles of references to looms, helping to settle that debate, as well as a brief mention of Tehke, a deity who’d turn up in the final New Adventure co-written by Mark Clapham two months after this. (Nice to see a bit of Virgin cross-promotion. All friends here.) And on the less meta or piss-taking side there’s also the casual suggestion that the Doctor’s poor piloting in the early years of Who was a deliberate effort to avoid the Time Lords. Head-canon for sure, but I’ll allow it.

I think all of that mild indulgence helped ground The Taking Of Planet 5 for me during its bigger indulgences — a knowingly fuzzy plot with tons of moving parts that all leans on Importance To The Arc(s). I was rarely hooked but I made it through quite painlessly. Saying that, this now makes three Important And Slightly Difficult books in a row. I appreciate the jump in ambition but it’s starting to get a bit stuffy in here. Does every book need to be a massive mind-boggler?

5/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #109 – Ghost Devices by Simon Bucher-Jones

The New Adventures
#7
Ghost Devices
By Simon Bucher-Jones

When I review books one of the main things I turn to for help (apart from the pool of Doctor Who trivia taking up brain space which perhaps should have gone towards useful everyday skills, but hey ho) is what the author did last time. Ghost Devices sees the return of Simon Bucher-Jones. His debut The Death Of Art didn’t quite work for me. I didn’t hate it; in fact I enjoyed many of its facets and ideas. The whole thing though could be described as a bit of a mood that I couldn’t get into. Therefore – no offence to any passing Bucher-Joneses – I’d be lying if I said I cracked open Ghost Devices with a giddy sense of optimism.

Well, that was then. Fast forward to now and it turns out Ghost Devices is much more my kind of thing. Hooray!

The prologue features a sentient factory questioning its lot. Neurotic robots are a bit of a cheat code to get me to enjoy things, so that made a good first impression. And then once again we’re dabbling in The Also People: a logical extension of “neurotic robots”, as well as a perennial fan favourite and increasingly the Rosetta Stone for Bernice-novel world-building. Who could object? (Although, sidebar: let’s see some non-Aaronovitch reference points as well, shall we?)

The plot concerns ancient machines of death with varying levels of sentience that try to commit their usual murders, genocides etc but end up squirting condiments or performing magic shows instead. This makes for a delightfully offbeat intergalactic crisis, but it has made certain warlords understandably upset. The head of a crime family is keen to start the heads rolling by visiting the homeworld of the Vo’lach – the ancient death-machine builders – while Vo’lach agents are keen to monitor the situation and keep any visitors at bay. Both parties hide in plain sight once an archaeological expedition crosses their path.

And speaking of Bernice: she is hired by an agent of God (as in the big computer one) to go on an expedition with the promise that a duplicate will write her next book for her. The perpetually late post-grad agrees, despite somewhat meta misgivings: “I know my life seems to be falling into a Bernice-has-a-university-problem-goes-on-a-field-trip-almost-gets-killed-but-triumphs-brilliantly-and-solves-her-domestic-crisis-into-the-bargain style of thing, but just occasionally I do need to do some real work.” (Put a pin in that for later.)

The expedition is to Canopusi IV, more specifically The Spire: a gargantuan tower of mysterious origin that is worshipped by the somewhat primitive, if seemingly agreeable natives. The Spire is made of “futurite,” a crystal with temporal properties, and the structure sends back information from the future. (Bits of futurite also litter the nearby desert, which is a mystery for later.) Bernice can’t believe her luck in getting onto this expedition. Professor Fellows, who is leading it, cannot believe his bad luck for exactly the same reason: “Bernice ‘Jonah’ Summerfield. The woman had been a jinx on so many offworld field trips, that it had got to be something of a joke.”

