Really Weird Who
Written: Mar 11 '02
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Wonderful, "creepy" monsters, great prose
Cons: Horrible "history" style of writing works against the reader
The Bottom Line: Read it only if you're a completist. Otherwise, if you're a follower of the series, find out what happened from somebody else and move on.
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| hist's Full Review: Lawrence Miles - Doctor Who: The Adventuress of He... |
The Adventuress of Henrietta Street is a Doctor Who adventure, featuring the Eighth Doctor, Anji, and Fitz.
This particular Eighth Doctor adventure is very important if you are following the series in order, as many big things happen in it. When Lawrence Miles writes a Doctor Who book, you have to stand up and take notice. While “cosmic” may not be a good word for the events in this novel, “trans-dimensional” might be.
How is it as a story? For me, it wasn’t that great. First, to summarize. The Doctor has come to Earth to help protect it against yet another dire threat: babewyns (yes, that is the proper spelling). These apes are creatures from the edge of human understanding of the cosmos. As human understanding starts to approach this edge, the babewyns are attracted to Earth and start wreaking havoc, killing people very violently. Why hasn’t this happened before? Because the Doctor’s people, the Time Lords, have been guardians of the cosmos, preventing stuff like this from happening. Due to events in previous books (that I won’t spoil here), they no longer serve that purpose. The Doctor’s link with his people is gone, and he needs to link himself with Earth instead in order to prevent stuff like this from happening.
Thus, he comes to London in 1782, where he meets up with a group of humans who also have a basic understanding of the way time works, as well as other “occult” things. The Doctor’s going to marry a virgin woman to link himself with the planet. It’s all very metaphysical in scope, and is a bit hard to describe. This group of humans he allies himself with are prostitutes in a bordello run by Scarlette, who is one of the experts on this sort of occult stuff. The rest of the prostitutes have some ability in this as well. The book details the year that takes place from February 1782 to February 1783, which includes the events leading up to the wedding, and the events that take place immediately afterward. It also introduces another character who will feature in future Eighth Doctor books, Sabbath. He is a bit of a nemesis for the Doctor, though he’s not above helping if it serves his own ends as well.
So why isn’t the book that great? The main reason for me is that the book is written as a “history” book instead of a novel, as if some historian in the 20th century is looking back at the events in the book and trying to cobble them together from writings produced at the time. Thus, there are a lot of passages similar to “no one knows exactly what the Doctor said to Scarlette, but it would seem likely to go something like this:” This creates a barrier between the reader and the characters, making it almost impossible to say whether or not the people in the novel are in character. The reader is almost removed from the action. There is virtually no dialogue.
This isn’t necessarily a bad way to do a novel, as long as it’s not repeated often. It’s an interesting technique. Unfortunately, what Miles goes on to do is make this “history book” one of those pop-history books, not really written by a historian but more by somebody with an interest in the topic but no training in how to write a book about it. The text goes all over the place, jumping back and forth in the action like a novel would, but it just doesn’t work in the pseudo-historical format. It has faux-cliffhangers similar to “...which Scarlette would find out later, to her regret. But getting back to the Doctor....” That’s not an exact quote out of the book, but it’s the type of “cliffhanger” I’m talking about.
One thing I really did like about the book, though, were the “babewyns.” These apes, while not exactly terrifying, were quite disturbing, especially in their home dimension. Considering the TV series has been known in the past for “forcing kids behind the couch while they’re watching,” it was nice to finally get a creepy enemy in the book series. The wasted “city” that their dimension consists of is very well-drawn, too. Miles has always been an impressive wordsmith, and the prose shows that. While I don’t like the style it was written in, I like how it was written (does that make sense? )
Ultimately, I found “Adventuress” a frustrating book. It has big events, and I follow the book series so I want to read each one. But it was hard-going through this one. The text is quite small (and as the BBC Books division seems very strict on its approximately 284 pages per book limit, I’m sure it will stay that way in subsequent printings, if any). Thus, it’s very dense. The style works against the book as far as I’m concerned. Because of the style, the characters aren’t really that three dimensional. They can’t be, because you’re never sure whether or not the narrator is being accurate or not.
If you’re a regular reader of the series, then you should probably read this book (though if you are, you probably don’t need a recommendation anyway). If you’re not, then you may just want somebody to point out the “big events” in the novel and move on to the next one.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
hist
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Member: David Roy
Location: Vancouver, BC
Reviews written: 723
Trusted by: 218 members
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