The Glamour Chronicles – Review
Patrick Kavanagh-Sproull gives his verdict on the latest wave of 12th Doctor novels.
For once, the New Series Adventures are linked. The latest wave of Twelfth Doctor novels, following Silhouette, The Crawling Terror and The Blood Cell last year, possess a connective tissue in the form of the Glamour. It’s a long-lost treasure, desirable and capable of providing its holder with anything their heart desires. The quest for the Glamour is what links the latest string of novels, written by returning scribes Una McCormack, Gary Russell and Trevor Baxendale, although it doesn’t dominate any of the respective narratives.
Royal Blood by Una McCormack
Royal Blood is, very pleasingly, the perfect example of a Doctor Who story that splices together sci-fi and history. It is the closest thing Doctor Who fiction has, in recent years, come to a historical epic: The Androids of Tara for modern readers, but better. If writer Una McCormack had been given carte blanche on the word-count, one suspects that Royal Blood could have been a beefy doorstopper of a novel. It wants to be treated as a serious historical drama with all the treachery, underhandedness and inevitable power struggles that comes with the territory. Rather than opting for a straightforward historical adventure, McCormack infuses her seemingly medieval setting with futuristic tech (my reading of this is that there’s an underlying anti-consumerist message) although it’s one of the many balls Royal Blood has to juggle in its slight length.
Anyone hoping for even the briefest insight into series nine will be disappointed, because where Royal Blood – and Big Bang Generation and Deep Time – fall in Who chronology is perhaps deliberately ill-defined. It starts with the Twelfth Doctor and Clara landing in the hills separating the city state of Varuz and its neighbouring country, dominated by the powerful Conrad. Varuz is weak and faces being eradicated by Conrad and his forces, though the Doctor and Clara find that Varuz may be on the path to self-destruction as its ageing ruler, Duke Aurelian is stubborn and a poor leader. The Doctor assumes the identity of a holy man and inserts himself into the politics of the nation.
Admittedly, there’s more to it than that with a party arriving partway through claiming to be Lancelot and his men and Una McCormack is forced to cram an awful lot of exposition into the book’s first fifty pages. That’s not necessarily her fault, it’s clear she (and her fellow authors) were given a modest word-count to work with and McCormack’s idea is an excellent and rather hefty one. Had McCormack been given more pages, you can see Royal Blood could have been exceptional but in its current form, we’ll have to settle on very good.
McCormack has a firm grasp on the latter-day Twelfth Doctor here. He’s amiably sarcastic, straight to the point and short with a lot of the members of the Varuz court. Interestingly, he recognises and appreciates having Clara to help soften his rougher edges when he interacts with people. Their dynamic is similar to that seen in Last Christmas and it’s pleasing to see McCormack has accurately captured the Twelfth Doctor. Similarly, Clara is well rendered and we see her utilise the more pragmatic side of her mind, also delivering the occasional sassy one-liner. Early on she is separated from the Doctor and this decision pays dividends. It’s nice to see Clara solo on a diplomatic mission and with plenty of agency; she’s partnered with a mild-mannered ambassador from Conrad and over the course of the novel they develop a sweet and endearing relationship.
Verdict: 8/10
It’s clear that Royal Blood aspires to be bigger and bolder but with such a short space to tell a story, it can’t afford to be as complex as it would like to be. The jockeying for power in Varuz is interesting and the brief window McCormack uses is enough to get a flavour of Varuz’s internal politics. The Twelfth Doctor is well sketched, Clara more so and the latter’s solo adventure fits nicely into the narrative, giving us the opportunity to see Clara working alone. The supporting characters – Aurelian, his wife, disloyal knight Bernhardt, young upstart Lord Mikhail – are fascinating, each with multifaceted personalities, and the subplot with Lancelot, which initially seems gratuitous, works well in the end. Similarly, McCormack’s prose is engaging and there is little beating about the bush in kick-starting the plot, which is excellent given the slight page-count.
Big Bang Generation by Gary Russell
The last Gary Russell novel I read was the reissue of his Tenth Doctor and Donna yarn, Beautiful Chaos. At first it seemed like the Doctor Who equivalent of a beach read, fun and engaging but ultimately forgettable. In the subsequent months Beautiful Chaos stuck in my mind for a number of reasons, namely because it gave Donna’s supportive granddad, Wilf top billing (more or less), it reintroduced the Mandragora Helix and because it was a thoughtful and unique look at Alzheimer’s disease. Another aspect of Beautiful Chaos that stuck out was its abundance of pop culture references. Even reading Beautiful Chaos in 2013, the references were dated and dragged the story down. Notwithstanding these grating nods to pop culture, I enjoyed Beautiful Chaos and started Russell’s latest, Big Bang Generation featuring the Twelfth Doctor on his own, entirely unsure what to expect.
Big Bang Generation is probably the book on the most literate of Doctor Who fans’ Christmas lists. It’s notable for featuring Big Finish darling Bernice Summerfield in her return to print alongside her son, Peter, a half-wolf boy and his friends, Ruth and Jack. For many, the appearance of Professor Summerfield is worth the price of admission but for Big Finish and Virgin New Adventures agnostics, it’s hard not to be indifferent. Blasphemously, it’s hard not to see her as a character written in the vein of River Song (although Summerfield was created long before the Doctor’s wife was) and according to Big Bang Generation‘s endnote, Russell wanted to use Song but Steven Moffat was unwilling to let him have her for fear of her and the Twelfth Doctor’s timelines clashing (i.e. he was saving her for this Christmas).