And, well, this is entirely fair, isn’t it? We’ve all heard the clever-clever argument that the Doctor turning up somewhere in the TARDIS is a trigger for certain doom, but that’s just wrong, like blaming firemen for fires. Canonically he goes where he’s needed – often not the place he intended. The doom was already happening! Bernice Summerfield doesn’t (or doesn’t always) have that in-built excuse, so the fact that she keeps turning up at dig sites that become bomb sites is worthy of comment. This week God has asked nicely for her help, which might as well be the TARDIS picking a location out of a hat, but unless she’s going to start working for The People on the regular that’s a narrative sticking plaster. And anyway, Fellows and his colleagues don’t know about that.

All of this hints at a narrative question that I’m happy to see articulated, even if there’s no answer yet: can you really get away with dropping Benny into an archaeological dig-of-doom in every book? Does she do anything else? Isn’t her academic life ticking along as well? (Now unpin that thought from earlier: even Bernice has noticed the level of contrivance in her life.) What else, in other words, can these books do? At least Doctor Who can swap out its star wars for historicals, or just give the interstellar megalomaniacs a time out. Bernice finds herself increasingly in a rut, which is undoubtedly bags of fun to be in but is a bit tricky for sustaining a series.

Lots to ponder then. Ghost Devices doesn’t, of course, push us to the next stage (in my ignorance I still hope there is one), but it does some interesting things with Bernice. She is again (!) not quite the protagonist, more of a team player, with Fellows leading a strand of story at the Spire once Benny and others head off to find the Vo’lach (who, multitaskers they, also built the Spire). With the added context of Fellows (see “Jonah”) it seems less of a wrench not revolving it all around her. She is only one component of these expeditions, and it would threaten suspension of disbelief to always position her so. Bernice, in this one, consequently feels like a scruffy little variable you’re delighted to cut back to. Like the larger meta questions, this lack of focus feels like it’s either going to be solved or I’ll just have to get used to it, but this time the mix works.

Bucher-Jones writes Bernice very well generally, which isn’t always a given. There’s the essential wit: “‘It’s the wider implications I’m worried about. I just don’t see why anyone would use poison.’ Bernice hesitated. ‘If I said to kill him, would I be hot or cold?’” There’s the way she jumps at anything resembling pop culture: “‘It’s me, I am the Air Vent itself, not some hunky rescuer in a torn vest trapped with his wife, who needs a vital operation, in the bowels of a nuclear reactor captured by terrorists in the path of a runaway Continental Siege Engine.’ ‘You saw Die Hardest?’” There are the little meta series-of-adventures nods, as already mentioned: “Well, it’s just that you seem a liberal, educated, benevolent sort of Priest-King, not at all a raging fanatic.” He also nails that aspect of moulding the prose around her, sometimes giving Dave Stone a run for his funny-long-sentence money: “Staggering back from a pub in the students’ quarter, at twelve bells past closing time, the bells being measures of spirits, not of chronology, Professor Bernice Summerfield hadn’t expected to find an angel waiting on the stairs.”

But apart from all the funny stuff there’s grit too. God’s offer of a pseudo-you doing her homework has its appeal of course, but it also sends her into a mild existential crisis. (Do you really need her if you can outsource like that? Ah, the joys of AI!) The Spire gives her a vision of the future that seemingly includes murder, about which she anguishes – until a moment of crisis when she fulfils it because circumstances demand it, and she accepts the cost. (There is an out for this shortly afterwards, but you can’t unring that bell, can you?) At times she wonders how Chris or Roz would handle the situation. And when she saves the day in the end, which incidentally she can only do by wilfully endangering a friend, she may have fundamentally damaged the universe. Existential crises are here again! Things weigh on Bernice in a way that they do not seem to – within earshot of the reader anyway – for the Doctor. Highlighting those differences, like funny robots and air vents with opinions, is my jam.

There’s so much to like. Any hang-ups? Well, yes: there’s a little stylistic quirk carried over from The Death Of Art, although that was far from the first New Adventure to use it, but for me it’s a biggie. You guessed it: short sections. Cut, cut, cut goes the action across the page. And I’ll give it this: we are often cutting around the same scene. But the effect on me is the same. My attention span just can’t take it. Ask me to restart, as a paragraph break does, and I might take the opportunity to go and do something else. It’s an interruption. And it’s generally not the same scene. This is a stylistic choice and not everyone will be bothered by it. (You might even find it improves a book. Quick cutting is after all pretty standard when the action mounts towards the end.) But it made Ghost Devices a somewhat long, stuttery experience for me, despite its merits.

Apart from that it’s very funny and gently puzzling, most of the time in a good way. (At one point a time paradox unravels in far greater detail than I’m used to, which was cool and broadly easy to follow. But then, for example, a lingering plot point is answered by Bernice on Page 206 as if it was entirely obvious, which it wasn’t – perhaps a bit of editorial lampshading there? Still, it made me laugh.)

It’s refreshing to revisit an author and find myself on their wavelength this time around. I hope for more pleasant surprises in the range.

7/10

Doctor Who: The Virgin Novels #84 – The Death Of Art by Simon Bucher-Jones

Doctor Who: The New Adventures

#54

The Death of Art

By Simon Bucher-Jones

Well this is a fine Welcome Back.  Not that I’ve only just read The Death Of Art, of course: I started it months ago, then mysteriously ran out of steam.  Later I started again in case I’d forgotten any of it, and... strangely stopped again.  Huh.  Life intervened for a few months until I finally decided to stick the landing on my third go, or perish trying.  In all fairness, it could just be a coincidence that I struggled to finish it several times?

Sigh.  Noooope.  The Death Of Art is another of those first-time-author books that aren’t afraid to get weird, and aren’t too bothered about the people reading the result.  There’s a certain spectrum for these which runs from “fires random words for shock value” to “seems to know what they’re doing even if we don’t,” and Simon Bucher-Jones lands at the smarter end.  I mean that: there’s promise here, and good ideas.  (Plural makes a difference.)  But unavoidably there are sections that read like a fuse box, and the overall thing just sits there bubbling instead of actually moving.  And oh, it is work.

Some of this I’d point to the editors at Virgin, who surely could have cracked the whip a bit more.  Yes it’s interesting, but will anyone enjoy it?  Will anyone who isn’t the author understand it?  Fancy, idea-driven, heavily-stylised, showy-offy prose is all well and good (okay, I mostly hate it) but there’s also a lot to be said for knowing what the hell is going on.

So about the plot.  (I almost had to Google it.)  Following a brief cameo from Ace (hi and bye!), the TARDIS crashes (again) in France circa 1897.  This is after an odd bit about Charles Dickens some time earlier, which had something to do with a monstrous possessed doll house that sure sounds like a badass setting for a Doctor Who story.  On arrival, the TARDIS promptly begins morphing internally into a replica of France.  The Doctor, Chris and Roz go investigating because they believe a proliferation of psychic powers will cause a disaster in time, which in turn is what summoned them here.  If you’ve read my reviews post-Original Sin, you’ll know I love it when these three are on the case.

Roz befriends a psychically talented American; Chris joins the local gendarmes; the Doctor tries to get himself committed to an insane asylum with a surprising lack of success.  All fun scenarios, by the way.  Roz’s eye-rolling interaction with the impressionable Daniel is fun, if tragically short-lived; Chris’s easy application of his talents to 1897 police-work is brilliant (his effortless memory skills in particular); and the Doctor stuff… eh, that doesn’t come to much.  I think we get one amusing scene involving grapes, but that’s it.  Boo.  More importantly we have the Family and the Brotherhood, warring (?) factions who can transform themselves as well as swap bodies.  There’s a seriously cool bit where one character is run over by a horse and carriage, and his consciousness leaps straight into the cab driver who murdered him.  On the flipside, some characters body-swap to the point where I don’t know who they are any more.  And some of them just never distinguish themselves in the first place.  When the last act rolls around it’s probably quite dramatic, but it would be more so if I wasn’t still playing catch-up.