Russell’s handling of Summerfield is interesting because when she’s introduced, she’s given a rather dramatic entrance with a few knowing winks to the reader. If you’re unacquainted with the earlier novels in which Summerfield appeared and Big Finish audios, the excitement of having a character like Bernice Summerfield is entirely lost. As Big Bang Generation unfolds we get a better idea of what the archaeologist is like but without any prior knowledge, she could be substituted for a brand new supporting character.
Big Bang Generation sees the Twelfth Doctor traveling alone but his solo journeying is halted when he discovers a centuries old pyramid has suddenly materialised in Sydney Harbour. No sooner has the Australian public snapped photos of the sight, the Doctor is reintroduced to Benny Summerfield, her son, his friends and a ragtag band of mobsters, assassins and professors. Big Bang Generation, when it gets going, is perky and undemanding, a fun let-up in the Twelfth Doctor’s darker adventures on-screen. Part of Russell’s vision for the novel was to take the new, serious Doctor and put him somewhere fun and silly, and it works. It’s like Robots of Sherwood with a bigger cast and budget. When Big Bang Generation gets into its stride, it’s amiable but it takes nearly half of the novel for the story to get going. Bernice and the Doctor don’t meet until relatively late on and the plot, as a consequence, takes its time. The biggest criticism that can be levelled at Big Bang Generation is that there’s an overabundance of characters and that does weigh it down in places.
Verdict: 7/10
Big Bang Generation is enjoyable once it takes its sweet time to set the plot in motion – the beginning is a lot of set-up thanks to the multiple locations and characters Gary Russell utilises. It’s nice to see a returning character appear as part of the Doctor’s Dinosaurs on a Spaceship-like gang and Bernice Summerfield is a welcome presence, a humble and clever foil for the Twelfth Doctor. Like Trevor Baxendale and Una McCormack, Russell has his own interpretation of Peter Capaldi’s incarnation and it’s one of a cynical Time Lord out of touch with the current generation. He can’t be faulted for originality, something Big Bang Generation is blessed with. Overall it’s a good-natured, quirky adventure with an interesting portrayal of the Twelfth Doctor and a likeable comeback for Bernice Summerfield. Oh, and that’s without mentioning the Duran Duran references.
Deep Time by Trevor Baxendale
There’s something downright satisfying about Trevor Baxendale’s simple, expertly told space saga, Deep Time. It lays its cards on the table very early on, it doesn’t pretend to be anything more sophisticated but Baxendale still manages to throw in a few surprising twists. Simply: it’s a straightforward adventure with an awful lot going for it.
Deep Time sees the Doctor and Clara, fresh from GSCEs marking, arrive for the maiden voyage of the Alexandria, an exploration vessel bound for the Phaeron roads, wormholes through time left behind by an age-old, now seemingly extinct race. The sleek starship is populated by what seem like archetypes at first: the shrewd one, the surly and uncooperative one, the ditzy one, the scared one, the boisterous but naïve one. With the tight word-count, you would expect the Alexandria’s crew to stay that way but Baxendale develops each of them superbly. Even the antagonistic one gets room to grow, their motivations fleshed out nicely so they aren’t a simple caricature. Despite the rather large cast (the Alexandria sets sail with eleven people on-board, the Doctor and Clara included), Trevor Baxendale manages to create a very claustrophobic environment. For all its grandeur, the Alexandria is still a tiny ship venturing into a far-flung corner of the universe and Baxendale makes us aware of that.
Baxendale excels at the characterisation of the Doctor and Clara as well as the exploration crew, and some of Deep Time‘s strongest moments feature them. The Doctor is more focussed here, not as funny and soft as we saw him in Last Christmas (and, soon, The Magician’s Apprentice..) but that’s largely because Deep Time is pretty dark. It’s not a novel in which you know everyone will make it out, everyone’s lives are at stake and the Doctor has assumed his unsympathetic, brisk bedside manner in order to get as many people as possible out alive. Clara is on hand, then, to provide the more human touch and her gentle, almost strategic approach to dealing with the slightly disorganised crew is fantastically well done. Baxendale knows her inside out, the confident outward appearance masking genuine fear, the one-liners covering up her insecurities and desire to be in the comforting presence of the Doctor. Deep Time is a novel that would flop if the characters weren’t compelling but Trevor Baxendale does a cracking job. The Doctor and Clara are portrayed exactly like Peter Capaldi and Jenna Coleman play them on-screen, the supporting characters are excellent (particularly the touching relationship between the Alexandria’s pilot and a genetically altered clone), and Deep Time flies because of them.
It’s hard to discuss the threat in Deep Time without giving away some of the book’s best twists, but they’re interesting and the tension Baxendale builds through the novel never lets up, all the way until the final act of revelations. He also succeeds at making sure the Alexandria crew aren’t entirely trustworthy so that you’re always wary of everyone. There are also some moments of body horror that wouldn’t look out of place in Alien and Deep Time is as unsettling as it’s tense.
Verdict: 9/10
Deep Time, ultimately, is a thoroughly enjoyable trip with a spot-on rendering of the Doctor and Clara, an interesting band of new characters, a nicely sustained undercurrent of tension and some terrific horror sprinkled throughout. If BBC Books could get Trevor Baxendale back soonish, that would be smashing.