In amongst all this (or between it, under it, who knows etc.) are the Quoth.  They are… something, and they are doing… something.  A direct explanation arrives literally three pages before the book is over, but suffice to say, the Quoth are a really cool idea.  Put through a mangler.  Then translated into Japanese.  And back again.  And finally juggled over an open bin.  Seriously, who is reading the Quoth bits for fun?  Were you retaining any information at the end of each paragraph?  No fibbing.  The Death of Art isn’t the first New Adventure to unload random jargon on us, and at least it’s not as sustained as the fever dreams of Time’s Crucible or Strange England, but I still tuned out every time the Quoth heaved into view.  And every time the book dipped into poetry, which I admit is purely a pet hate.  (Yes, I know I’m a philistine.)

The writing in this is, charitably, all over the place.  For every paragraph rambling on about the Quoth and their pattern-lifetimes, there’s a sentence like: “It was starting to look as if she would not always have Paris”, or “Mirakle’s blonde receptionist was not enjoying her introduction to the Roz Forrester closet experience”.  For every bit that takes the plot’s transmogrifications a little too far and just generates random words at us, there’s something pithy like: “For once in his lives, he needed to sleep.  Besides, it was the quickest way he knew to make the phone ring, aside from getting into the bath”, or “There was an indescribable noise that was not like TARDIS materialisation.  That was because the TARDIS was not materialising.  Then there was a noise like everyone in the TARDIS screaming.  That was because they were.”  And Bucher-Jones has a real knack for ending his paragraphs or chapters with a shock, like “Mon Dieu.  This future, then, you have come to prevent it?”  The Doctor smiled.  “No, to make certain of it”, or “As he turned he saw the first of the dolls crawling towards him.”  Hell yeah!  Conversely, The Death of Art indulges in one of my biggest pet hates in literature: frequent, short sections.  I can hardly think of anything more annoying than settling down to a scene and then being somewhere else already, sometimes up to five or six times across over two open pages.  Mate, it’s a novel.  Relax.  We’re invested.  There’s a cup of tea next to us.  We can stand to read about something for more than a page without reaching for the TV remote.  (Unless it’s the Quoth.  DEAR GOD, WHAT ELSE IS ON.)  All this kind of fidgety nonsense does is remind me regularly that I could stop reading.

It’s frustrating, because it really feels like a good idea is in here, and a good writer is working on it, and just… stuff got in the way.  You could pare down the Family and the Brotherhood, make it clearer who’s doing what.  You could stick with the characters we get attached to, like Daniel.  You could sprinkle some plot developments earlier in the story, or just plain kick it up the arse a bit sooner.  For all the ballyhoo about Psi-Powers arc, you could make more of actual psychic powers in this, since the plot is really more focused on physical transformation.  You could edit the Quoth to within a quark of their lives, so those bits actually say something in human terms rather than halting whatever momentum you’ve got going.  Certainly you could give the Doctor more to do, and treat Roz a little better – she’s forcibly disrobed at least twice, in that New-Adventures-at-their-sleaziest way.  Chris has a few solid laughs pretending to be the Doctor, which makes good use of Cold Fusion, but the book’s rampant “AND THEN THIS HAPPENED, THEN THAT HAPPENED” cutting makes it just some more noise in the mix.  Ace impinges cleverly on the story a little more later on, thanks to a link back to Christmas On A Rational Planet – but that’s not the happiest link for me, as that was another book I struggled with.  I was reminded of it often.  Another one joins the “Huh?” club.

The Death of Art isn’t a complete wash-out, but it is what it is: slow, practically static for the most part, waking up long enough to be thoroughly unpleasant or unexpectedly witty.  Poor Daniel does not wake up in the Epilogue to realise it was all an absinthe nightmare, but you might.

4/10